Eat For The Earth 2013 | World Environment Day

Eat For The Earth is a yuppiechef initiative held annually on World Environment Day. Yuppiechef’s aim is to raise funds for Soil For Life and this will be the third year that I am taking part by hosting a meal at my home.

I had the privilege of being invited to spend a morning learning more about Soil For Life and I walked away humbled and inspired. 77% of people who live in the unicity of Cape Town are food insecure. They do not know where their next meal will come from, and Soil For Life aims to alleviate hunger by teaching people to become home gardeners. Groups of 15 people are trained at a time for a one year period and they are taught how to tend the soil and plant vegetables and thereby feed themselves. The extra vegetables can be used to feed their community and can be sold for income. The program aims to upskill people so that they can earn a living and one of the success stories is of 4 women who grow their own produce which they then turn into jams and chutneys. They are able to sustain their own gardens through their enterprise. By growing people the community can grow and this was so obvious in the township tour that we did.

Fransisca is one lady who has been through the training program and now runs her own food garden enterprise and in 7 weeks she has achieved more in her gardening enterprise than I have in 7 years! These food garden enterprises are set up by Soil For Life to supply each community. The trained gardeners are given coupons and they can use those coupons to get seeds, compost etc. from the food garden enterprise in their neighbourhood. These coupons are then exchanged for cash so that the person running the food garden enterprise can earn a stipend. A R50 ($5/€5) donation will pay for 10 packets of seeds. For anyone who plants their own vegetables at home you can realize just how much food this will produce. The aim this year is to raise R40 000 and I am hoping that every one of my readers will donate to this by clicking here.

To understand more about why I was so humbled, take a look here at what Charles has to say:

If you live in Cape Town and want to get more involved call Soil For Life on 011 794 4982.

With intent and focus (thanks Lisa for those words) I am going to grow my own vegetables and I am issuing a challenge to everyone at yuppiechef – next year, the vegetables for our Eat For The Earth meal are to come from our own home gardens!

Disclosure: I was invited to attend this event. I was not required to write a blog post and any opinions and facts expressed herein are my own. This post is in line with my blogging policy.

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