Food For London Now: Keep on trucking… the wheels that help our appeal roll in London

T

hey are the wheels that help keep our Christmas appeal on the road across the capital during the winter food crisis. Mobile catering company Food Truck Masters has joined our Food For London Now appeal, lending two trucks to our Christmas campaign as part of their Together19 Street Vendor initiative. Together19 was started to help traders survive the financial effects of Covid-19.

It negotiates trading locations, offers tools and vehicles, helps provide training and sponsors, and gives financial support. In exchange, partners commit to offering healthy, locally sourced products and ensure no food is wasted. Since the start of lockdown, the firm has already deployed trucks to help homeless people in London.

More vehicles — such as two converted London taxis — will join in the effort.

“Together19 is focused on supporting high street shops and landlords, and making sure traders and restaurants stay exposed via our mobile food trucks or kiosks,” said a spokesman from the organisation. “This will offer employment and a sense of community. Dark kitchens and advanced technology will be an additional solution.”

For the Together19 founders, a renewed enthusiasm towards communal eating and the sharing of food is crucial. Each truck deployed will provide a significant number of free hot meals to those in need, and the initiative will be active six days per week, with the vehicles covering a range of boroughs throughout the capital. “The Standard’s Food For London Now campaign is an amazing opportunity to bring more organisations like ours together, making London’s vulnerable aware that there is a community that cares but also to encourage to pursue a possible future,” they said.

This is an opportunity to make London’s vulnerable aware there is a community that cares

“Maybe someone [in that community] is the next helping hand in a prep kitchen, or the next driver.

“The reach that platforms like the Evening Standard have is immense, and with their help we can create awareness and ripple the effects to a much greater extent.

Let’s Feed London Now!

Together with our sister title The Independent, we will be delivering food directly to 1,000 Londoners a day through our partner With Compassion. Please donate here to help ensure no Londoner goes hungry this Christmas.

 As a collective, Together19 is universal in its inclusivity. Alongside its food-related maxims that “one feeds two” and that “we can all plant a seed to turn dirt into fruit”, the initiative also firmly champions racial and gender equality, as well as environmentalism and positive eating.

Most important, however, is the initiative’s continued support for London’s most vulnerable: “We are stronger, healthier together.”

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