Hidden Harvest comes home to Healthy Cities Illawarra

Back in 2015, Hidden Harvest held its first dinner. This involved a group of friends holding a ‘potluck’ around the dinner table, using ingredients from their respective fridges that were almost past their use-by.

The idea for Hidden Harvest began to marinate in founder Berbel Franse’s head after a trip to Ghana, West Africa. Berbel, who worked in supply chain logistics at the time, saw that the majority of food waste happened before the produce got to market due to a lack of infrastructure – things like refrigeration, transport and storage.

Coming home to Australia, she saw that the majority of food waste came out of our kitchens at home – and no one was really talking about why.

Over the next eight years, Hidden Harvest has worked to spark this conversation in the community  and bring attention to the delicious opportunity that the problem of food waste serves us. The organisation has done this via fun and thought-provoking events, featuring human-sized bread forts at local festivals, dozens of community dinners throughout the Illawarra and ongoing beginner-friendly cooking workshops.

Currently led by Maree Thomson, Hidden Harvest invites the community to the table to talk and taste food with one simple message: by using more of what we have in our fridges and pantries, and wasting less, we can collectively cook up positive change from our kitchens at home.

Anyone can be a certified food waste fighter in easy steps:

• use what you have;
• shop to a list;
• store your food correctly.

To date, the food waste organisation has diverted more than 13 tonnes of edible food from the bin.

To achieve this, Hidden Harvest has relied not only on a small army of red-shirted volunteers at their events and behind the scenes, but also on the ongoing support of Healthy Cities Illawarra through an auspicing arrangement that has been in place since that first dinner in 2015.

Fast forward to 2023 and Healthy Cities is welcoming Hidden Harvest into their home as the newest member of HCI’s suite of community programs. With this iteration of the partnership, Hidden Harvest will have even more power to champion a food-saving movement here in the Illawarra.

Want to stay up to date with what Hidden Harvest is up to? Find links to its socials, sign up for the newsletter and get a free food-saving recipe here.