News
2022
Volunteer Rewards
Our incredible volunteers support our work in countless ways – from delivering meals, collecting kitchen kit, cooking, cleaning, chopping and supporting our cooking classes – they really do help to make our work truly impactful. We are so grateful to everyone who has donated their time and skills to help us alleviate hunger and share cooking-from-scratch tips throughout our work and we are delighted to have received funding from Action Together to provide some ethical goodie bags as a way of saying thank you!
Here are our wonderful volunteers at the end of a busy shift receiving their new books and Cracking Good Food tea towels too.
If you’d like to volunteer with us, please email info@crackinggoodfood.org
Growing and Cooking Education
This year we have worked with more than 250 parents, teachers and pupils in schools across Greater Manchester to help develop good food know-how and to foster a love of cooking-from-scratch whilst minimising food waste and environmental impact.
It’s great to hear in the Guardian article below about the fantastic wider work going on in our communities to share growing skills and foster a love of cooking healthy food in schools (our Co-Director Gemma is quoted too!)
Read the article here.
Social eating for older people in Stockport
Thanks to funding from Foundations Stockport’s Community Fund, we have delivered 3 seasonal social ‘cook and eat’ sessions with older residents of Stockport Homes. Throughout the sessions, we have used fresh allotment produce to cook delicious meals from scratch and shared age-appropriate information on affordable and accessible cooking-from-scratch to support good nutrition and hydration amongst the residents.
We will be heading back to Stockport for our final of these sessions this week when we will be making spiced pumpkin soup and stove-top apple crumble.
Helping to fight hunger in Manchester
Week 2 of our new pilot emergency food support project was a huge success! Our community cooking team, supported by our incredible volunteers, cooked up an absolute storm in Brunswick Church kitchen, creating over 160 nutritious meals to support the wellbeing of hospital discharge patients, people experiencing crisis and others at-risk of hunger and food poverty who struggle to access and cook enough food. Most of the meals are delivered to individuals referred to us by ‘social prescription’ and the rest are served up at our pop-up community cafe at Brunswick Church in Ardwick, where many in the community require additional support to meet their food and nutrition needs.
Hunger and food insecurity are sadly going nowhere, as the cost of living crisis spirals and causes even more people to experience poverty and hardship. We are proud to do what we can to support our communities at this time, thanks to funding from The Big Life Group’s Social Prescription Fund.
Community Cooking in Clarence Park, Bury
For the last 6 months, we have been running free monthly community cooking classes in the lovely cafe at Clarence Park, Bury. Commissioned by Friends of Clarence Park as part of a wider project funded by Recycle for Greater Manchester, our classes are designed to be a fun, social eating occasion with plenty of opportunity for people to get hands-on and learn more about how to make nutritious and delicious cooking-from-scratch as affordable as possible.
We have been overwhelmed by the interest amongst Bury residents in our sessions – 7/10 participants said that they were inspired to cook the dishes again at home and that they had learned new skills. 100% of the feedback classed the sessions as ‘excellent’ too!
Thank you to everyone who cooked or volunteered with us at Clarence Park, and thank you to Dawn from Friends of Clarence Park for booking us – it has been an absolute pleasure and we hope to return and cook with you again soon.
BBC Northwest feature!
BBC Northwest featured our first Kitchen Kit Redistribution event supported by Apex Self Storage and 1st Great Moor Explorers who helped us clean and pack pre-loved donated kitchenware for organisations across Greater Manchester communities to redistribute to their communities who are experiencing hardship. If you would like to support this initiative by hosting a collection point or are an organisation whose community would benefit from free kitchenware, email tracey@crackinggoodfood.org
Cracking Good Food shares low-fuel cooking guide
An article which featured in The Meteor, Manchester’s Independent Media. The Meteor is a not-for-profit, independent media co-operative – an alternative, radical, community-based publication for the people of Manchester. Read the article here.
Kitchen Kit redistributed to Oldham Food Bank
We were thrilled to be able to redistribute 4 boxes of kitchen kit, sourced from our Kitchen Kit Call Out Campaign, to support Oldham Food Bank this week. The team at the food bank will distribute the equipment to help break down one of the barriers to cooking and eating well which Oldham residents in crisis may be facing.
