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Lincoln community cooks among 1,000 trained by Tesco and Jamie Oliver.

Tesco and Jamie Oliver have delivered on a pledge to train 1,000 community cooks in how best to make use of surplus food.

They include 49 cooks trained in Lincoln as part of the Tesco Community Cookery School with Jamie Oliver, which was launched in January last year.

The cooks were drawn from the 7,000 charities and community groups that receive surplus food through Tesco’s Community Food Connection scheme, which is run in partnership with food waste charity FareShare.

Tesco is at the forefront of efforts to reduce food waste, having made a commitment in 2016 that no food that is fit for human consumption will go to waste in its operations. Today it donates a million meals a month to charities and community groups across the UK. But the challenge facing cooks working for those groups is how to turn whatever is donated into nutritious meals for their community, as the donations can vary hugely as they come from whatever remains unsold at the end of the day.

The cooks learned everything from knife skills and nutrition to recipes for versatile base sauces, which can be adapted to make meals from the wide variety of donated food. The courses were free to attendees and each of them received free cooking equipment and a folder featuring Jamie’s food surplus recipes.

Pauline Stepney, who took part in the training on behalf of a charity supporting people with learning disabilities, said it had been very useful to them.

Speaking after completing the course, Pauline said: “The cookery school has not only given us some much-needed inspiration for meals, but also reinforced our passion for making sure there is no food waste. We serve up to 60 meals each day, so what we learnt at the cookery school will benefit all of our members. We’re hugely grateful to Tesco for their help, and urge other community groups in the area to apply!”

To date 47 million meals-worth of surplus food have been donated directly from local Tesco stores to local groups, with more than 77 million meals donated when donations from Tesco depots are included.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Katie Rattigan .