We’re always on the lookout for worthy recipients of our donation of free, healthy food. The Crunchy Carrot have long been customers and friends of Greencity and when their community meals scheme was brought to our attention, we were delighted to be able to offer a donation to them. Their Development Officer Hannah answered a few questions to help us understand a bit more about the wonderful work they do…
1. Tell us about how it all started at Sunny Soups.
Back in 2017 I learnt about the food being wasted at one of our local supermarkets and thought – there has to be a simple answer to this! I got funding for a second-hand freezer from Zero Waste Dunbar and rounded up some volunteers. Since then, I have been collecting surplus fruit and vegetables from local shops, community gardens, home gardens and farms and we have been meeting weekly to turn it into soups and sometimes stewed fruit. This gets frozen and put in a freezer for anyone to take for free. We also give it to a local Recovery Café, our FoodShare food bank and Dunbar Day Centre on a weekly basis.
2. How many people are involved in your organisation?
Around seven or eight of us meet each week to make Sunny Soups. I’m the Development Officer for the Community Carrot, a community-owned greengrocer and whole-foods shop in Dunbar, which has a super rota of staff and a hard-working volunteer board of trustees. We also have lots of fabulous volunteers for my other outreach projects – I run a community meal called Sunny’s Kitchen on a Monday which relies on volunteers to help prepare, serve and clear up the meal, and a weekly Cook Club at Dunbar Primary School which also benefits from volunteer support.
3. Can you tell us a little about the things you do to fight food waste in your local community.
We are a member of FareShare Go, and our Sunny Soups volunteers go to a local supermarket each week to collect some of their surplus – this can range from one crate to many. We use this for Sunny’s Kitchen. We are also so grateful to Phantassie Organics, a local farm that drops round surplus veg each week for Sunny Soups, and we use surplus from the Crunchy Carrot (the trading name of the shop) of course. Each year we take part in events to use up some of the local apple harvest – this and last year we had an apple pie day at The Ridge’s community garden, making apple pies in their pizza oven, and we make chutney or help other local groups to do so. We also get occasional one-off donations: a local restaurant gave us lots of frozen food recently when they were doing a refurb, and we’ve even had someone drop round the leftovers from a funeral buffet! We hate saying no to surplus food, so we’ll do anything to distribute it, giving it to volunteers and one time even walking up and down the high street with a crate of sandwiches that we’d been given!
4. Community Carrot is a community owned greengrocer. Can you tell us a bit more about what that means as a business?
The Community Carrot - the Crunchy as it’s affectionately known – is now owned by over 600 people, mostly local. It means all our profits go into the shop, and as a community benefit society we can run outreach work too. The shop’s purpose is to provide an outlet for local growers and producers, to stick to our ethical and environmental principles, and to offer as affordable an alternative to the supermarkets as possible. Our community shareholders invested to help save the shop for the town, and the aim is for it to remain the welcoming community hub that it has been for over 20 years.
5. What steps do you think need to be taken to improve health & wellbeing in the community?
Nourishing food is a human right but remains very hard for many people to access. There is so much to be done to change this. A few things that would help are shifting our subsidy focus to healthy food, ensuring that food which is good for people and the planet is affordable to all. There’s also a big change needed in how we discuss and think about nourishing food – we’ve been marketed a food culture that reveres sugar, ‘treats’ and ‘kid food’ to sell us unhealthy and unnecessary discretionary foods. We need to celebrate well made, thoughtfully produced foods, shared in the company of others. We need to teach not only cooking skills but also food skills – how to appreciate good food and look beyond the black and white of a food ingredients label to educate ourselves more holistically about the food system as a whole and what the contents of our plates represent. And of course, we would say we need more shops like the Crunchy that provide an alternative to the supermarkets, outlets for local growers, and could provide the answer to the problem of ‘food deserts’ that we see in many places.
6. If you could pick one famous chef and one other person to come and work with you, who would you pick and why?
I would pick Jamie Oliver, whose work in schools and with families has been a big inspiration. He champions the kind of affordable, accessible, scratch-cooked home meals we love cooking in Sunny’s Kitchen, and I reckon he’d love to see the inter-generational, recipe-sharing vibe we’ve got going on in our meals. Secondly, I would love to invite the food writer and campaigner Bee Wilson, she’s a personal hero of mine and her books got me into teaching children to enjoy eating a varied diet and on the right track in how to approach this. I would love to sit back and hand the cooking reins over to those two for an afternoon, pick their brains and learn from them first hand, and I think they’d be a lot of fun in the kitchen.
Thanks so much to Hannah for answering our questions!
