Lending a helping mandarin
West Auckland community foundation The Trusts is calling on Kiwis with citrus fruit trees on their properties to pick surplus fruit and donate it to those in need, rather than let it go to waste.
Chief executive Allan Pollard says citrus fruits such as oranges, grapefruit, lemons and mandarins are currently in season and food rescue charities like Fair Food can often collect the produce from those willing to pick it.
“Winter, along with Christmas and back to school, are the months with the highest levels of need,” he adds. “Thousands of whānau in our communities are facing the perfect storm of seasonal cost pressures for thousands of members of our community.”
The Trusts also provides financial support to Fair Food, which aims to provide food for 5,000 vulnerable families and deliver 75,000 meals this winter.
Fair Food supplies over 50 Auckland community groups with over 2.4 million meals per year. It has also opened a ‘Conscious Kitchen’ to teach community members the principles of upcycling food – taking food matter that would normally be discarded as waste and turning it into something more useful e.g. coffee grounds as fertiliser.
Around a third of all food produced globally is wasted. However, staff at Fair Food receive and each day hand-sort around a tonne of discarded food provided by supermarkets, growers and manufacturers.
The surplus produce would otherwise be destined for landfill, generating an estimated 540 tonnes of greenhouse gases annually.
Fair Food chief financial officer Deborah McLaughlin says the poverty gap is widening, with pandemic-driven food shortages, inflation and winter heating costs all impacting already vulnerable families.
She says around 40% of Kiwi households experience food insecurity and 19% of children live in homes where consistency of food supply is a concern.
Pollard says it is critical that organisations like Fair Food be given the support of corporates to allow them to continue their work during peak seasons of need.
