London food-support service serves over 125,000 meals to those in need

In times of crisis we will keep on cooking to help our community, says Made In Hackney founder Sarah Bentley

(Made in Hackney)

No one on earth should be going hungry. But when hundreds of thousands of children in the fifth richest city in the world – London – are doing so, you know something has gone badly wrong with society.

I’m the founder of Made In Hackney, a plant-based community cookery school, charity and now an emergency foodsupport service. Originally we were a provider of London-wide food education experiences (still are!), but in March 2020 we pivoted to provide emergency food for our community and in doing so plunged into the escalating food insecurity crisis unfolding in Hackney and across the UK.

Hackney may now be regarded by some as trendy and gentrified (it is), but 48% of children here still live in poverty. Of the 280,000 population roughly half struggle to make ends meet. Hundreds of people die prematurely a year due to socioeconomic inequality and the borough has the highest number of people living in temporary accommodation.

On top of that rising living costs – food, fuel, accommodation – have hit our community hard. In 2018 rental prices rose 68%, the highest in the UK. For low wage workers and people on benefits – it’s a dire combination.

During the first week of lockdown we launched the food support service in collaboration with Angelina’s restaurant. Within weeks we were supporting 500 households across Hackney with a nutritious cooked meal delivered daily by cycle couriers.

Our cyclists visits were a life line to many. Not only were they delivering life sustaining food (some households told us our meals were the first food they’d had in for three days); they called ambulances, alerted social services to critical situations, bought microwaves, had long reassuring chats with anxious elders – the care and connection clearly just as crucial as the food itself.

We planned for the meal service to last three months, but ninety-six weeks and 125,000 meals later we’re still cooking. We make the meals in-house now and deliver them in batches of three on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Our chefs specialise in the multicultural cuisines of our community and we co-create menu’s with the people we support.

We never means-test people. If people say they need support with food, we give them food. No one wants to eat food chosen by someone else and the last thing you need when in crisis is the degrading process of needing to prove how bad things are.

But why after all this time are we still cooking? In short, the scale of need is too great and the connections we’ve made too deep for us to walk away. Could you?

Our mission was always to help people to grow, cook and eat more plants for the betterment of planetary and human health. This is still the case, but if people are in crisis, it’s not the right time for a cookery class, they need free sustenance delivered to their door – so that’s what we’ve committed to do for as long as we can fund the service. But the food education work is very much happening, too.

There’s a false yet pervasive notion that people are struggling because of their own doing. This is toxic nonsense. On our service we have families living in working poverty – the essential work they do as carers, cleaners, drivers - not resulting in a wage that covers their basic living costs. How is that right?

We have people who’ve experienced a health crisis, and the appalling £96 a-week statutory sick pay is not enough to sustain anyone never mind people living in London.

There’s people who’ve been sanctioned (so their benefits have been intentionally stopped) because they missed a meeting due to an error – or in one case because they were in hospital with COVID19. We have families living in temporary accommodation with no access to a proper kitchen – or a kitchen they feel safe to go in. I could go on. In an ideal world no one would need food support. Wages and all types of benefits should be enough to cover everyone’s essential needs. But they’re not. And until that happens – we need to keep cooking.

Made In Hackney is crowdfunding now to raise £150,000 to fund their meal service for the whole of 2022. For a limited period of time all donations up to £250 are being match funded by the National Emergency Trust – so you can double your donation. Click here to make a pledge.