Everyone has an energy story – this is a 2021 Islington Faces project which will see locals asked what puzzles them about trying to change our carbon hungry habits & find and share solutions from people who live locally.
Everyone has an #energystory 7.
Q: How can I help people who need help and not waste resources or food while I do it?
Each Energy Story interview is inspired by the questions local people ask Islington Faces about cutting carbon/tackling climate change. For this interview our question again considers how food banks and food hubs like Manna at St Stephen’s and The People’s Army (see interview from May 2021 here) look after people and use up food that would otherwise be thrown out. Horrifyingly, “One third of food globally goes to waste every year, leading to emissions that weren’t even necessary in the first place,” (quote from 3-part BBC show, Climate Change: Ade on the Frontline ) even though it’s not that hard to stop wasting food.
Everyone has an energy story. Amanda Gowing makes use of her passion for food and cooking to volunteer as a chef with organisations in Islington. Here she talks about how cooking meals for 100s of people who really need food isn’t worthy, it’s more a challenge that she enjoys and a way to help her mental health. Interview by Nicola Baird. Photos by Kimi Gill
Amanda Gowing, Friday head chef at The People’s Army. “Tonya on Wednesday and I on Friday both cook very different kinds of food, but we have each other’s backs.” (c) Kimi Gill for Islington Faces
Amanda Gowing has lived in Islington for just over nine years. “I’m a West London girl but I met my partner and he lived in Islington, so I came up because of him,” she says sounding almost surprised that she’s moved her London axis. But it’s been a good move, “as one of my sisters lives nearby in Stoke Newington and my father grew up on Mare Street, Hackney. Islington has everything that was on offer in West London. I also really like the juxtaposition of the hustle bustle of Upper Street and really beautiful quiet squares, there’s so much history, and it’s easy to go for long walks down the canal.”
Amanda, 51, is now a regular volunteer chef for two amazing local organisations, the Manna at St Stephen’s, on Canonbury Road, which offers support for people who are homeless or rough sleepers, and The People’s Army, Islington which was a community response to the Covid-19 pandemic. See interview on Islington Faces here.
“I’d definitely say that the skill I learnt in lockdown is how to cook for large numbers of people,” says Amanda who years ago did an art history degree at Staffordshire University. “Before the pandemic I probably cooked for 15 – 20 people in a personal capacity at home, then when we first started The People’s Army, we were probably cooking for 100 or 150 and I was one of the volunteers. In the first lockdown we had professional chefs who’d been furloughed. By the second lockdown a lot of those chefs had gone back to work, and we needed other people. By then I’d learnt how to upscale recipes and figure out ingredients for that number of people. By the half term I was being asked to cook 200+ meals and suddenly I had a team of volunteers to oversee.” To succeed Amanda says that, “You have to know how to do the maths, and timings and the balancing act of working out how much time to chop, to cook, and box up before the hungry hoards arrive at a certain time. You can’t keep hungry people waiting. I’ve done cookery courses (at Food at 52 & Waitrose Cookery School) and worked around chefs for the last few years whilst working in events, so had picked up lots of great tips but there’s nothing like being hands on.”
Cooked by Amanda Gowing: Christmas dinner – turkey, gravy, mashed potato, pigs in blankets with mixed vegetables. (c) Amanda Gowing
Food waste
Feeding people who really need food and help is done with great thought. “I don’t really see what I do as tackling climate change, it’s more about reducing food waste, which is a really big issue and one more people should be focused on. The councils and government should be tackling waste more and helping us to tackle it, to help us compost and provide more green spaces where people can grow things. Hazel Jhugroo looked at getting gardens for people to help out in. At the Manna at St Stephen’s where I also volunteer all our food scraps go to their compost.”
For anyone who cooks you’ll know the challenge of keeping to a budget and using up everything. At The People’s Army they don’t have money to spend: all the food comes from donations so the zero-waste kitchen, started by Hazel, is a necessity.
