The Hubb Community Kitchen, run by a group of Muslim women living in London, is once again carrying out benevolent acts. The women involved in the community kitchen have launched a meals delivery service to stop Londoners struggling to feed themselves during the coronavirus lockdown from going hungry. The initiative by the women who prepared food for displaced family, neighbours and friends after the Grenfell Tower fire runs alongside a wider effort to supply families in need with food, the Evening Standard newspaper’s Food for London Now appeal.
The women plan to cook between 250 and 300 meals a day, three days a week, while working around social-distancing rules. The meals, to be distributed to elderly and vulnerable people, will be prepared in the cooks’ homes and delivered by another charitable organisation called StreetGames. A lot of the produce the women are using is provided by The Felix Project, which supplies surplus food from cafes, restaurants and supermarkets.
The Felix Project’s Chief Executive, Mark Curtin, said, “The Felix Project is proud to provide Hubb Community Kitchen with the nutritious food they need to cook delicious meals for local people for whom this service provides a crucial lifeline.
“The women of Hubb Community Kitchen came together in the face of tragedy and they have stepped up yet again in the face of a global pandemic.”
One of Meghan Markle’s first solo projects as a royal was backing the Hubb Community Kitchen’s cookbook called “Together: Our Community Cookbook”. The 38-year-old, who wrote the book’s foreward, had a Zoom call with some of the women about their new altruistic project. Kitchen manager Leila Hedjem, as well as cooks Cherine Mallah, Halima Al-Hudafi, Oxana Sinitsyna and Jennifer Odonkor all got to connect again with the LA-based Markle.
“The spirit of the Hubb Community Kitchen has always been one of caring, giving back and helping those in need, initially in Grenfell and now throughout the UK. A home-cooked meal from one neighbour to another, when they need it most, is what community is all about,” Markle, who has visited the kitchen in West London’s Al Manaar Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre several times, said in a statement.
“I’m so proud of the women of the Hubb Community Kitchen, and the continued support The Felix Project gives them to carry out these acts of goodwill, which at this moment are urgently needed.”
The Hubb Community Kitchen was set up in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower disaster in June 2017, when a group of local women gathered in a nearby communal kitchen at West London’s Al-Manaar Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre as they needed a new place to cook. With so many homes destroyed, they started cooking and providing meals to those in the community who lost everything. They now have a new kitchen thanks to the proceeds from the sales of their cookbook.
