A restaurant in England has been able to employ 22 full and part-time staff serving food rescued from landfills to people on a “pay-as-you-can” basis.
This fantastic achievement is rooted in two significant challenges faced by the UK: price inflation has increased the average cost of food by a quarter, and as many as 10 million Brits, Scots, and N. Irish are malnourished.
The Long Table’s remarkable business model is rooted in conscience and ethics as much as anything they put on the menu. The Guardian reports that 6.4 million tons of food goes to waste in the country every year, amounting to quite a hefty bill of carbon emissions from rotting food and transportation to move it around.
But perhaps the reason this special Gloucestershire restaurant has been able to stay open despite allowing people to eat for free if they want is that the plan was never to focus on the negative.
“We hold a space where we are all collectively trying to answer a question: what if everyone in our community had access to great food and people to eat it with?” says Will North, The Long Table’s general manager.
Lunch is served five days a week from noon, while the store is open every morning for coffee and cake. Dinner is Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Everyone eats the same meal based on what the managers are rescuing from their suppliers, but that doesn’t mean the menu is stale.
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“We’re not pro-organic, anti-organic, pro-GM [or] anti-GM, we’re just pro-food,” says North. “But it just so happens that our local producers really prioritize the planet over anything else.”
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A not-for-profit community interest company, the turnover is about enough to cover all costs, but little else remains. Nevertheless, they don’t need any grant money from the government—all their profit comes from diners, heavily supported by drink and coffee sales.
The Guardian writes that others are looking at replicating the model in Cirencester and Falmouth.
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