“Everything we get is donated by companies like Edible London, City Harvest, the Felix Project or Selfridges and is stuff that shops can’t sell for one reason or another. Supermarket fruit and veg, all the things that don’t look the same, get thrown away, and things at the end of day that they haven’t sold and have a use by date but are still good to eat – so we might get a large pack of pasta that has split or wonky apples. That’s the first part. Then we try to use those ingredients. Scraps we don’t use goes to compost, and we recycle packaging,” she says.
Amanda Gowing, Friday head chef at The People’s Army: “You should always be learning something – in lockdown I’ve learnt how to cook for 300 people.” (c) Kimi Gill for Islington Faces
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Places Amanda Gowing loves in Islington
- One of my favourite places to go is the new complex, Islington Square on 116 Upper Street where the Post Office used to be. I really like it because it feels quite undiscovered, and they’ve got an Odeon (luxe and dine) cinema in the basement at 13 Esther Anne Place, N1 with a great big screen and huge reclining seats.
- I’ve recently started taking daily two hour walks, sometimes down Regent’s Canal to London Fields and on to Victoria Park and the Limehouse Basin. It’s just amazing, a great place to walk and think and see the changing of the area and seasons. Two weeks ago, all these ducks and geese were nesting, then now they’ve hatched and there are little ducklings on the canal. So beautiful. I noticed during the first lockdown you could see that the water got clearer and saw the pollution going – I saw three different types of fish in the canal!
- My favourite restaurant is Bellanger on 9 Islington Green. It’s a local success story, it closed. But it’s from a very famous chain of Corbin & King restaurants – it’s a sister restaurant of the Wolsey in Piccadilly – so many people in Islington wrote to them and said how much they missed it, and then they brought it back and it survived through lockdown. It’s back and such a fundamental part of Islington life and has the outside area. It has a beautiful Parisian-influenced grand café style inside.
- I often go to Waterstones on 11 Islington Green and get a book, I’m reading about the Hapsburg Empire. In the first lockdown Open University gave some of their courses away for free, including history. I left school so many years ago and I believe it’s so important to keep on learning, but I’d forgotten a lot of history and it’s so easily pick-upable. I’ve been reading about Chairman Mao and Stalin. I was interested in the Holocaust, after visiting the Dachau Holocaust Memorial in Munich then I started reading a biography of Hitler. It’s so interesting to see the mistakes people made in history and there are always parallels to the way politics is now.
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Amanda Gowing, Friday head chef at The People’s Army. “After I find out what’s been cooked on Wednesday, I spend Wednesday evening and Thursday deciding on my menu knowing what’s been donated and what’s left over. Come Friday I know what I’m going to do.” (c) Kimi Gill for Islington Faces
Cut your food waste
Her tip for cutting your food waste is to stay organised. “If you do have leftovers don’t throw them away put in a Tupperware and into the fridge and think how to use next time. If using a lemon and only need to juice it, zest it first and keep that for another time – use it in drinks and cakes. Just plan ahead and think about every single part. You can freeze small portions or put leftover herbs in ice cubes to use later, rather than throwing them away. For larger things like bits of meat, cook them all and then freeze. Batch cooking is very important for zero waste. And once you get the hang of it, it doesn’t take up time – you just need to get into the rhythm of it,” says Amanda making zero waste cooking seem super-easy.
A home cook may be able to wing it with measurements, but cooking for large numbers means you need good organisational skills and keep careful note of what goes into every pot. “I always make notes and like writing lists,” explains Amanda who now has a large bank of recipes that can be scaled up. At The People’s Army in early May she’s made vegetable curry with rice for 70 people and baked 10 cakes. Her notes show that the:
- Week before she made food for 150 people – Thai sea bass green curry with rice and then mince and mashed potatoes and veg couscous.
- Week before that she cooked for 258 people.
- Week before that she cooked for 139 people.
“We always have a vegetable dish and a couple of meat dishes. Our first few months we only cooked vegetarian or vegan dishes and as we got better known we were donated meat and fish. One thing I love cooking is fish, and I’m a great believer in fish Fridays. But fish is expensive. You can buy a couple of whole chickens for £10 and feed multiple people but even though you can get a whole fish for that price in supermarkets, it won’t feed many. We do get lot of homeless people and families and as fish is so nutritious and so good for you, I’ll always try and cook it when it is available. We were incredibly lucky to a get a great fish donation of king prawns, smoked haddock, salmon and pollock from Steve Hatt Fishmongers on 88-90 Essex Road which made a nutritious and delicious fish pie, which went down very well.”
