Words by Smiley Team
From budget recipes to foraging know-how, cookery school Made In Hackney offers all the plant-based inspiration you can imagine.
What’s more, its community cooking classes in London are entirely free and during the first lockdown, they created a meal delivery service to help vulnerable people. Cycling nutritious meals to community members with underlying conditions, volunteers supported them through the difficult peaks in the pandemic.
Today, they continue to offer a community meal service along with a huge range of classes, courses, festivals, wild walks and more. Their projects are united by one main aim: to support people and the planet.
“When we launched in 2012, we were really concerned about the interconnected climate crisis, the health crisis, and threats to community cohesion,” co-founder Sarah Bentley tells Smiley News.
“We realised that to address one of these issues you have to address all of the others, and without a healthy planet, you can’t have healthy people.”
Through their work, they support community members in many ways. Students learn healthy, eco-friendly ways of eating and for their volunteers, the school has noticeable benefits too.
Volunteer manager Khin Tye remarks: “A lot of people are just really grateful that they have something to do. They felt it was good for mental health that we were out and helping others.”
At the time of their launch, plant-based food was not as commonly embraced as it is today, Sarah feels. So in those early days, Made In Hackney’s founders felt there was an urgent need to help society discover this more eco-friendly way of eating.
“Whether that’s becoming a vegan part-time or three times a week, we just knew we had to normalise eating plant-based meals without labels like ‘vegetarian’ or ‘vegan’. Then people could just adapt to it at their own pace and their own comfort levels,” she explains.
[Discover other exciting stories about initiatives to improve people’s health and wellbeing]
The advantages of plant-based eating are self-evident for the school’s members. For example, one 12-year-old girl called Maisy, who attended lessons with her mum, overcame symptoms of a debilitating bowel condition. Whereas before she was barely able to move, the little girl has now been able to take up ice skating thanks to eating healthy, plant-based food.
“Made In Hackney is making a difference for the community’s choices around health and diet,” says Khin. “In Hackney, the top health concerns are obesity and heart-related disease, so by learning plant-based cooking and volunteering here, you can learn to make choices and help others make the right choices with food.”
Offering tips from the cuisines of every continent, the community lessons teach local people recipes that reflect the diversity of the school’s neighbourhood in East London.
“If people are going to feel empowered to eat more plants, it’s so important they can eat the food of their culture and heritage,” Sarah says.
“We love to explore global cuisine and it’s really exciting if we can learn from other people about authentic recipes that their families and their friends passed down to them,” she adds.
You can support Made In Hackney’s work by doing an online cookery class via Whats On | Made In Hackney, or making a donation to their community meal service at crowdfunder.co.uk/p/noonegoeshungry2022.
Find more information at madeinhackney.org.