If you’d like to donate pre-loved kitchen equipment to our Kitchen Kit Call Out campaign, to host a collection bin, OR if you know of someone who would benefit from some free kitchen kit, you can find out more here.
Enough is Enough Rally
Co Director Tracey Torley attended the Enough is Enough rally in the capacity to raise awareness of our FREE resource ‘ Power up the flavour booklet designed to help people maintain a healthy and nutritious diet whilst tackling the cost of living crisis.
Read more about it here.
We are recruiting!
We are seeking organised and supportive people with a passion for good food to join our growing team as Freelance Session Co-Ordinators.
This flexible freelance role involves supporting our Cooking Leaders to run fun, informative, safe and engaging cooking workshops and activities across a wide range of communities around Greater Manchester.
Email tracey@crackinggoodfood.org before 19th September for more information and a recruitment pack.
Please share with anyone who might be interested!
The H3 Project!
Team members Tracey Torley and Kala Mandviwala feature in this short film to raise awareness of the Healthy Soil, Healthy Food, Healthy People (H3) programme. Cracking Good Food will be supporting the research of world-class researchers from Sheffield, Leeds, Bristol, Cambridge, Newcastle and City Universities in partnership with multiple stakeholders, to seek workable pathways to transform the UK food system ‘from the ground up’ via an integrated programme of interdisciplinary research on ‘Healthy soil, Healthy food and Healthy people’ (H3) starting January 2022.
Planting a Plum Tree in Abermarle Allotments!
This week, we planted a beautiful young plum tree in the Abermarle Allotments, who have been supporting our many food projects with beautiful fresh produce all summer. The tree will hopefully live in this gorgeous community orchard and bear fresh plums for generations to come! It is a belated leaving gift for CGF Founding Director, Adele.
Here’s a pic of our Co-Director Tracey and allotment leader Hils planting it. The allotment, which is located on the border of Withington and West Didsbury, is a wonderful place to meet green-minded people and to get involved with some growing. We’re always looking out for volunteers to help out at our Sunday sessions – tools and brews are provided! If you’d like to join, email ellie@crackinggoodfood.org
An End to ‘Veg-Up!’
We have reached the end of our 12-week pilot project Veg-Up! in Barton & Winton, Salford. Here’s our ‘produce guy’ and Project Manager Dave collecting some fresh veg from FareShare Greater Manchester in Vera, our new van!
Since the start of ‘Veg-Up! Salford, Dave has sourced and redistributed more than 2.5 tonnes of perfectly good food destined for food waste from Fareshare, along with lots of beautiful locally grown produce from allotments and growing schemes – AMAZING work Dave!
We’d also like to thank all of our incredible volunteers who have helped us to wash, sort and pack more than 900 veg bags since the start of July – you are absolute stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
We are passionate about reducing food waste and supporting communities at high-risk of food insecurity and diet-related inequality to eat fresh and eat well. Keep your eyes peeled – we will be releasing an impact report to show you the full range of benefits this project has brought to Salford communities in the last 3 months.
More than 2700 healthy packed lunches to combat ‘Holiday Hunger’.
For many tens of thousands of children in Greater Manchester, food insecurity is a daily reality. Thanks to Marcus Rashford’s powerful campaign, funding was available this summer for free healthy food provision for those at risk of ‘holiday hunger’. As part of the Holiday Activity and Food (HAF) funding, we were able to prepare and distribute more than 2700 healthy packed lunches, along with a series of cooking workshops. As always, a HUGE thank you to our team and volunteers. We’d also like to say a big thank you to Sharon from Stockport Homes and the residents of Wimborne Close for lending us their brilliant kitchen. Thank you for putting up with us – we hope you enjoyed your cupcakes made by our Cooking Leader Zosima.
Whilst the future food security of many is uncertain, we are proud to combat food insecurity whilst reducing food waste via our holiday food provision. We passionately believe that EVERYONE deserves good food and we will be whole-heartedly campaigning for the continuation of funding to ensure no child goes hungry in school holidays.
Fighting Holiday Hunger In Stockport.
We have been commissioned to provide 1000+ packed lunches for young people in Stockport at risk of ‘holiday hunger’ who are attending Life Leisure’s activity camps. As part of this project, our team have been out and about in Stockport today cooking on-site from our portable kitchen set-up. As you can see, we’ve been encouraging the kids to ‘eat the rainbow’ with this colourful noodle dish packed with vitamins and goodness!
