It’s an exciting time for us at FoodCycle Marylebone. We’re finally saying goodbye to the emergency delivery service that has been running there throughout the pandemic and starting the process of migrating back to the more regular FoodCycle model of communal cooking and eating.
Janie and I have been helping with emergency deliveries at several projects during the pandemic. White City for example...
…as well as four seasons in Marylebone:
But this week was the last week of the deliveries. It was also one of two piloting weeks for the transitional cook and collect service. The headline photograph shows me and Janie trying to come to grips with the sneeze guard screen. Hopefully we’ll have come to terms with it by next week.
The main reason that Marylebone is one of the last FoodCycle projects to migrate to the transitional service is not to do with our low-level flat pack assembly skills.
No.
It is the fact that, uniquely, Marylebone FoodCycle does not have a single site available for cooking and service to the guests, so there are significant logistical challenges with which to grapple.
Bill Miller has been leading the good battle to set up the new service while keeping the emergency service ticking over. He is a pleasure to work with, is Bill. For some obscure reason he doesn’t like to have his photo taken whenever we’re around, yet he is the poster boy for FoodCycle Marylebone on Instagram:
Anyway, while we were grappling with the cook and collect starter kit, such as getting our heads around the vital dating and allergen labelling system for the cooked meals, a small cast had long-since assembled at the nearby Greenhouse Centre to pilot the cooking:
Once the cooked food is ready, a volunteer collects the cooked meals and trolleys then from Greenhouse to St Pauls. This week Janie and I piloted that bit of the volunteering, so we can “project lead” it in future:
Then, once the cooked food was all labelled up, Amandine, Janie and I were snapped by Bill in the process of bagging up food for this week’s delivery service.
Then, just to make sure that Janie and I really had done a decent double or triple shift, we also delivered the cooked food and surplus to a local shelter project and then went on and did our (formerly regular) delivery round for the final time.
No photo of what Dumbo actually looked like when we set off with all that lot in tow, but the picture below from last summer looks a bit like it:
I don’t think Janie and I will miss doing multi-shifts like this. That was an exhausting one-off.
Still, at least once it was done we could relax…it wasn’t as if I was giving a talk that night or anything…
…oh, hold on!
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