Curb began in March 2015, so happy first birthday to us! We’ve got loads in store for our second year but here’s a quick recap of 2015.
Before our launch, one of our directors completed a 2-month ‘food waste road trip‘ of the UK, with the main intention to discover the many different people and approaches to working against food waste. During this tour, she met with most of the other Junk Food Projects in our network and Curb quickly gained a really strong nationwide connection. We then started with a bang on her arrival back down South, catering for over 100 people at Southampton’s Sustainability Festival as our first gig!
We’ve been running on an entirely pop-up basis ever since, hosting events and cafe’s all over the city, from Town Centre, to Portswood, Swaythling, Shirley, St. Mary’s, even across the waters to the Isle of Wight, out into the woods of the New Forest, and recently over into Romsey! We’ve collected surplus produce from countless food traders, creating official partnerships with many local stores, restaurants, wholesalers and (recently) supermarkets!
Through winter, we operated a weekly Pay As You Feel Boutique for 3 months in Tiger Yard, providing about 80 people every Monday with their weekly groceries! We’ve worked closely with both the University of Southampton and Southampton Solent, running food waste stalls, discussions, sandwich-making workshops and recently appearing on a Sustainability Conference panel. We have developed a great relationship with Southampton City Council’s Recycling Department, collaborating on events and doing a talk at one of their community meetings. One of our directors ran last years Southampton Half-Marathon training from 0 – 13 miles on only food waste! AND, we’ve made great steps organizationally, registering as a Community Interest Company, purchasing Curb a van and having the fortune of witnessing a wonderful team of directors & volunteers all connect together over a shared passion for acting against food waste!
All in all, during our first year of service, we saved 8133.439kg of food, served a whopping 1974 people and created 1485 dishes at our pop up cafes. This (we will add) is without Curb having an actual base kitchen. Just imagine our potential if we could only open up one of the empty spaces in town and run properly for a few days every week!
March 12: Pop-Up In The Park
From 10:30 – 4, will be a Woodland Cafe in Itchen Valley Country Park. Join us for a menu of Curb food, with lunch served from 12-2 and snacks around these times. We’ll also run our Food Boutique so that you can take groceries home with you to cook with yourselves!
Itchen Valley Country Park, Allington Lane, West End, SO30 3HQ
March 16: Food Justice in Southampton
A Dangerous Ideas discussion event with the theme of local food poverty, food waste and moving toward a fairer system 7:30pm
Juniper Berry, Bugle Street, Southampton, SO14 2EE
March 28: Easter at Aldermoor
An Open Day lunch for community farm members and locals, from 12-2pm
Aldermoor Community Farm, Southampton, SO16 5NN
In April, Race Against Waste is back! Curb will be hosting the UK’s FIRST food waste running team! We have 8 runners signed up to train for Southampton’s Half Marathon, fuelled only by food that would otherwise be destined for landfill for the 4 weeks leading up to the race! Keep an eye on the event Facebook page for updates from the runners. Training officially begins this month…
Our main aim for this year is to focus our energy into finding and opening a Curb cafe. For this reason, we will not be adding many more additional catering events and pop-up’s to our calendar for the time being. We will shortly be focusing heavily on bringing the International campaign Feeding The 5000 to Southampton this June!! Managing this project is where most of our energy will be going up until then, which we hope will be an inspiring event that not only raises the profile of food waste in the city, but generates and strengthens connections between all of the sustainable food projects in Southampton.
More on this later, but for now, do have a little look at our Diary for what we already have booked in.
Finally, we’d just like to say a MASSIVE thank you to every single person for every single action that has been ‘Curb’ over the past year. There is an absolutely enormous team of us working both directly and indirectly on this project. We wouldn’t be here at all if it wasn’t for each of you participating in this movement with us, so please eat your dinner knowing we are full of gratitude.
First Year Anniversary! Hi Everyone! Curb began in March 2015, so happy first birthday to us! We've got loads in store for our second year but here's a quick recap of 2015.
