Chris – Volunteer

Meet Chris, a FoodCycle surplus food volunteer of ten years, who has dedicated his life to helping the planet through sustainable living. 

Each week Chris collects surplus food from local supermarkets, businesses and farms, delivering them to his local FoodCycle team to cook up a feast. 

He takes all their cardboard and plastic to be reused or recycled at a local eco-living project which is also his home. He also takes the team’s peelings and food waste, which is used to either make compost, or feed his chickens! 

Chris received a FoodCycle Sustainability Hero badge after being nominated by all seven Project Leaders at FoodCycle Clacton, in March 2025.

What motivated you to you get involved in volunteering with FoodCycle?  

I’ve been with it since the beginning, so over ten years. I got involved in providing vegetables, we were mostly gleaning in those days – going on fields and scavenging vegetables, not doing so much picking up from supermarkets. 

I’ve always been into wellbeing and self-sufficiency. I run a sustainable living-project at the home I share with my wife, so reducing food waste is very important to us and how we live. We’re very keen on not wasting, and trying to get people to recycle their waste. 

FoodCycle ticks all the boxes of things that I’m interested in. It’s stopping waste. It’s recycling things that shouldn’t be thrown away, and it’s helping people who really need it, so it’s obviously doing good work, and I really approve of that.

What is your role as a surplus food volunteer with FoodCycle? 

I often do two or three collections over a couple of days. On the day of meal I start really early, I pick up food donations from the supermarkets, and deliver them to the project.  

Then I come back later to clear up absolutely everything. We get about 50 or 60 people who come for the meal, and we give away as much as we can afterwards to guests, but sometimes there’s food left over so I pass that on to other networks. . 

I collect all the food waste, scraps and peelings, and they go either to feed our chickens, or on the compost heap, and I sort out the recycling too. 

A lot of the time I spend volunteering for FoodCycle isn’t the time I spend at the project. It takes time, but it feels like doing the right thing, and so that feels good. 

What difference do you think FoodCycle making in your community? 

On the one hand, it’s stopping food going into skips, which what would happen if I didn’t collect it. So we’re making use of perfectly good food that would otherwise go to waste, and on the other side of the coin, we get a lot of vulnerable people who come to FoodCycle who we’re supporting in the way of giving them a meal, and often a bag surplus too that they can use to eat in the week. 

So that all ticks all the boxes as far as I’m concerned. 

What difference does volunteering with FoodCycle make in your life?  

I get a lot of personal satisfaction from it, it’s a moral thing to be honest – to see food going to waste, it just really hurts.  

I’m not young, I’ll be 80 this year, but I’ll keep going and picking up stuff up while there is stuff to pick up. I fit it into my life because it just feels so important. 

If I didn’t enjoy it, I wouldn’t be doing it! 

Why is eating and living sustainably important to you? 

It’s something that’s been there all my life. In in my 20s, I was living up a mountain off grid being self-sufficient, and later I moved on to live in a commune with a load of other people, it’s just been the thread going through my whole life. 

I like a green way of living, and I just think it’s immoral to waste food when there are so many people in the world who are hungry.  

We’re trying to grow too much, mostly meat – and that’s destroying the planet in the process. I want to do everything I can to make things better. 

It’s good that when people come to FoodCycle they’re getting a vegetarian meal. It might well be that the people who come wouldn’t normally think of eating a vegetarian meal. So the fact that they’re liking the meals that they’re getting is probably helping in some way too – it’s more sustainable, and probably better for health than the cheap meat you get in the supermarkets. 

Do you have any tips for other FoodCycle volunteers? 

It’s really good to make connections with your local allotment and allotment users because they often have surplus that they can pass on to FoodCycle.  

In some areas you might even be able to do a bit of gleaning, if you find a friendly farmer and have a word with them. You have to go on their fields the minute that they harvest their potatoes or whatever it is, because they plough them in very quickly afterwards. If you explain what FoodCycle is about and be friendly, you might find you can do that. 

I know an onion grower who we’ve done that with, he’ll let us go and clean onions because they waste a lot of onions. 

Then at the other end of the cycle you can compost, and grow your own. Even a tiny bit of growing if you’re in an apartment is a good thing. If you grow your own tomato plant, they taste so much better!