Typical dishes from Amanda include stews, casseroles, stir fries, shepherd’s pie, Bolognese and vegetable curries – “something quite filling and wholesome, and we always use lots of veg.” But it’s not just cooking, planning is vital too. Amanda says the first task is always to “put on the water to boil, either for the pasta or rice that has to be cooked and then potatoes need to be peeled. All the food needs to be ready to go by 3pm at the latest – boxed and labelled, with what date it’s made on, what it is and any allergens. Depending on what’s been cooked this can take an hour to portion out and box up especially if doing food for 200-300 people. Hopefully, l do always meet that 3pm deadline – you don’t want to keep hungry people waiting!” says Amanda smiling.
The Manna
Amanda volunteers at The Manna on a Thursday where she cooks breakfast and lunch. It’s clear she’s impressed by this organisation which stayed open throughout lockdown. “The Manna offer so many different services, you can get laundry done, have a shower, get post sent here because if you’re homeless you obviously don’t have an address. Many things you need an address for – trying to start work, etc. You can use the phone and computers, key workers will help with benefits or any issues, so sometimes people are at the Manna for a long period of time so then we try and feed them. Often the Manna is where people spend the day because if you are out at night, it’s nice to be somewhere warm and dry in the day. If you are homeless the day is a very long time. You can’t go back to your doorway and you can’t spend the whole day walking or even sitting in the park in English weather. So, while they are at The Manna we try and feed them.
Amanda Gowing, Friday head chef at The People’s Army. “It’s physically quite tiring! In the second lockdown we’d never know which volunteers were going to turn up – we didn’t know their skills when they turn up so you’ve got to assess them quickly and then get them to help cook or chop and keep their interest throughout the day. That is a separate challenge as well as cooking.” (c) Kimi Gill for Islington Faces
Good food
“Food is such a fundamental part of your life both physically and emotionally – you need it to survive, and food makes you feel good. But when you don’t have it it’s the first thing you notice, and you will feel the change in your body. Not only does it fuel you, but it can also make you feel better and help you get on with day. On the flip side cooking for people makes me feel emotionally better and was something I started to do to relax in the evenings and at weekends away from a stressful job,” she says. Her skill led her to appear on Masterchef in 2020 which she remembers as being unbelievably stressful. “There’s such pressure with a time limit using an ingredient you’ve never used before in a strange kitchen in front of cameras while people are talking to you… When I’ve been on TV before I had been judging!”
But being chosen from 6,000 entrants for the Masterchef moment is not just an achievement, it’s also helped Amanda see what she loves about cooking and who she loves to cook for. “Now I cook on a much larger scale and that’s helped me with my emotional wellbeing and my mental health, I love to produce food for people and see their reactions. I often see the same people at The Manna and The People’s Army, and they know I’ve cooked it and discuss what it is, and that makes me feel good, it’s wonderful that it is a two-way thing,” she says.
My goal is to keep on cooking for The People’s Army and the Manna at St Stephen’s. It gives me enjoyment, helps me with my anxiety and confidence and is something that gives me joy. Thursday and Friday are the best days of my week. Sometimes when you tell people you are cooking for the homeless, they think it’s all quite worthy – I like to help and yes I like feeding people but it makes me happy and I’m at an age when I want to do things that make me happy.
- Follow Amanda on Twitter @Lulutantan and instagram @amanda_gowing1
- Donate, volunteer or receive support The Manna in Canonbury see http://www.themanna.org.uk/
- For more info about The People’s Army – to volunteer or to get food dropped off – go on to social media, see instagram @thepeoplesarmyldn twitter @peoplesarmyldn . You can email Hazel Jhugroo at The People’s Army to offer help, get help (or both) on thepeoplesarmy@hotmail.com
- Read the interview on Islington Faces about the wonderful work of The People’s Army at https://www.islingtonfacesblog.com/2021/05/18/the-peoples-army-no-waste-kitchen/
