Because I can afford to / have an office printer to exploit, I don’t really take any cut from doing zines. Every penny you send me for these messy lil zines about band chillis and what sound you all think bass has ends up going to the Oxford Food Bank, who do an awesome job salvaging fresh surplus food that would ordinarily go to waste, and redistributing it to charities, services and groups who can use it and who need it. These are some words from Emma at the Oxford Food Bank, (to be printed with some doodles of cheese, bagels and green Quality Street triangles when issue 4 is done). I visited them and recorded these words when everything was less grim, desperate and uncertain, way back on [checks notes] the morning of the 13th December 2019. As you can imagine, they’re right up against it now with limited capacity, so please donate if you can (or to an equivalent food bank / charity where you are). Don’t clap, that does nothing.
We’re not really like a standard food bank. We’re more like a food waste organisation, in that we’re taking lots of surplus food from supermarkets and wholesalers and redistributing that to other charities. Homeless shelters and children’s centres and primary schools and women’s refuges. It’s sort of like we’re a wholesaler supplying charities and other food banks. And then further out in Oxfordshire - sort of Didcot, Abingdon, Bicester - they have the more Trussell Trust food banks. The one that’s closest to that model in Oxford is the Community Emergency Foodbank on Hollow Way - and we do supply to them. But there are lots of other charities that we give food to.
[“Can you lift that, sorry” - At this point in our talk I am roped into lifting some crates of mozzarella into somebody’s car. After I’ve struggled with basic lifting, I ask what food they distribute and where it comes from]
Primarily, we have fresh fruit and veg. Some tins and packets. Bits and bobs get passed on from supermarkets too. It’s like individual stores don’t get any control over what they are getting so we get loads of stuff that’s been rejected by individual stores. Supermarkets deliberately overstock on bread, for example, so there’s normally tonnes here. They do a lot of work on consumer psychology and apparently people never want to buy the last loaf on the shelf cos they think there’s something wrong with it.
In sheer numbers we get the bulk from big wholesalers from Bicester and Banbury. Now they’re selling to schools, hospitals and so on, so they’ll need quite a long [use by] date. So they’ll give us stuff that still has a week or two to go, but that they can’t sell on. We have a big fridge where most of the stuff that needs to go out fairly soon lives. So sometimes there are signs saying ‘Urgent Usage, Send this Out Today’ - so we’re constantly seeing how long the [use by] dates are and trying to move stuff out. Some things that look they’re going off we distribute to some small animal charities - guinea pigs and so on, cos some stuff that has passed for human consumption is still okay for animal consumption. And then anything that’s real waste goes to an anaerobic digester in Cassington, where it gets turned into fertiliser and energy.
Sometimes you get just too much of a single thing. There’s a limit to how many lettuces you can get rid of in December, for example. We get a lot of avocados cut in half. The reason being is that when wholesalers get a batch, they cut some open to see whether they’re ripe or not, but these cut up ones are still fine. Our volunteers tend to eat them. Sometimes we’ll have some specialty ingredients that we can donate to specific community groups. So the Chinese Cultural Centre at EOCC gets a lot of stuff from us.
But that’s what’s great about going out in the vans with some of this stuff. It’s like Ready Steady Cook sometimes. Chefs are out to meet us at 10am thinking of what they’re going to do with the stuff we give them. A fair amount of it requires a lot of skill to use. Some of our charities are very into teaching people how to cook. So we have a partnership with an organisation called Waste2Taste, who are kind of a social enterprise who teach people cooking skills and get people qualifications in food hygiene and such. They have a cafe at Ark T and it’s fantastic food. I find it particularly interesting knowing where all of the food comes from, so it's great to see what Sandra and Marie get from what we give them.
We’ve been going for 10 years. We started with 2 guys moving stuff around in the back of their cars, and now we have 5 vans shifting about a tonne a day. In terms of deliveries, Bicester is the furthest we go north, Abingdon and Didcot in the south. We do roughly 3 van runs a day that are mostly deliveries, and then 1 or 2 that are mostly pickups. There are also some charities that occasionally come to us when they’ve got an event or a particular group that needs support [like the person whose car I was lifting mozzarella into].
We’ve got about 100-120 volunteers. Some of them drive, some of them come here, sort through the stuff, see what’s gone off, check the fridges and so on. When we started, we didn’t have any paid staff, and now we have about 2 and a half. Because we get most of the food for free, the money is mostly used for upkeep on our base and maintenance of our five vans. Electric bill on the fridges. In a dreamworld, we would like to get electric vans but the tech isn’t quite there yet. But it will be, hopefully, in the next few years.
But yeah. I think there’s room for one of these in every city. A big, community organised one. It needs a lot of work and a lot of energy to get it going for the first couple of years but it could be so beneficial.
You can donate money to the Oxford Food Bank here. If you’re a charity that needs food, or if you’re looking to donate food, check the information on their homepage.
[Monster truck] van illustration by Sé Tehrani-White (I tried to draw the Food Bank van myself but was terrible at it so got someone to do a far better job of it. I assume when the Food Bank discuss how they want new vans, this is what they have in mind)
LOTS OF ADDITIONAL GRAIN AND POTATO DISHES
GLASGOW (virtual) ZINE FAIR STARTS TOMORROW (Fri 15th)! Check out the schedule / sign up for online events here
Some time back, the self-described “GEORDIE IRANIAN HALF ARSED COMPOSER NOISE FACILITATOR WITH BIG EYELINER” Mariam Rezaei (who *cough* released a new tape last week) asked me to make a grizzly noisy cooking demonstration to be broadcast on the amazing series of TOPH Housebound livestreams (you can watch my bit here). It was well received, so she asked me to do it again, which I did and you can catch it on last week’s TOPH stream (no. 7, check out the other while yr there). I’d had a bad day and basically decided to take it out on my kitchen while boiling toy percussion instruments over a cursed tape loop of Worral-Thompson. I did a rant about Jamie Oliver too. If that’s yr thing.
Zahra Tehrani (Despicable Zee, director of Young Women’s Music Project and, er, ‘agent’ for the above monster truck van artiste) invites you and your quarantine family to make a bop at the breakfast table for The Oxfordshire Kindness Wave
I’m looking to branch out a bit on my own contributions to future CHEWns, and have been channelling broadsheet columnist energy by looking to write articles about things I’ve been googling for 15 mins. To come: ASMR (good article in the Eater here), singing at the dinner table, and the work of Oxford professor, author, flirt and Ig Nobel Prize-winning crisp dubber Charles Spence.
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Mark off of Witching Waves made the famous vegan Superiority Burger, and posted about it on instagram, so I had to as well. They were good (although I’m not used to that much kwinowah myself so I was a bit full for a couple days). Recipe here (if it gives you a registration/paywall, you can get around it).
Listening wise - lots of reggae/dub (last month’s Equiknoxx radio broadcast on NTS is frickin molten). This record by a group called Gentle Stranger that I picked up - I can’t remember on whose tip but it sounds like some drunken chamber orchestra with a synthesiser hyperactively careering between messy-but-convincing bastardisations of all music. Warm Bodies. Ivor Cutler. The Social Stomach. This pretty droney thing I found on bandcamp somehow. And Another Thought by Arthur Russell, which I have only just discovered and why did no-one tell me about this before??
Drop me a line if you wanna talk zine or just wanna talk yeah? And stay indoors x