Our Community Food Projects
The Scottish Land Fund award that enabled us to buy the Crunchy Carrot premises in 2019 also funded the hiring of a Development Officer for a year. This role began in October 2019 and gained an additional three years’ funding from The National Lottery’s Community Fund in May 2021. To better reflect the focus of the role, the job title is now Community Food Outreach & Communications Lead.
The role covers:
Food outreach projects for adults and children;
Partnership working with local organisations to teach food skills and increase accessibility to good, sustainable food;
Resource reduction;
Communications;
Supporting the shop’s profitability to ensure a robust business and the continuation of community work;
Fundraising.
Our Community Projects
Sunny Soups
Sunny Soups is designed to tackle local food waste. This small, supportive group is made up of volunteers from the community who meet weekly to cook together.
We make good quality, healthy food from fresh surplus ingredients. We use surplus fruit and vegetables from the Crunchy as well as other shops, farms and gardens. This is then stocked in a community freezer for anyone to take for free, and given away to community meals.
This free source of food is available to all, with the emphasis on our community working together to reduce food waste.
We are grateful to The National Lottery Community Fund and Vegware whose funding and support makes Sunny Soups possible.
Sunny’s Kitchen
This weekly community meal launched in June 2021, and is held at the Bleachingfield Centre: some people come along to help cook, some to eat, some for both. Most folk come regularly, with between 20-30 attendees each week. We use as much surplus produce in our meals as possible.
We use surplus produce from FareShare, as well as freshly picked ingredients from The Ridge’s community gardens when available.
Children’s Food Activities
Our Food Outreach Lead runs a range of children’s food and cooking activities locally, all designed to increase children’s familiarity and acceptance of fruit and veg and teach basic skills.
Cook Club
Over 150 children have so far attended our free five-week cooking course, run after school at Dunbar Primary School.
Eight children at a time, aged between 8 and 12, learn basic cooking and knife skills, as well as starting to think and talk about where food comes from and how we learn to eat and enjoy a varied, healthy, balanced diet. We are inspired by Sapere ‘taste education’ principles of sensory food education: tasting, smelling, becoming familiar with fresh ingredients in a no-pressure environment.
We talk about sustainability, provenance, how we learn to like new foods, and basic healthy eating (based on dietary variety and scratch-cooked, minimally processed meals). Children try a huge range of new foods during the sessions: many children have never tried such basic foods as soup or a stir fry before, and we receive consistent feedback from parents that the sessions widen their children’s food horizons.
See photos from our sessions on our Facebook and Instagram pages.
Cook Your Tea
Demand for Cook Club is huge. Feedback from children and their parents consistently shows that children who come through Cook Club are enthusiastic to do more cooking, so we introduced this seven-week skills-building club to consolidate and build upon what they learn in the five-week course. Cook Your Tea has a greater focus on being participant-led: the children set the menu and have a hand in picking produce from The Ridge community garden where the classes are held. It is supported by a student volunteer from the local high school.
We have also run a number of KidsFoodJourney after-school activity courses for children aged between 4 and 11. The course was designed to tackle neophobia, the common fear of trying new foods, and to teach children how to re-frame their approach to trying new foods from away from fear and towards curiosity.
For a full introduction to the classes, as well as six lesson plans published when a course had to be cancelled during the Covid-19 pandemic, see our blog post here.