Granville Community Kitchen is investing in the health of its community through a veg box scheme that makes fresh, seasonal, localised and culturally significant food affordable for everyone. Ceire Carey finds out more about Good Food Box.
The building itself, known as The Granville, is an historic, brick building in South Kilburn. A place for local residents to meet, it was also home to Merle’s Diner for 25 years. Merle herself started off at The Granville with £10 to feed the youth club downstairs, and was later hailed as “The Queen of Caribbean Cuisine”, loved by locals and celebrities alike. When she hung up her apron, Granville Community Kitchen (GCK) followed in its place.
Local co-founders Dee Woods and Leslie Barson started with the aim of developing a vibrant community hub to promote the health, wellbeing and employability of the South Kilburn community. Cooking and eating, and growing food together was a way of bringing the community together, building resilience and repairing harms done to marginalised people. Dee believes “people have a right to a life of dignity and a right to food and nutrition”. She adds, “as long as we continue to conflate the issue of food waste with household insecurity, then not only are we supporting an industrial food system that is killing our planet (and us!), but we are complicit in the violation of human rights of millions of people.”
Good Food Box
Good Food Box is a vegetable box scheme (with an optional fruit addition) run on a membership model with a set tiered pricing system. Leslie comments: “here, in one of the richest economies in the world, we have a growing number of people who can’t afford to put good food on their plates”. Their approach aims to create a model which breaks this cycle, and draws on other organisations leading this transition including those the United States such as Zenger Farm (Portland) and Rock Steady Farm (New York), Growing Communities in the UK and on food justice work in Canada and the international CSA movement (Urgenci).
