Welcome to Hungerford Food Community!
What do we do?
Our aim is to connect communities with real food and inspire them to waste less food. We believe that the choices we make about the food we buy and eat can have a huge affect on our health (mental and physical), our environment and our local economy.
We also believe that cooking is an important life skill that has dwindled in recent generations resulting in a reliance on take-away meals and fast food that tends to be low in nutrition and often high in calories and cost.
We want to have a positive impact throughout the year on food education for the families of Hungerford and West Berkshire and also want to increase our support of local producers, businesses and the community.
Our projects include:
- Monthly Food & Artisan Markets to help make our food supply chain more local, supporting local producers and community groups like Shalbourne Community Growers.
- Cookery lessons for pre-school families with HomeStart West Berkshire, after school cooking clubs at local primary schools, cooking sessions with Hungerford and Lambourn Youth Club in our Cooking in the Community & Kids in the Kitchen programme.
- Fun food educational activities that we run at events and in schools: mill your own flour, churn your own butter, Eat the Rainbow smoothie bike and Operation Banana Rescue.
- Promoting cooking and eating as a social event with mental health benefits at our Community Cook-Ins which bring people together to cook with ingredients that would otherwise go to waste.
- Loaning or gifting cooking equipment like air fryers and stick blenders to enable people to cook more at home.
- Giving people the confidence to cook more from scratch following flexible recipes that use up the ingredients you have, especially when on a budget.
- Moving to a more balanced diet that is good for for your health and the planet, eating less and better quality meat.
- Encouraging people to minimise food waste by promoting Operation Banana Rescue and Halloween Pumpkin Rescue, supporting the local network of the free food sharing Olio app and sending local surplus produce to West Berkshire Foodbank. We are also piloting a scheme of providing cooked meals to Hungerford Foodbank, using up surplus produce from a local farmshop.
- Facilitation of local fruit harvesting and cooking /juicing to minimise the amount of fruit that goes to waste in local gardens (80% of garden apples are wasted annually in the UK).
- Encouraging people to grow their own. We have plant and seed swaps at all our markets and support veg gardens in local schools.
- Single-use plastic reduction by hiring out our Party Box and incentivising market visitors to bring their own reuseable coffee cups.
We welcome new volunteers. Full training provided – you just need an enthusiasm for real food. Please email hungerfordfoodcommunity@gmail.com for details.
We are kindly supported by Sheepdrove Trust and Greenham Trust who will match fund your donations to us. All support, however small or large, very welcome. See details here.