This project will run until the end of August – if you can volunteer any time to support us with this, please email:
CGF at Manchester International Festival!
We were delighted to be commissioned by Manchester International Festival’s event ‘Looking Forward To Tomorrow’ to deliver 2 cooking demonstrations and discussions about sustainability and to raise awareness of food insecurity in Greater Manchester.
Whilst Covid regulations meant we were unable to let the audience sample our delights, the food was distributed to Emmeline’s Pantry, a food bank for women in Chorlton. We had a great time, with a very engaged and interested audience. Thanks for having us MIF – we hope to see you again next year!
CGF in the MEN!
The lovely Kit Vickery from Manchester Evening News visited us at our Gorton Community Kitchen and wrote some lovely words about our work and our incredible volunteers. You can read the article here:
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/i-felt-like-hero-how-21075494
Gorton MP Afzal Khan visits our kitchen!
Today Afzal Khan paid our Gorton Kitchen a visit where he met our Cooking Leader Ngwafu and our amazing kitchen volunteers who were cooking up butternut squash curry and roasted chicken to make meals for people experiencing poverty and food insecurity across Gorton and other Greater Manchester communities.
CGF Co-Director Gemma said:
‘It was lovely to meet Afzal and great that he is so interested in his local community. He has even offered to come and take on our Cooking Leader Ngwafu in a curry-based cook-off once Parliament ends – we will certainly look forward to putting him to work in the kitchen!’
We’d like to take this chance to say a big thank you to all our funders of our Gorton Kitchen: One Manchester, Action Against Hunger, The People’s Postcode Lottery, Manchester City Council, Forever Manchester and WRAP.
Postcode Neighbourhood Trust Funding.
We are thrilled to have received funding from the Postcode Neighbourhood Trust, a grant-giving charity funded entirely by players of People’s Postcode Lottery.
Thanks to their kind support, we are able to conduct some research with our partner organisations to ensure that people most at-risk of food insecurity continue to receive nutritious meals as needed. We can also continue our emergency food response for even longer. We believe that everyone deserves good, nutritious food and we are working hard to ensure as many people as possible across Greater Manchester can access sustainably-sourced ingredients and cook them into tasty, healthy meals – a huge thank you to all at Postcode Neighbourhood Trust for your support!
Grow, Eat, Cook for Veterans!
We are really excited to be offering cooking classes for the Armed Forces Veteran community as part of Groundwork Greater Manchester’s ‘Grow, Eat, Cook for Veterans’ project‘. We can’t wait to get started on June 10th.
For more information on taking part, please email terry.morley@groundwork.org.uk
or to volunteer at the cooking sessions email: info@crackinggoodfood.org
CGF Support Know Africa’s new Community Fridge and Kitchen in Wythenshawe.
We were honoured to be invited to the opening of Know Africa’s new Community Fridge. We have provided Know Africa with some support for their food bank by linking them in to a local surplus food network. We will also be supporting Know Africa to set up their new Community Kitchen in coming weeks by delivering Basic Food Hygiene Level 2 training for their volunteers and redistributing some equipment sourced from our Kitchen Kit Call Out to ensure their kitchen is fully equipped and ready to COOK delicious meals for their community.
Thanks so much for inviting us Know Africa – we loved the dancing and of course the cake! Congratulations on your new Community Fridge – we are looking forward to working more with you soon.
Watch Shobna Gulati Cook up a Storm with Cracking Good Food.
We teamed up with Shobna Gulati, much loved actor and author, to raise awareness of food insecurity in Greater Manchester.
Shobna recently joined us in our community kitchen and cooked her ‘Bung-it-all-in Stew’ – a hearty and healthy dish that was sent to Chelwood Foodbank Plus.
We filmed an exclusive foodie Q&A with Shobna which you can watch under the videos section on our website.
The Hype with Gemma Foxcroft!
Our Co-Director Gemma chats on the radio. Some lessons here about the way so much food goes to waste + how hard the volunteers at Cracking Good Food work to provide thousands of nourishing meals for people who need them. Listen here.
