At Addi Road Food Pantry this varied clientele mingles. Locals-in-need shop beside those who like to support the pantry’s environmentally-friendly approach to rescued food. There’s a deeper sense of people searching for what community can mean, customers chatting to one another and our volunteers, finding ways to become familiar and feel less alone. Food as a foundation for connection.

Inside the Common Ground building it’s just as busy.  Our monthly ‘Addi Road  ‘Let’s Get Cooking’ session (AKA “the Cook-Up”) offers 260 free hot meals for residents as well as those shopping at our Food Pantry. We also run a monthly cooking demo inside the CG courtyard with Phil and Bronwyn, who set up all the ingredients on a table for today’s Pad Thai and Apple Tart.  Food literacy is the goal, helping people to shop and cook with limited funds. Each month there are extra tips for their kitchen cupboards, essentials to facilitate simple, inexpensive and nutritious recipes that match whatever Addi Road Food Pantry has in stock.

It’s an integrated food ecology for people battling. With that extra special ingredient: camaraderie. People cheer and laugh at the cooking advice and how they might manage a recipe. For many our Addi Road Cook Up is an impetus to leave their rooms and gather. Those struggling with mental health issues, or simply feeling shy, can take their free hamper boxes – packed and stacked beside the food demonstration table – back to their private rooms, along with the cooked meals that have come from our kitchen.

Outside on the street, tables are set. Phil’s pad Thai is being brought out and served. Then Bronwyn’s apple tart dessert. Residents from Common Ground and Johanna O’Dea Court are joined by more people jumping off the 470. A volunteer asks how it tastes. A young man raises both hands over his head and opens his fingers up like he has won something: “Ten out of ten.”