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Skipchen mission to Calais camp
Stokes Croft-based Skipchen, which serves unwanted, surplus and waste food in a pay-as-you-feel cafe, is heading to France this weekend to set up a mobile kitchen at Calais migrant camp.
Volunteers are taking two tonnes of unwanted food with them and plan to serve around 600 people a day a hot nutritious meal.
Marianne Musset, co-director of Skipken, said they were inspired to go to try and change perceptions of migrants and immigration: “We have been in Stokes Croft for eight months now and we feel we have done quite a lot in the community. We started to think what else we could be doing to help other people.
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“The Calais migrant camp was a really obvious choice to us… with all the anti-immigration rhetoric which is coming out with the national elections we wanted to highlight the issues and dispel the myth that we cannot afford to take migrants into our country.”
Marianne Musset one of the co-directors of The Bristol Skipchen will be travelling to Calais to set up a camp kitchen
The world’s attention is focused on the tragedy of the Mediterranean migrants after hundreds of people drowned over the past week as they tried to flee to Europe. Many of the migrants who finally make it to Europe end up in camps like the one in Calais.
Around 2,000 people in the Calais camp have access to one water point, no toilets, electricity and no accommodation.
It has been described by Christian Salomé, the director of voluntary migrant help group L’Auberge des Migrants as “the worst camp for war refugees in Europe, if not in the world”.
Lorries are being targeted by migrants up to 60 miles from Calais (photo: Shutterstock)
Skipchen volunteers aim to feed up to 500 people a day – a hot meal from food which would have otherwise been sent to landfill.
Some food has come from the Bristol area, some from a cooperative near Leeds and some from London, which the Skipchen team are picking up on the way to Calais.
Musset said: “We been making phone calls and explaining about our trip and what we are doing. Normally we take what they give us but this time we have had to be selective and thinking logistically – what can we take, what will be useful, what is good to cook in bulk.”
Skipchen have converted an ambulance into a mobile kitchen (photo: Skipchen)
Musset said the week long project is about highlighting a humanitarian issue.
“We all deserve the right to live free from oppression, we all deserve to be able to eat healthy nutritious food but also, because we are a food waste campaign group, all the food we will take with us is that which hasn’t been considered by society or supermarkets or the government as fit for human consumption – it is. A lot is wasted with packing issues, dent in a can or organisations cannot distribute it fast enough.”
“It’s about highlighting this massive humanitarian issue that is on our doorstep but also… we want to get people to think about food waste and realise that we waste billions of tonnes of food in the UK.”