When Charlotte and Nick Baker were planning their wedding in Cumbria last month, they wanted a highly personal celebration that reflected their deeply held principles about minimising waste.
Unusually, that included asking a food waste charity to feed their 135 guests a three-course meal created entirely from food that would otherwise have been thrown away. “I didn’t even know until the day before what we were going to eat,” says Charlotte, 30, a urology registrar who lives with her GP husband in Inverness. “Then I was told that a load of frozen chicken had turned up, along with trayfuls of soft fruit rejected by supermarkets.” The chicken breasts still had three to four days left on their best before date, but the wholesaler had been unable to shift them. At the Bakers’ feast it was cooked with white wine and mushrooms as a main course – alongside vegetarian chilli and rice – while the berries were transformed into fruit salad and topped with clotted cream. Whole trays of berries were heading for the bin because a couple of punnets had the odd squashed or slightly mouldy fruit. The starter was platters of cheeses and cold meats.
Charlotte and Nick contacted the Real Junk Food Cafe in Wigan, which intercepts food still fit for human consumption but heading for landfill, and has the slogan “feed bellies, not bins”.
“We’d never catered for a wedding before and I had a few sleepless nights wondering exactly what food would come in,” explains Shirley Southwood, who with partner Ann Fairhurst founded the cafe two years ago. She agreed to the unusual commission for what is thought to be the UK’s first “food waste wedding”, despite the prospect of an hour-and-a-half’s drive to the wedding venue in the Cumbrian fields of Hawkshead.
The cafe obtains surplus food from a wide range of places including supermarkets, restaurants, wholesalers and food banks. This is always safe to eat and may simply have been over-ordered, failed to meet retailer specifications, or be close to its best before date. No food that has exceeded its use by date is ever accepted. No money changes hands, but there are costs associated with collection. “The only item I had to buy was a bottle of white wine for the sauce,” says Shirley, who roped in her husband to help, travelling to the wedding by camper van. The chicken dish was prepared and cooked in Charlotte’s parents’ kitchen on the smallholding and carried up the hill to the marquee.
“We stayed overnight and it all worked out brilliantly,” reflects Shirley. “It was a challenge but hugely exciting and well worth it.” Close family and friends helped over the two-day event, making jam and brewing beer, washing up, fetching and carrying and even putting up the marquee.
But for Charlotte, saving money was not the motivation. “The ethos of the day, and our lives together, is that of an ethical foundation. We are aware that weddings can be an opportunity for obscene over-expense and excess and we decided to minimise our contribution to this trend.”
Charlotte’s wedding dress, for example, was a second-hand Monsoon gown spotted in a charity shop in St Andrews, while her bridesmaids’ dresses also came from charity shops. Decorations in the marquee were fashioned from discarded bicycle wheels (the couple are keen cyclists) and origami from junk mail, while all the flowers were grown by Charlotte’s mother.
The couple also eschewed a traditional wedding list, instead drawing up a “gift suggestion list” encouraging guests to give second-hand or home-made items. “We wouldn’t have done anything differently and we would encourage others to think about using surplus food in this way” says Charlotte.
