Inside the community-led movement taking on food waste, inequality and social isolation

“A particular call stands out,” NNational Food Service volunteer Dave Hitchmough tells me over the phone from Sheffield. “A 17-year-old care-leaver who lives with her boyfriend. Between them they had around £256 to last them the rest of the month. Their gas and electric bills had increased due to staying at home during isolation, and they’d been trying to feed themselves for the most part. But towards the end of the month they were living off cereal or going hungry.”

The calls come every day, says Hitchmough, from many different voices and in high numbers. In the last few weeks they’ve come from young people like this one, or like Sophie, 21, a student with no income, no family nearby and no phone of her own to enable her to reach out for support. “Then there are people on benefits whose Universal Credit just won’t stretch now there are kids at home all day,” Hitchmough continues, “there’s also the older people who are scared to go out and can’t access their pensions. Other people are just eating more for a bit of comfort. We find comfort however we can, don’t we?”

Hitchmough is one of hundreds of volunteers working for the National Food Service (NFS), a partnership of organisations across the UK aiming to ensure that “everyone’s right to food is met”. It began in Sheffield, two years ago, and has expanded steadily since. Now, the NFS has branches in eleven different cities across the UK. Fuelled by forward-thinking community members and a belief that social eating can solve more than just hunger, the NFS set out to take on food insecurity, inequality and isolation.

By encouraging communities to create social eating spaces – sharing food, eliminating waste – the service is challenging existing norms of distribution and consumption, as well as motivating essential mutual aid work. Community kitchens and open dining areas, run on a contribute-what-you-can model, provide not only basic nutrition, but social fulfilment – nights, workshops, collaborations, conversation, friendship and support.

It’s now well-documented that the impact of Covid-19 reaches far beyond healthcare. While our public health service has evolved beyond a universal provision for indiscriminate healthcare to become a valued pillar for community and rare unity, financial insecurity and food insecurity is rapidly rising. In the first few weeks of lockdown, the Trussell Trust reported its busiest ever period, when 50,000 food parcels were delivered in just one week, an 81 per cent year on year increase. Elsewhere, from the Independent Food Aid Network, a 59 per cent hike in demand for emergency food was recorded. Empty supermarket shelves exposed the tip of the iceberg – inequality, a flawed distribution system and ultimately millions of hungry people.

Temporary measures have since been called for but moreover, calls for universal provisions of basic needs to continue after the pandemic have been elevated. The NFS acted quickly, finding that they were more prepared than most. By utilising the networks they’d built while working widely within their community for years, the team behind it was able to set up a system within days which is now operating with high efficiency. Since lockdown began, they have distributed more than 7,000 meals to people in and around Sheffield who need it most, skilfully using their connections to map out parts of the city most in need for multitudinous reasons; identifying areas where in mutual aid services – and council-led support – were non-existent.

While nights and workshops at their centre were suspended, they quickly mobilised a welfare team to provide social support to the community. Fresh meals – more than 1,500 per week, at the current rate – are being delivered to those in need, many of whom say they feel unable to rely on the public services supposedly in place to support them.

Single mum Jeanette Bailey, 50, tells me she called the NFS because she didn’t trust the council to help, and is worrying about affording food with two children now permanently at home. “It’s just costing so much more,” she tells me. “My two kids are here all day and eating me out of house and home. I’ve got bills to pay as well, which are going up. It’s such a worry. Usually I have a strict budget for each day. But this has just thrown it up in the air.”

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John Chapel, 71, who is warm and chatty, living alone with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and no family in the Sheffield area, was directed to the NFS by the local council who said they couldn’t help. “I’ve used the NFS… I think I’ll need to next week. They’ve brought potatoes, porridge, bread, tinned stuff… the things that you need in your cupboard... To know you’re OK, you know?” he tells me – and he’s increasingly worried. “But worrying isn’t going to get you anywhere is it? You just have to get on,” he says.

Food insecurity and social isolation often go hand in hand. In fact, studies have frequently and consistently shown that social eating is a source of greater happiness and satisfaction. The NFS put this at the heart of their work: it’s not just about putting food on plates or, right now, delivering food to those who need it. Rather, it’s about changing our ideas around eating in the belief that this – cooking and eating with other people, the value in a collaborative community – could tackle greater social issues, too.

“The idea came from my understanding of the history of social eating movements. As far back as the mutual aid welfare systems of the 1800s, the wartime National Kitchens and the pre-war communal kitchens, like Edward Carpenter’s commonwealth cafe [a pioneering community space, which opened in Sheffield in 1887],” Louis Koseda, who started the NFS campaign after founding Sheffield’s Foodhall Project five years ago, says. “We needed a national symbol of solidarity for the community-led movement to tackle food waste, inequality and social isolation in our cities.

“The focus is on making meals, but by doing that, you bring people together,” Selina Treuherz, 21, who has volunteered with the NFS for two years during her university degree tells me. She says that the dining spaces became a space for people from all walks of life to eat and socialise together, and to work through problems – addicts, the homeless, students and people who could afford to feed themselves, but are poor in companionship. “Or even just someone who has recently been through a break-up,” says Treuherz. “We’d just try and solve issues together, from looking at Universal Credit forms round a table to just talking something through. I think people miss that now.”

“When you see, as we were seeing early on, the empty supermarket shelves, and everyone going manic… you realise just how central food is to society and survival,” says Treuherz. “The system we have clearly isn’t doing the best job. For years we’ve been showing that it doesn’t have to be this way. Since the pandemic, ideas about communities providing for each other have been put into action, and they’re working. When we went into lockdown, I realised that this is an opportunity for change.”

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The aim is to create a country-wide network – “one NFS branch in every city”, Treuherz says – to enable communities to provide for each other. Not a government-run system, or an entire replacement of the food system – but a solid safety net using shared meals as a way to eradicate hunger, the shame of being hungry and to promote cohesion. Ambitious? Yes. But the thing is, it’s already working.

In these pockets, communities – individuals and aid groups – are coming together. In the starkest of circumstances, the NFS is a glimpse of something a little brighter. “Even for me, as a volunteer, the NFS has kept me going the last few weeks,” Treuherz adds. “It has such a positive impact. It feels like we can make change happen not just now, but for the future too.”