Each Monday morning GoodGym help the South Ealing Food Cupboard volunteers prepare to give away food to the community. Supermarkets and other organisations donate surplus food to prevent it being wasted. Lots of heavy lifting and speedy organisation is required to get a van-load of food ready to be shared!

This week Afshin, Mehmet, Martin, and Iram were on hand for the South Ealing Food Cupboard shift. The van was running fashionably late (well over an hour behind schedule!) but everyone stayed as long as they could. The extra time was spent soaking up the sunshine and chatting with the other volunteers, a real calm before the storm.

When the van finally rolled in it was worth the wait: a bumper haul of juice, potatoes, spring onions, carrots, broccoli, salad leaves, and crate after crate of assorted veg and meal-prep boxes. Sorting the meal prep boxes was no quick task, so in the end they were handed semi-sorted to the customers who were more than happy to rummage through and grab what they fancied.

It was a whirlwind shift of heavy lifting, speedy sorting, and plenty of teamwork!

South Ealing Community Food Cupboard were flooded with mysterious brown bags this morning and the big challenge was where to put them all. They had big numbers printed on them, which weren't helpful, then smaller text showing how many people they'd feed. They were undelivered Hello Fresh meal kits, perfect for those who could turn them into something tasty at home.

Mehmet was already hard at work stacking crates onto trolleys when Martin and Sevan arrived. The delivery van was smaller than normal and that meant less food on the Food Cupboard shelves too. Still, everything needed to be moved and the brown bags were loaded, along with a lot of broccoli, sausages and Wasabi ready meals and shuttled to the church building.

There was plenty of chilled food to organise in the limited fridge space, which Martin did his best to solve by playing Wasabi tetris.

"There's no room at the inn" - Martin

Mehmet and Sevan were kept busy with the meal kits. They separated the 2, 3 and 4 person bags to be placed on different shelves, making them easy for the clients to collect.

There were rumours of a second coming of the delivery van, so Martin and Sevan hung around on the off chance that it would. When there was no sign of it by midday, it was time to wrap up.