JW3 food bank provides meals and also ‘much-needed contact’

The relentlessly cheerful José da Silva, from Brazil, rolls up at JW3 to be greeted by the food bank team. He drives a City Harvest refrigerated van, and twice a week turns up at JW3, the Jewish community centre for London, with around 60kg of food in each delivery – so 120kg a week.

This is the beginning of the food trail, an extraordinary operation begun by JW3 when the pandemic forced it to close the Finchley Road building to the general public. But it became clear to the team that pandemic or no pandemic, there were all too many people in the London Borough of Camden, JW3’s home base, who needed food – either raw products that they could cook themselves, or hot ready meals.

And the recipients cover every demographic one could think of, and more: old people, disabled, vulnerable and shielding, refugees, asylum seekers, and poorer members of both the Jewish and non-Jewish community. To the JW3 team, who the recipients are doesn’t matter. If they need food, JW3 will do its best to supply it.

Strictly speaking, the food trail begins a lot further back, before José appears with his van. City Harvest is a London-based charity that delivers more than one million meals a month to those facing food poverty.

It has managed to persuade big companies, such as Amazon, Sainsbury, Tesco and Costco, to donate surplus produce to the charity. The van deliveries José brings will be a selection from the donor companies. “We often get wonky vegetables that the supermarkets can’t sell,” says Bryony McIvor, who is the JW3 food bank co-ordinator.

Once unloaded from José’s van, the food is separated in various palettes. Some goes into big fridges at the back of JW3’s piazza, an area more familiar in normal times to large-scale projects such as the winter skating rink or the summer beach. But there are capacious storage cupboards edging the piazza, and that’s where some of the stock goes.

Inside the JW3 building is where the grocery bags are assembled. Georgie Friend, the centre’s social action and volunteers co-ordinator, tells me they work with the charity FEAST, which determines how much is required for recipients. It works across the London boroughs of Barnet, Camden, Haringay and Islingto nand its volunteers cook around 4,000 meals a month. JW3’s cook volunteers are mainly FEAST people.

JW3 volunteers fill plastic bags with enough vegetables and non-perishable goods to make 15 meals for each recipient. The day I visited, the team were filling up 112 bags: and the produce, which varies from week to week, can include onions, potatoes, eggs and tinned soups.

“Sometimes it’s seasonal,” says Georgie, “and sometimes it’s just what City Harvest brings. We never know what we’re getting.”

In JW3’s upstairs kitchen, the FEAST partners are cooking up a storm. Generally they arrive at around 9.30 am and head straight for the storage fridges to see what is available.

“You know the TV programme Ready, Steady, Cook? That’s us,” a FEAST volunteers grins, as she flash fries a huge pan of vegetables, destined to be partnered with rice. Elsewhere they have made marmalade cakes. “Because we never know what we’re getting, we have to be incredibly creative when we decide what we’re going to make. We have to cook for around 60 people [per session].”

In a side room, the seemingly never-ending process of washing-up is taking place.

What are they short of? “We never have any sugar – that’s why we have to improvise with marmalade. We’re always looking for donations, particularly things like foil, oil, baking trays, plastic boxes for the meals, even kitchen equipment like hand mixers.” And plastic bags.

The former demonstration kitchen of JW3 where the Wednesday and Thursday cooking takes place and it’s not really set up for this kind of cooking. Despite its constraints, the preparation has to be done there, because the ground floor restaurant kitchen is kashrut-supervised, while upstairs is vegetarian only.

By 12.30pm the cooking is done and the meals are being packed up for delivery and distribution. The hot food recipients are on a list devised by FEAST, while the grocery bags go to those on a Camden Council list.

Now the pandemic is slowing down, the plan is to try to restart communal dining inside JW3, bringing recipients in to eat together. Whatever happens, the food trail has become an integral part of JW3’s social action work. And what is important, says Georgie, is that it’s now a well-oiled operation. “There is likely to be a huge new influx of [Ukrainian] refugees,” she says – but no one who ends up in Camden will go hungry.

Recipient Friedrich F said: “I am so grateful for this service. The person who brings it is always cheerful and friendly, his name is Mike. When
I hear Mike on the phone I come alive again!”

Charles S said: “We really enjoy your lovely food. It’s really important. The people who come are so lovely that it is more than food. You get all the contact. Especially at such a difficult time, it meant a lot.”

JW3 chief executive Raymond Simonson said: “I am deeply upset that, in modern Britain, a country not short of wealth, there are so many families struggling with the impact of food poverty in the face of rising costs. And I am extremely disturbed by how the numbers of people needing to access such food services continues to grow rapidly by the week.

“Yet at the same time I feel a sense of pride at the impact our services are able to make since we set them up. I’m inspired in particular by the incredible tireless chesed work of all the volunteers involved, collecting or donating food, cooking meals, packing or delivering food parcels to hundreds of people in need.”