Whanganui Kai Hub co-leader and Whanganui Kai Trust member Louise Oskam says they are aiming to change how people think about and manage food. Photo / Bevan Conley
Whanganui Kai Hub co-leader and Whanganui Kai Trust member Louise Oskam says they are aiming to change how people think about and manage food. Photo / Bevan Conley
Growing demand for food parcels and increased food waste has a Whanganui group looking at different ways of managing the challenges.
"The time is right for Whanganui communities to change the way they think about food waste," Whanganui Kai Hub co-leader Louise Oskam said.
The Whanganui Kai Trust runs aKai Hub on St Hill St, with the mission to rescue and upcycle food that would otherwise be going to landfills.
Oskam said they did this through their upcycling project, which rescued unused food and repurposed it through redistributing to other organisations.
Bread and dairy products were the most rescued foods from participating supermarkets Countdown and New World.
Countdown's director of corporate affairs, safety and sustainability Kiri Hannifin said other items included those damaged in transit, or too close to their best-before date to be sold.
So far Kai Hub has rescued more than 1100kg of food from Whanganui Countdown.
Kai Hub also repurposes food from the City Mission Food Bank when it has an overflow.
The food rescue operations run four days a week, up from two days a week last year.
"We often rescue 100kg of food in a single day," Oskam said.
The food is redistributed to organisations such as the Mental Illness Survivors Team, The Learning Environment, UCOL, Te Ora Hou and the Kai Hub's on-site community fridge, among others.
Whanganui Kai Hub rescues and upcycles food that would otherwise be going to landfills. Photo / Supplied
The community fridge, which opened to the public a month ago, is open every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, from midday to 2pm.
"Some days we have 70 people turn up in the two-hour slot," Oskam said.
"People can come to get free food but we also want Kai Hub to be seen as a helping hand and a place people might come to learn about food resilience, upcycling their food and cooking better.
"It becomes our concern that we become the place that provides all their food.
"Free is never free - there's really good research that says free actually does more harm than good."
A study by Zero Hunger Collective in 2021 showed when food parcels were needed repeatedly over time, they had the danger of creating a cycle of dependency.
The study, called Mana To Mana, showed food banks and food parcels were initially an emergency community response to extraordinary shocks such as war and natural disasters and were never intended to sustain families over long periods of time.
When the basics of life continued to be provided for free, people became dependent on the services delivering the basics.
Oskam said the goal of "food sovereignty" had been complicated by the increased cost of living.
"We have a low unemployment rate, so maybe it's because there's just not enough to live off."
She said reducing household food waste was also a big part of Kai Hub's mission.
"Kai Hub is not just for people who can't afford food.
"It's also for someone who lives on St John's Hill who shops and buys more food than they need."
Kai Hub runs upcycling events which educate people on how they can better make use of food, whether by preserving, cooking or redistributing their own unused food to the community fridge.
So far they have run three upcycling events, with the next one on Wednesday, June 29.
"Here we have people who are going without, and yet others have excess," Oskam said.
The recent Rabobank-Kiwi Harvest Food Waste research surveyed 1509 New Zealanders about their food habits.
It showed the estimated value of food waste per New Zealand household has risen to $1520 per household per year.
Nationally, this equates to $3.1 billion of wasted food, up from $2.4b last year.
The survey results, which came out on June 23, showed the average New Zealand household reported wasting 13.4 per cent of the food they bought each week – up from the 8.6 per cent recorded in the 2021 survey.
The three most frequently wasted food groups are bread, fruit and vegetables.
