Published: 29 August 2023
Last updated: 5 March 2024
PETER FRAY spends a day inside the whirlwind of the Sydney food service that enables the more fortunate to give something back to the community.
The voice of Bryan Ferry, he of the great suits, Jerry Hall and the floppiest of floppy hair, is bouncing off the commercial kitchen’s metal surfaces, as groups of five from e-signature pioneers DocuSign come to terms with the task at hand: make 50 meals for the needy out of an array of vegies and spices.
Do the math: that’s five x 50, 250 edible meals in about three hours. Chop, chop.
By way of inspiration, in the middle of each of the five tables sit a vegetable in a covered bowl – potatoes, cauliflower, pumpkin and so on. There’s a clipboard and a pen to capture the rest of the ingredients. The morning starts with each group discussing what they’ll make. Phones are enlisted in the search for recipes.
Love may well be Ferry’s drug, but for the assembled 25 volunteer corporate cooks the buzz is more Master Chef meets Red Shield Appeal, or, in all actuality today, the Exodus Foundation and a local woman’s shelter.
Exodus and the shelter are this morning’s clients of Our Big Kitchen (OBK), a Sydney-based non-denominational charity that turns donated food into meals for other charities to hand out – with the help of free corporate labour.
OBK is not the frontline of the fight against poverty, homelessness and the multitude of other inequalities besieging our society. It is the engine room. Down there, demand is getting hotter, faster and more desperate by the day.
