Hungerford Food Community

Their aim is to connect communities with real food and inspire them to waste less food.

They 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.

They 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.

They 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.

Their 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 their Cooking in the Community & Kids in the Kitchen programme.
• Fun food educational activities that they 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 their 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.
• They 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. They have plant and seed swaps at all their markets and support veg gardens in local schools.
• Single-use plastic reduction by hiring out their Party Box and incentivising market visitors to bring their own re-useable coffee cups.