About me

Welcome to brown bread and baked beans.

I started this blog to write about my experiences of volunteering with various organisations, and to share my thoughts on food related topics – particularly food poverty and food waste, which I feel very strongly about.

Here’s some information about the groups I work with:

• Curb is Southampton’s new surplus food kitchen and is part of The Real Junk Food Project. Curb uses food that would otherwise have ended up in landfill to make tasty vegetarian and vegan meals, and serves them on a pay-as-you-feel-basis. This gives everyone equal access to food, because it can be ‘paid’ for in time and/or skills as well as monetary donations. Curb currently operates on a pop-up basis, but is on the look out for a permanent home somewhere in the city.

• Southampton City Mission Basics Bank is a local project that gives free food and clothes to those who need it. The Basics Bank operates in five different locations around Southampton. I’ve been volunteering at the city centre food bank one day a week since July 2014, and the OCD side of me loves arranging tinned food in very straight rows!

• The Trussell Trust is a food bank provider, with some 400 centres and thirty thousand volunteers all over the UK. Over Summer 2014 I had a varied role at the Trust’s Head Office in Salisbury, working with the fundraising team, doing battle with baked beans, and helping on a project to teach basic cooking and budgeting skills, called ‘Eat Well Spend Less’. I now volunteer with the Trust as and when I can.

• Since 2011, I’ve been a Crisis Christmas volunteer. Crisis is a charity that helps single homeless people and is mainly based in London. For a week over Christmas, Crisis centres their doors to provide a range of support, food and companionship for people who are homeless. In 2014, I got the opportunity to help run the kitchen in the Hammersmith centre, which was a great insight into how a commercial kitchen operates and just how hard chefs have to work!