Food was collected from local businesses on Thursday and Friday. Friday's food collection saw two huge boxes of tangerines and kiwis donated by a market seller to one of our volunteers. Struggling to drag the fruit across the city to the FNB kitchen, a police officer helped carry the fruit to the nearest bus stop where he even organised a free day saver ticket! By the evening, a substantial quantity of bread, vegetables and fruit had been accumulated.

The cooking group (only two people to start with!) met up at Decoy on Saturday morning to collect equipment and formulate a menu from the gathered food; it was to be soup and fruit salad. We dragged the equipment across town in in shopping trolleys (courtesy of an anonymous 'benefactor') making a short stop en route at Poundland for some utensils. The trolley-chauffeurs braved Birmingham's cratered pavements, and - despite the struggle and racket – successfully transported the equipment undamaged to what had been designated as the FNB nerve centre at a city-centre university Halls of Residence.

The Kitchen was cleaned from top to bottom before embarking on the gargantuan task of peeling and cutting 124 vegetables. Three hours later, all vegetables were cut and blended (carrots, potatoes, onions, beans, peppers, coriander, chili powder, garlic, and a small aubergine) and the soup was born! Unfortunately we were yet to even comprehend scaling the mountain of fruit awaiting us at the end of the kitchen. Fortunately we were joined by two more committed FNB facilitators to create what can only be described as an assembly line / party (or at least as close to that as you can get when cutting fruit for 2 hours). After preparing the fruit salad of apples, kiwis, mandarins, bananas, oranges and lemons, we were still knee deep in kiwis and tangerines. It was decided that we would make freshly squeezed fruit juice. After some final seasoning of the soup we filled one trolley entirely with bread and uncut apples, and the other with the soup, juice, banners and equipment.

What was originally planned as a 12 o'clock lunch finally came to fruition (crass pun intended) at 5 o'clock outside the Bullring in Birmingham City Centre. Four volunteers became ten, and then it became difficult to distinguish diners from servers. There was even a late donation of vegan cookies and brownies. The food became a real icebreaker and it was great to see youths, shoppers, the hungry, and homeless all chatting and sharing food together. It was estimated that between 50 and 60 people were fed, whether with just a cup of juice and an apple, or a whole meal. At 8 o'clock all the fruit salad, soup and juice had been finished and the remaining bread and apples were distributed between the homeless still gathered around the stall. It became particularly poignant how the same food that was so well appreciated by the hungry would have otherwise been thoughtlessly thrown away and left to rot.

All those in attendance unequivocally agreed the day was a success and without any suggestion from Saturday's core group, plans were independently made for a serving the following Saturday in addition to the Refugee Sleep-out on the 22nd June. Although all the food was free, passers-by donated £18 which will hopefully go towards buying a gas stove.

Many thanks to everyone who attended and helped out. It is hoped that this event will be an even bigger success next week and interest in this project will continue to grow. The next meeting will take place at Decoy (22 Green Street, Digbeth) in conjunction with the Dissent meeting on Tuesday 14th June from 18.30.

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Also:-

www.foodnotbombs.net

www.fnbnews.org