ANGELS at the TABLE

“In looking for solutions to fight food waste, we found incredible potential for a wider impact. We became aware that a good meal in a beautiful and welcoming environment can change a community.” These are the words of Massimo Bottura, the 3-Michelin star Italian chef who you might call the international rock star of food rescue. Bottura set up his first ‘refettorio’ – community dining hall – in Milan in 2015, where he invited top chefs in the city for the Expo to come and cook for the homeless and others in need.

With a team of architects, furniture makers, designers and artists, a neglected theatre was converted into a space where people could come together and enjoy top quality meals using surplus food from the Expo. Now, through his global project Food for Soul, Bottura and his team encourage organisations to donate food that would otherwise be binned, to feed the needy at his four refettorios across Europe.

The two-pronged problem of colossal food waste and widespread hunger is the ugly paradox of our times. “Almost one billion people are undernourished. One third of the food we produce globally is wasted every year, including nearly four trillion apples. Just imagine how many apple pies we could make?” Bottura writes in Bread is Gold, a collection of 150 ‘food rescue’ recipes from the chefs at his first refettorio, who whipped up culinary excellence from ingredients other people didn’t want.

In Aotearoa, it’s no different. Campaign Love Food, Hate Waste, run by 60 councils nationwide, says the average Kiwi family throws away three shopping trolleys of edible food each year. Couple this with the findings of a recent Salvation Army survey showing 37% of people skip a meal because they can’t afford it, and around one in four avoid buying fresh produce due to cost, and things start to look decidedly grim. But just as Bottura did, Kiwis have been busy finding solutions. When the refettorio