Eat cake, save the planet
Being broke and eating shit food is basically a trademark of being a student in New Zealand. The constant financial pressures of overpriced courses and soaring rents means the necessity that is kai, is often last on our menus. What if I told you that this doesn’t have to be true, and that you can contribute to helping climate change all at the same time.
With my tummy rumbling as we speak, lets dive into a few ways you can positively contribute to the environment while eating tasty kai.
Foodprint (Auckland/Wellington)
Eat cake, save the planet – sounds good to me. Foodprint is a food waste application that is combating the climate crisis by minimising surplus food from going to waste. Foodprint operates by offering generously discounted surplus food from eateries to customers to ‘rescue’ before it is thrown out. Customers order and pay for food in the app before collecting directly from the eateries, with significant discounts ranging from 30 to 90 per cent off the normal retail price.
Almost 50,000 tonnes of food is wasted by the hospitality and retail sectors in New Zealand each year, over 60 per cent of which is still edible. When food is thrown out it decomposes in landfills and emits the greenhouse gas methane, making food waste a huge contributor to the climate crisis.
In a world where students are scrounging for any edible morsel on a dusty Sunday morning, it’s crazy to hear that we can contribute to the climate crisis by eating peoples left overs – how good!
Foodprint founder Michal Garvey, is honoured to lend the students of Aotearoa a helping hand.
“Being environmentally friendly is often something you need disposable income to do, it feels good that we can help students not only contribute to saving food waste, but also contribute to feeding them good food,” says Garvey.
Foodprint has been operating for two years in Auckland, connecting 35,000 consumers in with 400 eateries with discounted leftover food through the app. Garvey and her team are delighted to have been able to expand to Wellington this month with the support of Creative HQ’s Climate Response Accelerator.
“Wellington has been our most requested city, from both customers and eateries,” says Garvey.
“With the high concentration of top-quality eateries, the walkable nature of the city and the food-obsessed population, it’s the perfect city for Foodprint.”
Foodprint has partnered with 30 eateries in central Wellington so far including Nam D, Yoshi Sushi, Basbousa, The Lab, Fix & Fogg, and Verve Cafe. They join the community of almost 400 eateries in Auckland that have been rescuing food and reducing their ‘foodprint’ with the app. Cafe operators have praised Foodprint for its sustainability purpose and usability.
“Foodprint is genius, it’s a beautiful and easy to use app which means we can get our delicious lovingly made food into someone’s tummy that previously would have ended up in the compost,” says Megan May, founder of Little Bird Kitchen in Ponsonby.
“We waste less, and it gives people access to food that might usually be out of their price range.”
If you’re craving something on the finer side of life this week, put your mee goreng packet away and see what you can scavenge on from your favourite local eateries.
The Free Store (Wellington)
The Free Store was founded in November 2010 after an art project inspired a group of friends. Kim Paton, an artist from out of town, set up a regular-looking shop stocked with food on the shelves.
The peculiar difference being that customers could simply take the food for free. The art project came and went within a matter of weeks, but this instalment got a group of Wellingtonians’ brains buzzing.
After discovering that much of the food in this shop was surplus food from local cafes, they asked, what if this could be a sustainable food supply?
The Free Store, an initiative which redirects surplus food from cafes and eateries around Wellington, operates out of a shipping container in the car park of St Peter’s Church on Willis St. This is a mere 10 to 15-minute walk from Massey Wellington’s campus.
A normal weekday sees volunteers pushing trolleys around Wellingtons CBD, collecting food from over 60 retailers in the area. The food is brought back to a line of people gathered in the church car park, who chat over a cup of tea while they wait.
The food from the Free Store is exactly that, free. Many students shy away from using services like this as they don’t believe it’s made for them.
The Free Store works of the basis of no questions asked and no strings attached. Anyone is welcome to partake in the bounty. The Free Store is an inclusive space built on a foundation of mutual respect, generosity and friendship.
If you are a student struggling for food, don’t be afraid to use services like The Free Store, as they are in place to help people in all stages of life struggling to fill their puku.
Just Zilch (Palmerston North)
Our Palmy campus can also join in on the food waste kaupapa, and for free! Just Zilch operates a free store solving two problems at once by taking food that would otherwise have gone to waste, and making it available to those who need.
Just Zilch is New Zealand’s longest running free store, providing food to over 350,000 kiwis since opening in 2011.
Just Zilch has removed more than 3.36 million food items from the waste stream, equalling more than 1,176 tonnes of food from landfill. With more than 100 volunteers, they give away nearly $80,000 of food each week.
Like the Wellington Free Store, Just Zilch is built upon a guilt-free foundation and guided by aroha kore - love without condition– and kaitiakitanga – together taking care of our resources.
As students it can feel like a mountainous task contributing to climate change initiatives. It often feels that you need access to sizable amounts of money to make a real contribution to this kaupapa - when in reality, it doesn’t
Reducing food waste had been identified by international research as the third most important action consumers could take to fight climate change. If all we need is space in our puku and an ounce of agency to get down to these stores or download an app, then what is our excuse.
Eat up!