As the Travelling Kitchen journey begins, we appreciate the effort of others doing great things for people, with food.
FareShare, Melbourne's largest charity kitchen, hosted Laura and 14 of her colleagues this week to support their efforts in cooking free nutritional food for those in need. The organisation is largely run by volunteers, including volunteer Chef Polly, who guided us through the making of 1106 sausage rolls, plus 40 trays with pastry bases for 960 bacon and egg pies. Good effort, team!
In the same way as Travelling Kitchen does, participants were instructed on knife skills and working with heat, and I'm pleased to say no accidents occurred. Where we differ is that FareShare has been in operation for 20 years, amazing! Starting off with a few hundred pies, it has been volunteer-run this whole time, with volunteers accessing their own garden supplies, and coordinating all the rescued and donated food.
With operations that run like a well-oiled machine, FareShare has many consistent volunteers and also accept school and corporate groups. Polly shared that often the school groups are better listeners and have higher productivity, but our work team was fairly well matched, phew… A humbling and inspiring experience, Travelling Kitchen strives to have that level of impact in the future.
