Friends of ours in Hong Kong

So Kelvin was in Hong Kong visiting the parents and doing some FoodCycle related stuff as well last week, and met with various groups in Hong Kong that do similar things to what we do in the UK. This is to be expected of course, with the amount of food waste in richer countries... and food prices rising, citizens are taking matters to their own hands!

One organisation is the Love Food Save Earth project in Tai Wo, which is in the new terrorities in Hong Kong. They collect food from the local 'wet' market, which means open market in local terms, and bring it back to the community centre to cook for those that are unemployed, or just on low income. They charge about £1 per meal... all you can eat, and 6 dishes. As you can see, they were quite delicious!

We chatted about our experiences, difficulties and how to overcome them. For them, just like us, unfortunately, it is the amount of food that they get. 400 kilos in one day, and now that the vendors know about them, and the project has been featured on TV, even more food is saved for them and well, they just don't know what to do with it all!

There are other project going on as well, such as the http://www.foodlinkfoundation.org which takes surplus food from hotels as well.

One of the issues is the scalability of the projects. It works well in one area, but how to scale it in a sustainable way to other communities as well. There is a hidden and unreported layer of poverty in Hong Kong and recent reports say Hong Kong throws out 3,000 tonnes of food each day... that's not all good, but I'm sure about 1000 tonnes must be... do the math... a kilo of food per person per meal, that's food for 1 million people... I know the math is not all there, but it is still a lot of people give or take 25%!?!

Hopefully the projects in Hong Kong can work together to tackle these big problems. FoodCycle in the UK will do their best to support them from the UK.