Newark and Sherwood District Council leads the way in ensuring families in crisis have enough to eat

An army of volunteers is being enabled to help families in crisis get enough to eat, and in some innovative ways.

Newark and Sherwood District Council is co-ordinating the effort to ensure that impoverished families get through the cost-of-living crisis in a number of ways, the most recent of which is sourcing food from manufacturers who would ordinarily discard food because it has been wrongly labelled.

Another is in collecting toiletries from major airports where they have been confiscated from the hand luggage of passengers and redistributing it.

The food-from-source idea means that company's who produce chilled goods within the district, or further afield, such as sandwich fillers, can call for collection of food stuffs that until now have gone into skips.

The council has co-ordinated a network of volunteers either in growing, collection or distribution.

The good work involves the likes of orchard-growers in Upton who generate surpluses that would otherwise rot, Starkey's Fruit in Southwell, Barnby Road Academy in Newark who have an army of volunteers making up food parcels, as well as major supermarket chains whose approaching-out-of-date stocks can be collected and be with someone who is hungry virtually straight away.

Newark KFC offers-up frozen food two or three times a week.

There are five centres in Newark and Sherwood where the army of volunteers provide food to those that cannot afford it, while others collect from wherever it is generated.

The network has become so impressive that waste-conscious food producers make contact to say they have stocks about to go to landfill, in one case 50 tonnes.

It also works alongside groups such as FareShare, the UK's national network of charitable food redistributors, and its own schemes such as Crop Drop, which offers allotment-holders the chance to support residents across the district with fresh fruit and vegetables.

All of this is in addition to the work done by foodbanks.

The council is also working alongside organisations such as Inspire to educate people on how to cook foods they have never or rarely bought before that are now available to them, aubergine being one example.

What it urgently needs now to reach more people and to prevent further wastage is for someone to provide a unit that is either refrigerated or of a size where it can cram it full of large fridges.

This would prevent large amounts of food, in one case a huge number of chickens, being wasted.

The council's senior health improvement officer, Helen Ellison, said change became noticeably necessary during the pandemic and the need had only increased since.

Support on offer can be found at: www.newark-sherwooddc.gov.uk/heretohelp/

David Lloyd, leader of Newark and Sherwood District Council, said: "We are committed to doing all we can in the district to reduce food waste, help local residents with affordable and healthy ways to access food and coordinating with a number of community food based organisations.

“Our teams work tirelessly alongside local food groups and partners in the district to ensure residents have the support and food they need when they need it the most. This includes looking into inventive and creative ways we can provide residents with more affordable food, such as sourcing produce from our Crop Drop scheme or working directly with food suppliers to take their unwanted products that would have normally gone to waste.

“We’re also looking to hold more cost-of-living support events in the district, following our first successful event a couple of weeks ago, and we have set up a dedicated web page where residents can find out what support is on offer for them."