Cornwall’s Family Foraging Kitchen CIC receives National Lottery funding enabling ongoing wild food education and support for the local community

Rame Peninsula’s social enterprise, The Family Foraging Kitchen, has been awarded National Lottery funding as a part of the Community Fund Scheme. This fund, extending over two and a half years, supports The Family Foraging Kitchen to deliver wild food and heritage craft education to the region, as well as provide ongoing community food support services to help reduce food poverty within Cornwall.

The fund will allow The Family Foraging Kitchen to continue its wild food services to those living in Torpoint, Millbrook, Antony, Kingsand, and Cawsand. This includes a monthly wild food box that delivers freshly foraged wild foods and educational materials, such as recipes and foraging guides, to homes in the area, enabling low and no-income households the confidence and knowledge to source and incorporate wild foods into their diets. Alongside these wild food boxes, The Family Foraging Kitchen will also continue its Virtual Foraging series, which supports free online wild food education, as well as the continuation of the social enterprise’s Free Food Forever and Grandparents’ Secrets initiatives, all of which is directed to tackle social isolation and food poverty.

The Family Foraging Kitchen has been running since 2013 and was founded by forager, Vix Hill-Ryder, after she realised that her community was facing significant levels of food poverty, often lacking the confidence, knowledge and skills needed to cook with the bountiful array of wild nutritious fresh food available on their doorstep.

“I was receiving messages on a weekly basis from families asking me what simple things they could pick up to eat when they were out walking as part of their daily exercise allowance. So I began to make short films of myself and my two children, ages 3 and 8, gathering and cooking at home. These were a huge hit and watched and shared by so many people” says business founder, Vix.

“I felt I needed to do more to help. Foraging can literally be a lifeline for low income families and individuals struggling to afford fresh food. Food box schemes are wonderful but having fresh produce to pair with those staple items is essential. Now, we can help people not only by

supplying them with a fresh ingredient box each month but by inviting and encouraging people to join us, for free, out on our walks and courses, learning how to pick and prepare those ingredients for themselves. The boxes will also contain recipe cards and ideas and during periods of lockdown, content will regularly be put online with cookery tips, videos and streamed virtual walks.”

The funding from The National Lottery Community Fund, which distributes money raised by National Lottery players for good causes and is the largest community funder in the UK, will see this project continue for the next two and a half years.