City Harvest delivers National Harvest Festival Service in Southwark Cathedral
On Sunday 6th October, City Harvest delivered the National Harvest Festival Service in Southwark Cathedral. The service was organized in partnership with Covent Garden Market Authority and British Food Fortnight, this year celebrating 50 years at 9 Elms and the Love British Food campaign, and the service marked the end of British Food fortnight.
City Harvest CEO, Sarah Calcutt delivered a beautiful sermon on the UK farming industry as well as the importance and impact of City Harvest. The service was followed by a reception at Glaziers Hall.
About British Food Fortnight
British Food Fortnight runs from 20th September until 6th October and is organised by Love British Food, the campaigning organisation that works at grassroots and industry level to encourage sustainable supply chains. Every year 1,000s of shops, restaurants, pubs, caterers, hospitals, schools, supermarkets, independent shops and whole communities come together during the national food celebration to showcase the diverse and delicious food we produce in this country. The event reaches millions every autumn and is an excellent opportunity for local communities to get together and celebrate British food.
Ambassadors include Raymond and Oli Blanc, Liz Earle, Phil Howard, Simon Hulstone, Alex Hollywood, Mitch Tonks and more, who all give their support by sharing recipes and tips on buying British.
Alexia Robinson, Founder of Love British Food said: “This year’s British Food Fortnight will again be a joyous celebration of the wonderful food we produce in this country. It will also be an opportunity to consider how we need to do more as a society to make good food available to all so that everyone has access to nutritious food. We have wonderful partners this year across catering and retail so there will be promotions and activity across the country. And we are expecting to see tremendous support from schools, hospitals and universities as a result of the work we do in these sectors year round.”
Sermon delivered by Sarah Calcutt
“By heritage I am a farmer. This time of year, has always had such significance. The hard, but satisfying labour of love, bringing in the harvest, knowing that you have nurtured your crops in order to nourish others.
The reading from the Prophet Joel is one for farmers and has often been read at Harvest Festival services, though some farmers struggle with the second verse where, ‘he has poured down for abundant rain’…
The harvest festivals of my childhood were a time of reflection, bringing together our rural community to celebrate harvest safely gathered in, to recognise that not everyone was as fortunate and to ensure that we observed the time-honoured tradition of sharing some of the harvest with those in need.
Our society has grown in scale and complexity since then and the urgent need to care for our neighbours, in both cities and the countryside, has sadly grown even faster.
We’re grateful to Southwark Cathedral, New Covent Garden Market and the many organisations and caring people across the City of London for embracing this urgency.
City Harvest is a food rescue charity devoted to capturing sources of surplus food, from across the UK and rushing it to local community organisations that provide healthy meals to families, and individuals in need. We are unique in our space in the volume of fresh produce that we share, vital healthy food shared by farmers and their representatives in retail and wholesale.
One of our 19 vehicles is outside the Cathedral today, compassionately funded by great London Livery companies. We are so grateful, on behalf of the hungry people across Greater London that we serve together, that we are embraced by a generous community who enable us to bring hope, dignity, respect and help to alleviate the hunger that blights the lives of 20% of our population today.
There is a phrase often quoted by our team ‘delivering hope and vital nutrition with dignity and respect’. City Harvest was founded out of the understanding that poverty is made more wretched by the shame and anxiety of the situation, we remain guided by the vision of our founders who saw the rising need of the poorest in our society coupled with good food being wasted, discarded and damaging our planet.
Their work in the early years, in London, was visionary, and those first community groups they worked with then, are still, ten years on, our partners today.
Unfortunately, today, the UK has 4 million hungry children every day, 20% of all households are living in food insecurity. Every day brings new anxiety about where the next meal is coming from. The number of people being admitted to hospital with malnutrition is increasing monthly and a quarter of teachers said that they again brought in food from home to feed hungry pupils in the summer term this year.
People who have never needed help before are flooding into soup kitchens, food banks, social supermarkets and food cooperatives.
Today there are twice as many food banks than there are McDonalds outlets. There are as many food banks as there are branches of Tesco.
Half of London’s single parent households are in food poverty, just think how desperate that must feel, how precarious your life is, in every moment? Think how often that parent goes without, so that their children can eat.
That is not sustainable. That is not dignity. That is not acceptable.
From our delivery of 80,000 meals worth of food in 2014, our decade of making a difference has seen us grow exponentially. Last month, as we celebrated our impact and thanked our founders, we also delivered our 70 millionth meal.
Despite all that we have achieved, all of the people that we have helped, our waiting list grows every day, we could double in size tomorrow and there would still be unmet need.
We are no longer an emergency food service; we are now part of a long-term recovery service responding to a catastrophic crisis. Food insecurity continues to rise, fueled by wider extremes of weather destabilizing supply chains, geopolitical forces that are driving inflationary increases, conflicts, public funding constraints and shifting political aspirations.
We are fueled by determined, caring, and motivated people, like yourselves, dedicated to finding solutions for a global humanitarian and environmental crisis that will impact on society at every level for generations.
Today, we are here together with compassionate partners from New Covent Garden Market, a great London institution, home to big-hearted food businesses who have fed the capital for centuries. The Market is home to every kind of fruit, vegetable or flower that you could ever imagine, businesses that exist to care for their local population, working with farmers from across the globe, delivering the healthiest diet of fine fresh produce.
We also welcome colleagues, friends and supporters alike, here today to reflect and show gratitude for the harvest gathered from the field, and the surplus we are able to source from farther afield.
At City Harvest, we now have a team of 65, (please raise your hands) and in the last year we benefitted from 30,000 hours of volunteer time (volunteers please raise your hands, our food council, the trustees, and founders too), incredible people, helping others, showing their love for the planet and people.
We deliver over a 1.2 million meals every month.
We partner with over five hundred food distributors, wholesalers, producers, events, caterers, restaurants, manufacturers, packers, and members of the National Farmers Union, who generously donate the proportion of their products that they cannot sell, delivering it to those that help others.
We cover the whole of the United Kingdom in our quest to collect good quality, edible, yet unwanted, food and deliver it to our partners who care for so many.
But still it hasn’t been enough, so we continue to grow.
Adding to our team, growing our knowledge of what is needed, expanding our reach across the capital, and beyond. Becoming more efficient, more impactful, helping more people, delivering more support, and love, by sharing food, which would otherwise have gone to waste.
Working with like-minded partners across our capital and the UK, ensuring that no edible food goes to waste, and by getting it to those in need, working for City Harvest has restored my faith in humankind, we work with the most extraordinary community organisations which are led by incredible, golden hearted individuals. These community groups make a difference to people in desperate need every single day, providing nutrition, a listening ear, expert advice, hope and a warm, safe space for people facing the worst of times.
We move forward, living our strong values, always striving to be community-focused, remaining committed to connecting communities through the gift of food.
We need real and lasting change, and that doesn’t come from standing alone for a cause, no matter how passionately we believe in it. It comes when you stand together with friends of other communities, faiths and sectors who are willing to share their skills and resources to achieve a common objective.
Bringing leaders together from backgrounds in business, science, philanthropy, civil society, faith communities, all of us united behind our vision of a London where no child goes hungry, there is no more malnutrition and that everyone is nourished so that they can thrive and fully achieve their potential.
City Harvest is determined to play its part in affecting real change for good, supporting where we are needed to bring about the real conversation that needs to be had about local, and national food insecurity.
We support thriving not simply surviving.
Thanks be to God for the inspiration and mission to serve those in need and for the committed community that supports and encourages City Harvest to do its best every day. “
