Fuel for School: Kevin Mackay

Kevin Mackay organises Fuel for School, the education arm of food activists The Real Junk Food Project, which diverts thousands of tonnes of food from landfill and into hungry mouths in Leeds and surrounding area.

The Real Junk Food Project started as pay as you feel cafes, feeding people decent meals with food thrown out by supermarkets in exchange for whatever the customer could afford, whether that was time, skills, or cash.

It’s since diversified into the UK’s first food waste supermarket and Fuel for School, which delivers stacks of food to Leeds primary schools every week for use in breakfast clubs, educational sessions and on market stalls, where parents can get fresh food for, you guessed it, whatever they feel like paying.

Who are you and what do you do?

My name is Kevin Mackay and I’m the Fuel for School co-ordinator for the Real Junk Food Project.

What is the point of Fuel for School?

Our end game is to stop food waste and the best way to do that is through grass roots education.  

When was the moment you decided to do this?

I started volunteering for the Real Junk Food Project a year ago when I was still a primary school teacher in Leeds. I saw the huge impact Fuel For School was having in my own school and when the job came around to help develop that educational side of things locally, nationally and hopefully globally, I took it on.

Lunch at the refurbished @Armley_JunkTion #foodwaste #payf cafe after a fun morning shooting @fuelforschool in Leeds pic.twitter.com/LKyM4r0Uzm

— Far Nearer (@far_nearer) October 5, 2016

What’s been your proudest moment so far?

My proudest moment would be my first assembly, in my second day in the job. We went to a school in St Barts which has 700 children on row, and just to see 700 children in a hall engaged in what we are doing was an extremely hard moment.

Up until then I’d seen the impact on a smaller scale within a class that I taught in, but to see it working in other schools and the level engagement there was and all the comments after about how proud they were to be a part of it and what an impact it was having was a proud moment.

What’s the hardest moment?

There are lots of difficult moments. We’re an environmental project but a lot of work that we do helps vulnerable families and that’s quite difficult to see. We want to get more food to people. There’s that side of it, but the difficulty out of that comes with pride as well, because we’re doing a lot to help those people.

We have schools that could take a delivery a day and help families, and I suppose not being able to get that to schools every day, that was a difficult discussion that we had to have.

We don’t have the resources to get food to them every day. We have the food but we don’t have the resources. That was probably the most difficult decision that we had to take, that it would be one delivery of eight crates [to each school each week], because we do have families who could use this food every single day.

The UK has its first food waste supermarket https://t.co/uyRDCasNL8 @RealJunkFood @Armley_JunkTion @Independent pic.twitter.com/fLt0ZqCUMk

— Far Nearer (@far_nearer) September 20, 2016

What gets you through at those moments?

The great work that we are doing. So many stories, so much feedback of people that we have helped, looking at it from people who we have helped.

I hope Brexit has a positive effect.

But at the same time looking at it from that side we do have an education opportunity to make a change and that doesn’t come round very often. That’s what I’m trying to get across to schools, this bigger picture that if we do all work together, we can stop this food going to waste. And that’s what keeps me going, this bigger vision. 

What does community mean to you?

Community is kind of a lost word, people talk about it as something that happened a long time ago but it doesn’t happen any more. But I think projects like this show that it does and that it means everyone looking after everyone else.

It’s nothing special, it just means everyone chipping in where they can and doing their best to help others. It can be someone to sit and talk to, or doing something with food like we do, or doing something that helps others.

How will the outcome of the EU referendum affect what you do?

I hope it has a positive effect.

A lot of the regulations around food waste that cause so much waste come from the EU’s regulations. So I hope it has a positive effect.

For example, we speak a lot in the workshops and assemblies about size and shape of vegetables. A lot of those regulations do come from the EU. Things like if one cucumber has gone off in a box of 40, you have to throw the whole box away.

Things like that come from the top, not necessarily at supermarket level. Hopefully, if we have more control over laws and regulations after Brexit, we’ll have more control over food waste than we do at the moment. 

What’s next for Fuel For School?

To continue to work with our partner schools in Leeds and on an education pack that we can take nationally, for an educational pack around waste food and the outcomes around that.

Then to take that to other cities and see what we’ve done and where we can take it from there.

So to take it national and then hopefully to take this global and make some big changes by showing that what we have done locally can work around the world.

What would you say to someone wanting to get involved?

Just come along and get started. Whatever you can offer, that’s great.

We were just talking about the word community – this is exactly what that means. Whatever it is that you can offer – even if that is only a bit of time – just come along.