Hunger Is On The Rise
Last week, well-known homelessness charity Lifeshare (who we recently partnered with at Christmas) asked Cracking Good Food to provide a further 150 meals per week for people they had identified through their outreach work as being in need of support.
Judith Vickers, Operations Manager for Lifeshare said,
‘This service came out of concerns and need for weekend food provision, as clients were leaving their accommodation and breaking lockdown rules due to being hungry . This funding from ‘Global’s Make Some Noise’ has enabled us to not only provide nutritional meals at the weekend but also toilities and essential clothing to support clients in isolation .
Looking forward, Lifeshare and Cracking Good food are hoping to deliver cookery classes to all the hostels we supported during lockdown when it is safe for us to be together!’
The meals are being delivered every weekend to support people experiencing poverty who have just been discharged from hospital, young people with learning disabilities, and people experiencing homelessness and insecure housing.
As the current lockdown draws to an end, there is sadly no reason to believe the challenges facing people living in poverty in Greater Manchester will be alleviated. Sadly, things only seem to be getting worse.
If you can, please donate now to support our ongoing community outreach and emergency food provision.
Radio Chat!
Our Co-Director Gemma and our volunteer Kitchen Assistant Phil joined Justin Moorhouse for a chat about food poverty in Greater Manchester, and our community outreach work. You can listen to the interview here. It starts around 3 hours 37 min.
Interview on Wythenshawe FM!
Last week, our Co-Director Gemma spoke to Colin Owen from Wythenshawe FM on his show The Buzz. Listen here as they chat about the Manchester as a ‘Right To Food’ City, food poverty and all things CGF.
Baking Kits!
Last week, we had loads of fun putting together baking kits at our Community Kitchen in Gorton. Buzz Manchester funded 26 baking kits which were distributed in North Manchester, including to members of Together Dementia Support’s Friendship and Activity Group. The kits contained all the ingredients needed for people to make traditional flapjacks AND chocolate chip cookies. There’s nothing like the smell of freshly baked cookies – we hope everyone enjoyed their packs!
Our new kitchen is OPEN!
Despite many challenges (including severe disruption to the water supply in Gorton on our opening week!), our third Community Kitchen in the heart of East Manchester is now OPEN. Our passion means we are cooking healthy homemade food for the people in the community who would otherwise go without.
Our brilliant bunch of volunteer cooks made 213 meals just on the first day. 🍅🥔🥦
We want to thank all our wonderful volunteers and team members who’ve made this possible! Our Crowdfunder is still live if you would like to support our emergency food provision in Gorton.
Listen here to our BBC Manchester Interview.
Listen here (at 3 hours 40 mins) to our Co-Director Gemma and our amazing Volunteer Helen speaking with Mike Sweeney on BBC Manchester about Cracking Good Food!
It’s been a busy weekend!
Our team have spent their Sunday scrubbing, painting and clearing our new space at The Churches, Gorton. As well as ensuring the space is safe for our staff and volunteers to cook from, we collected a LOT of pantry goods kindly donated by Gorton Monastery to help get our emergency food response in Gorton up and running so we can cook and distribute a further 200 meals per day to support those in need of nutritious food. Read more, and support us if you can via our Crowdfunder page
Live COOKAlong!
Our live COOKAlong this weekend helped a family come together to cook up home made samosas and delicious Dal from scratch. It was a wonderful opportunity for a virtual family get-together, and a great time was had by all! Email tracey@crackinggoodfood.org to arrange your tailor-made COOKAlong now!
Spotlight on Social Enterprises: Tracey Torley reveals how Cracking Good Food sells to businesses.
Tracey Torley, one of the directors for social enterprise Cracking Good Food in Manchester, talks to us about how they have changed the way they have been working through Covid-19 and gives her tips and advice on working with and selling to businesses.
The High Sheriff’s article about Cracking Good Food
The High Sheriff of Greater Manchester has dedicated this weeks column to Cracking Good Food and the Coronavirus campaign.
Three appointments for Cracking Good Food
People on the move: 40 top North West appointments you shouldn’t miss.
https://www.business-live.co.uk/enterprise/people-move-40-top-north-19288871
New Wythenshawe Store
The Community Grocery is part of The Message Trust’s site in Sharston. Its aim is to bridge the gap between supermarkets and food banks, and to increase access to good food for all.
We also get a little mention! https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/…/amazing-new…
