On June 28, we held a launch event in Exeter Cathedral to highlight homeless charities and create awareness of Next Meal. We were delighted by the turnout, which included the Mayor and many other local dignitaries, as well as a number of charities and media outlets.
If you attended, see if you can recognise yourself in this gallery…
Giving people access to services and education they desperately need makes our cities better environments for everyone, which is why we support the Next Meal good food campaign.
Thanks for taking the time to talk to us, Tash. We know from personal experience about The Felix Project and the amazing work you do, so we’re sure that our followers will be interested to hear more.
The Felix Project rescues high-quality nutritious food for people in London who struggle to afford good food. This is food from suppliers, including supermarkets, wholesalers, farms, restaurants and delis that would otherwise go to waste. It’s delivered to charities that cook meals and prepare food parcels and to primary schools to distribute to children and their families.
This year we will deliver 2,000 tonnes of food to more than 280 London charities and primary schools. This is enough food to make almost five million meals.
Volunteers collect food from suppliers in vans, sort it and then deliver it to charities and schools. We have depots in North and West London and do our best to keep local food local, which is greener and builds a sense of community with suppliers, charities and volunteers.
Our central London operation uses 100% green energy. Deliveries from suppliers go direct to charities in electric vans and Green Scheme volunteers do walking and cycling collections and deliveries.
Absolutely! There’s no shortage of food in cities, but there’s a lot of wastage. Retailers and producers are happy to give us their surplus food for free and our logistics are easily replicable, which offers a way to remodel food supply and help homeless people and others in London who struggle to afford good food. Sharing food brings a sense of happiness.
We keep running costs low thanks to suppliers who donate their surplus food for free, just two depots to minimise overheads and a small staff. We are also extremely lucky to have made some fantastic friends with companies who provide equipment, tech solutions, services and logistical support for free or at extremely low rates.
At the heart of this success is the goodwill and generosity of our volunteers, without whom we would have to pay a workforce to provide the service. Ultimately, with the kindness of just a few organisations and some wonderful willing volunteers we have built a low cost, sustainable, scalable, environmentally friendly, unique service in the very heart of London.
Next Meal helps people find amazing food in a really simple way, and the good food campaign is about healthy food for a balanced diet. Giving people access to services and education they desperately need makes our cities better environments for everyone, which is why we support the Next Meal good food campaign.
We are always delighted to welcome new supporters who help reduce food waste and ensure that good food reaches people who really need it. Please visit www.thefelixproject.org to make a donation or sign up as a volunteer. We’d love to hear from you!
Thank you Tash, and keep up the amazing work!
She spoke to Martin Stone and tweeted from the event:
The launch was featured on BBC Radio Devon that morning, and appeared on the BBC News website:
Let us know what your perfect meal looks like, and how you source the fresh fruit and veg you need to serve tasty, nutritious meals to your guests.
Leave a comment below, or email Martin at martin.stone@nextmeal.co.uk and we’ll feature the best menus in this blog
We are excited to announce that our Exeter launch will be held at the beautiful Exeter Cathedral on 28th June, with the Councillor Leader of Housing for Exeter in attendance along with extensive press and media support.
This completes a trilogy of successful launches in the South West, following Bristol and Plymouth.
If you are in the Exeter area please feel free to come along!
We believe that it’s important the food we serve should offer a balanced diet. After all, good physical health is essential to maintain good mental health.
That’s why we’re asking you to review the food that is donated. Does it pass the Next Meal test?
We’d love to know what’s in your store cupboard. Upload photos and tag us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
In recent research, results have shown that homeless people are increasingly dying of strokes. In order to find out if the homeless are being overfed, yet undernourished, we spoke with nutrition expert Nicole Berberian-Alabaster.
Studies on the homeless find that they are indeed not getting what they need nutritionally. They found this group is low in fruit, fibre, protein, vitamin C, selenium, zinc, and for women, iron. Milk and calcium intake were also low. However, the results showed a high level of alcohol, salt and saturated fats.
The effects of an unbalanced diet mean that the average age of death in this group is just 47 years, with the leading cause of death being cardiovascular disease.
Mental illness is higher in the homeless too, with a link to high alcohol use and lows in the important B vitamin thiamin.
Thiamin is already low in this kind of diet, but alcohol makes this worse by blocking it coming into the body. The result is even lower thiamin.
Low thiamin leads to a serious mental health and brain condition called Wernicke-Korsakoff’s syndrome. The effects are confusion, impaired coordination of limbs, memory problems and brain damage, along with heart failure.
The drug-free way and starting point to improve both these conditions, and the many other related health issues, is diet.
My idea of the perfect healthy menu would look a little like this…
Vegetable soup: Onions, carrots, potatoes, broccoli, cabbage, tomatoes, lentils.
Main meal: Pork, chicken or beef. Whole grain bread, pasta, potatoes or rice. Plus seasonal vegetables.
Dessert: Fresh Fruit served with yoghurt, or make an oat crumble and include dry fruit.
You can find lots more on nutrition on Nicole’s website.
Hear Martin Stone talk about Next Meal and street homelessness on BBC’s World Service
How do you eat when you have no home? Nowhere to store food, nowhere to cook, no table to eat at?
In this episode we are with homeless people in two of the world’s most prosperous cities – London and Los Angeles – to talk about how they feed themselves.
This is a tale of two cities – a surprising story perhaps of the abundance of food in the most deprived parts of society. What does it tell us about our global food supply chain?
They are vital in providing our service and to keep the cost of the service at a workable level.
Here in Muswell Hill, everyone is a volunteer and we provide a hot three-course meal five evenings a week. We have a pool of about 60 volunteers working different rotas.
I would really like to know members’ experiences with volunteers across the UK and Europe
1. Do you have enough volunteers?
2. How long do they stay for? Six months, two years or more?
3. Do they get on the job training?
4. Give me three reasons why they volunteer at your centre.
Also, it would be great if this army of volunteers would carry Next Meal cards and promote it in your towns and cities, so please ask and we’ll get some to you!
My warm greetings to all the homeless centres across Europe.
I have been volunteering for two years and I am mainly involved in assisting the manager. I commit to my duties here with a lot of passion and the help that I provide, even if it is small, makes me very happy. I know I am just a drop in the ocean, but a lot of drops together will create the ocean itself.
Since I have started volunteering, the number of guests that comes into the canteen is pretty much the same. We host 100-120 people daily except Saturdays. We are also closed in August. We can say that in Italy there is a common break, so it is very difficult to find volunteers. That does not mean that we leave poor people alone, since there are other centres where they can easily find assistance and their next meal.
The guests are mostly men (80-90%). We do host women and they usually have a separate area in the canteen where they can enjoy their meal, unless they have sons or their husband, in which case they eat all together.
The majority of our guests come from abroad. Almost all of them speak Italian even if it’s just a little. Then you can hear English, French, Spanish which are also comprehensible for us. There are a few cases of African or Asian guests who do not speak or understand any other language. That makes the conversation a bit difficult but not impossible. Because all the guests have been living in Italy, they do speak a basic Italian and Milan offers free courses to learn Italian too.
A typical meal at the OMC consists of traditional food: pasta or rice as a main course, soup, meat and veggies or a cold dish as a second course, fruits, desserts and vegetarian options on request.
According to a Milanotoday article there are 2,608 homeless in Milan.
The Next Meal blog 