My two ward councillor colleagues and I visited the FareShare Merseyside
distribution centre recently to help us understand how food banks work and where
they get their food from. We are interested in using some of our devolved budget
to support the establishment of food banks in the Kensington and Fairfield area
because we have heard that currently our residents who are in need are having to
travel or walk several miles to the two nearest ones.
We have been in touch with
some local churches who indicated they might want to help with this so we
thought a visit to the FareShare project would be useful.
We took two of the Council’s Neighbourhood Ward Support Officers with us
too so that they could spread the word while engaging elsewhere in the city.
We learnt that FareShare is a national organisation with depots around the
country. Each depot receives a share of food from the national depot, which has
been sent to them from supermarkets and manufacturers where for some reason they
are not able to put it on their own shelves. So for instance a tray of beans may
have been labelled as having 450g of beans but the conveyor belt in the factory
might have blipped and only filled them with 430g. Or the line might have been
discontinued, or there may have been a production over run so that 2000 jars of
sauce were made when an order only required 1500. The surplus food and foodstuff
is then given away to FareShare rather than thrown away, put into landfill or
incinerated.
They have no say what they will receive, when we were there there had for
example been a recent delivery of masses of apple juice, but this might be a
one-off, they may never receive apple juice again.
The foodstuffs are then appropriately stored in the depot and hard working
volunteers sort it out according to its use by date. We marvelled at
some of the food that had found its way to FareShare, there were tins of soup
and beans, pasta and sauces, coffee and cereal but also obscure things like half
a dozen tins of Pannetone cake and a crate of windscreen de-icer. We even spied
a couple of bird boxes!
FareShare then parcel up an agreed amount of food for each of the food
banks and subsidised luncheon clubs that they serve, and other volunteers drive
vans every day to deliver the food to them ready to distribute to those in need.
Some food banks collect extra food from shoppers in local supermarkets to
supplement the food they have delivered from FareShare.
It costs something in the order of £700 per year for a food bank to buy
into the service and to have the food delivered to them as required.
We were extremely impressed with the dedication of the staff and volunteers
and will be delighted to fund two or three of these memberships to help local
people in need to eat.
You can keep up with the good work of FareShare by following them on Twitter
@faresharemersey
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