Community cafe aims to tackle wasted food (From Haringey Independent)

Tottenham community cafe aims to tackle wasted food

4:30pm Saturday 12th January 2013 in News By Bruce Thain

Two mums who run a community cafe believe a lot of work is needed to make sure people don’t waste their food.

The Fill the Gap Cafe aims to help families on a budget by reducing the cost of healthy food and reducing waste by serving perfectly good surplus food which supermarkets would throw away.

A study released this week by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers showed as much as half of the world’s food is wasted and also found that up to half of the food bought in Europe and the USA was thrown away.

Renee Taylor, 37, founded the cafe at the end of last year with her friend and fellow mum Kate McMath King at The Salvation Army Hall, Terront Road, Tottenham.

Mrs Taylor said: “The amount of stuff we get from supermarkets which is passed its sell by date is astonishing and when we get it there isn’t anything wrong with it. It’s all perfectly fine.

“It’s just frustrating to think if we weren’t going to use it, it would all go onto landfill.

“What we really want to do here is to try and provide healthy food for families at a reasonable price with produce that would otherwise been thrown out.

“I think there needs to be a change in shopping culture. With supermarket deals it’s very easy for people to buy more than they actually need which leads to a lot of stuff being thrown away.

“Also I think something needs to be done about what shops can and can’t sell in regards to dates.”

Mrs King, 33, said: “Before we started we knew there were cafes doing a similar thing to us but there wasn’t anything like this in Tottenham.

“We wanted to create something for young families in Tottenham to make and to provide healthy food.”

The cafe gets support from the Big Lottery Fund and 90 per cent of what they cook and sell is from Fareshare.