My foodbank is forced to throw away 20% of our donations

Stale croissants mixed in with dying flowers.  

Browning broccoli scattered with bashed up blueberries. Fizzy fruit salads. Wet, wilted bags of rocket and leaves.  

Potato salad, or coleslaw, or cream or milk with the clock ticking down on its use-by date.   

No, this isn’t a particularly disastrous online food shop. Dealing with this kind of unusable food – often in large quantities – is the true reality of working in a foodbank.  

As the pantry manager at the foodbank at my church, I’m constantly battling for the food I need to feed people with balanced, nutritious meals. 

Food is love, food is community, but food waste is far from either of those things and my role has become about waste minimisation and management.  

Most of our food is donated by the big supermarkets. We go to them and boxes are already stacked up and ready to go. Usually they want us in and out, so we grab them, load them into the back of cars and head back to the church. 

Then we pick through to see what’s actually suitable for giving out or incorporating in our meals, which we cook for the community twice a week.  

Then we look at what can be composted and, finally, what needs to go in the bin or taken to the tip. Some weeks it’s 15 to 20% that’s wasted. 

Although donations help provide food for those who need it in our community, having to wade through bad-smelling, curdling, out-of-date food to get to that point is frustrating. 

This isn’t just happening in my church. New research from environmental charity Feedback – based on the lived experience of people just like me – found that the burden of damaged, out-of-date or nutritionally inadequate food is being unacceptably passed on by supermarkets and retailers to food aid organisations to deal with.  

It found that 91% of organisations like mine have had to discard donated food, with the most common reason being that the food was damaged or inedible. Meanwhile, 85% reported feeling frustrated, angry or sad when they received donated food items that they can’t use or redistribute.  

I took part in Feedback’s research, and am writing this because I want to sound the alarm on the reality of food distribution in this country.  

Our food pantry and foodbank at the church has been open for over two years and in that time it has grown and grown. When we began, I wanted to open up the church and bring people in. My original vision was of a little fridge, a little freezer and teas and coffees.   

How naïve I was. We now have two big fridges and two big freezers, as well as back ups.  

We started advertising locally and I was shocked when 70 people turned up in the first week – so many people needed us. We now have over 50 volunteers and feed more than 200 people at a time. We sometimes have to turn people away.   

I work in an area of deprivation where people have zero hours contracts and irregular job contracts. Sometimes you’ll get loads of hours, then none. No sick pay. Waiting weeks for benefits to kick in. People are being pushed into debt and unable to feed their families – with the cost of living sky high.   

Child poverty levels in this country are shocking and the welfare cuts are only going to make that worse for the most vulnerable. Three hundred people came to eat at the church on Christmas Eve.  

Though doing the work is fulfilling and necessary, sometimes it’s just all too much – the endless cycle of food collections, waste management and starting all over again.  

I’m paid for 20 hours a week but I have regularly worked 60.   

Luckily, I have our amazing volunteers around me and we share the load, supporting each other and picking each other up when we’re down. But our volunteers are often vulnerable themselves and they find the waste even harder than me.  

The problem is the demand from supermarkets means food is being overproduced. Food is shipped to the UK from all over the world to rot in warehouses as it’s not being bought and eaten as fast as it’s turning up. 

That is immoral – all that effort to grow it and it’s wasted.   

Some of our volunteers really struggle with the sheer amount of waste. Recently, one person was in floods of tears, saying that it wasn’t giving people any dignity, and she was right.  

Most of our donations come from supermarkets or from redistribution charities like FareShare. The donations from charities are great – they’re of high quality and suitable for making, healthy nutritious meals.

FareShare provides a personal touch with its community development officers and listens to what kinds of food you need. 

We then get some food donated by our local community. Sometimes we get tins that are out of date – for example, from house clearances – but never rotting fruit and veg like from supermarkets.    

I’m not an expert – and I don’t have all the answers – but the food redistribution model definitely isn’t preventing food waste and it’s not a sustainable way to feed people.  

We need to tackle the root causes of poverty by making sure people have enough money to afford essentials – including food. This would take foodbanks out of the equation. 

I’m in my 60s now and I’d love for a day to come when our foodbank isn’t needed – but it’s not going to happen. We’re inundated and things are going in the wrong direction.  

Yes, foodbanks are brilliant. Yes, it’s humanity at its best. But they’re not the solution and we can do so much better. 

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk. 

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