FORMER RUGBY World Cup winner, Celebrity Masterchef winner and Sodexo’s ambassador for health and wellbeing, Matt Dawson, has spent time this week redistributing surplus food from charity FareShare to Londoners suffering from food poverty.
Dawson joined Sodexo UK and Ireland’s chief executive, Debbie White, to mark Sodexo’s Servathon – an annual month-long campaign, which invites Sodexo employees to join forces and tackle hunger in their local communities, through volunteering, fundraising or donating and serving meals. More than 40,000 Sodexo employees across 35 countries took part in the 2012 campaign.
Dawson and White went out with volunteers from national food poverty and food redistribution charity Fareshare, collecting surplus sandwiches, salads and baguettes from central London outlets before delivering them to six London-based charities, including Look Ahead, a hostel for vulnerable men and women.
“Volunteering really opens your eyes to the amount of food wasted in London, and the good that food can do when it is redistributed,” Dawson said. “FareShare do a fantastic job in redirecting this food to charities and thousands of people throughout London depend on them.”
A report published earlier this year found that half of all food is wasted. The hospitality sector is believed to throw away 600,000 tonnes of food waste every year, two thirds of which could have been eaten. WRAP, the Waste and Resources Action Programme, is researching how much food waste is produced by contract caterers as part of its voluntary agreement on waste.
