FareShare Nominated For An Award

We are pleased to announce that EMERGE’s partners, FareShare National are a finalist in the BBC Food and Farming Awards.

Yes, we’re now rubbing shoulders with TV chefs. We’ve been foraging with Hugh, knocking back pints with Angela Hartnett (I bet she does pints), and cooking pukka grub with Jamie ... well, perhaps not, we haven’t reached celebrity status just yet.

FareShare logo

FareShare National and its partner, Sainsburys, have been nominated for an award in the ‘Best Big Food Idea’ category, a new category for this year designed to highlight innovative ideas about how food can be sourced and sold. Their “Million Meals Appeal” asks Sainsbury’s customers to donate tins and other staple food items over a week-end in October every year.

The BBC Food Awards have always celebrated small, individual food producers, caterers and retailers, but this category looks at wider networks of food provision. For example, one of the nominations is Waitrose who are trying to source sustainable palm oil and soya. Another is in the incredibly energetic town of Todmorden where a number of schemes have been set up to grow and distribute food locally. The multi-layered ambition of FareShare is then a perfect fit for this group, and EMERGE is delighted to be a partner running the Manchester depot, expanding operations in the North West.

Our own idea here in Greater Manchester is not only to redistribute quality food that would otherwise go to waste, but to improve employability by providing training in our warehouse, and to offer cookery courses that show tasty nutritious meals can be created cheaply. We really do have a ‘Big Idea’!
FareShare is a national UK charity supporting communities to relieve food poverty. FareShare is at the centre of two of the most urgent issues that face the UK: food poverty and food waste.
And as Dan Saladino, the producer and co-presenter of Radio 4’s The Food Programme seems to have similar concerns we’re hoping that FareShare are in with a chance of winning:
“We believe, as many others do, that the world can be seen through the lens of food, nearly every issue, every news story has a food dimension to it, and so food as a subject provides stories of pleasure, fun, history and memory, but food is also a very political subject, and at the centre of stories about economics and conflict.”
A number of other Manchester based projects were short-listed for an award (we hosted part of the assessment as one of the judges lives in Macclesfield). In our category Manchester Fruit & Veg People were considered, and The Kindling Trust were nominated for the Derek Cooper Award. This is good to see because nominations are made by the public. It seems Manchester is a city with lots of ideas and the energy to put them into action.

The winners will be announced on the 28th November. Fingers crossed.

Janet
Garden 65

Comments

Popular Posts