Focus 3\4.4 Reading - The real Junk Food Project (task for text)

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Adam Smith is the founder of THE REAL JUNK FOOD PROJECT. He is passionate about collecting food that has been discarded by supermarkets, and transforming this wasted food into healthy nutritious meals.

Smith worked as a head chef for ten years and thought of the idea for The Real Junk Food Project when he was travelling in Australia and witnessed the scale of food waste in the agricultural sector and catering industry. The global statistics are shocking: roughly one third of food produced in the world for human consumption every year gets lost or wasted. Over 800 million people in the world (that’s one in every nine people on Earth) do not have enough food to lead a healthy, active life. Smith founded The Real Junk Project to fi ll the gap between hunger and excess food, and to raise awareness about how much food goes to waste.

“ Over 800 million people in the world (that’s one in every nine people on Earth) do not have enough food... ”

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Smith started the project and opened the fi rst Real Junk Food café in his hometown Leeds in 2013. Since then, the concept has been exported as far away as Los Angeles and Brazil, Warsaw and Zurich. The idea is simple: volunteers go out and collect food from various sources: farms, restaurants, factories and supermarkets. Meals are produced and sold in cafés on a ‘pay-asyou-feel’ (PAYF) basis so that nobody is excluded. The cafés are for the community in general, not only for the poor. Those who can afford it pay what they think the meal is worth, while those who can’t afford to buy meals from the café can earn their meals by volunteering – for instance, they can help with the washing up.

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There is some controversy around the fact that some of the food served in The Real Junk Food cafés is past its sell-by date. Smith explains that chefs inspect the food and use their judgement to decide whether it is safe to eat. The food is cooked in accordance with offi cial government standards, and cafés are inspected regularly by the environmental health department. They’ve fed over 10,000 people and nobody’s been ill yet! Anything that isn’t fi t for human consumption goes to feed animals or as compost on vegetable gardens.

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Smith believes that change needs to happen immediately and on a local level. Too many people are completely uneducated about food, and this was the incentive for setting up an educational branch of The Real Junk Food Project called Fuel for School. The initiative has two aims – to get breakfast to every hungry schoolchild in the country and secondly, to teach children the value of food so that they can reduce the amount of leftovers in their own homes. The idea is that if children know what they’re eating, where it’s come from and how it’s prepared, they develop an engagement with food and life skills for the future