Kash, Mohamed and Sevan arrived at Ealing Soup Kitchen in time to finish unloading the City Harvest van that was sitting outside. Looking at the delivery, there were a few things that stood out. Big bags of Brussel sprouts, teeny tiny pears, lots of eggs and many crates of fruit.

As usual, the aim of the prep shift was to unpack all of the food, then, from whatever the Soup Kitchen receives that day, creating snack bags for snacking and grocery bags for clients to cook with. The team started by separating out bags of easy peelers and bunches of bananas into single fruits. The food that comes to Soup Kitchen is often on the edge of being not sellable and so it was with the bananas. 2 boxes were fine, while the third was filled with mushy, brown bad 'nanas, some of which had split open.

Kash and Mohamed moved on to creating boxes of 6 eggs from large trays, coming up with innovative ways to make lids for the egg boxes from other bits of food packaging. There was endless cutting of egg trays and packing, then working out how to hold the makeshift egg boxes together.

"Genius" - Emma, task owner

Sevan, on the other hand, still had his hands full of fruit after moving onto filling the snack bags for today's clients. Normally, the snack bags contain 1 drink, 1 piece of fruit and 3 snacks like bags of crisps or protein bars. Today, there was so much fruit that the proportions flipped, with 1 drink, 1 bag of crisps and then a bunch of (sometimes squidgy) bananas, a handful of easy peelers and 2 apples. Very healthy 🍌🍊🍌🍎🍊🍌🍊🍊🍌🍎🍊🍌

Together, the volunteers put together 100 snack bags and 80 grocery bags. Even so, that still left plenty of bananas and carrots sitting around, so everyone was encouraged to take home as many as they wanted to stop them going to waste. There'll be a lot of banana breads and carrot cakes being baked this week 🍰