The Planet Cafe partners with community cookery school #Blog

Briony Wilson
28th January 2020

We recently made a number of renovations to The Planet Café, leaving us with a range of food and catering equipment that we no longer required. Thankfully, Manchester-based social enterprise Bounceback Food were on hand to help out!

Making the changes to our Café, which now focuses on Fresh, Local and Sustainable food, has proved to be a real hit with visitors, but we were keen to avoid any unnecessary waste during the transition.

So, we invited Bounceback to come down and look through what was available. Brilliantly, their team were able to put a wealth of items to good use in their Christmas community freezer project – where healthy, nutritious meals were made to support people living in food poverty over the festive period.

Bounceback Food CIC is a community cookery school that supports people living in food poverty in Greater Manchester, Cheshire & North Wales. They use the ‘buy one, give one’ model on their public cookery courses to generate free places for people using foodbanks and sell staple items of food (pasta, soup, rice etc.) in the same way as part of their foodbank drive at market events. This proactive approach to tackling food poverty has helped them to teach over 1,500 people how to cook, donate almost 10,000 items of food and provide over 50,000 meals as part of their wider community outreach work.

We are delighted to be able to support their fantastic work and our partnership with them continues to grow. The Bounceback team recently published their first recipe book Secret Dishes from around the World, which includes a selection of their favourite vegetarian and vegan recipes developed over the years, perfect if you’re attempting Veganuary this month! Each dish and all the key ingredients were beautifully illustrated by Manchester-based artist Libby Element – they look stunning:

You can pick up a first edition copy of Secret Dishes from around the world in The Planet Café the next time you visit Jodrell Bank. Proceeds from sales of the book go towards Bounceback’s continuing fight against food poverty.