VOLUNTEERS in East Oxford cooked up a mouth-watering menu from food that would otherwise have been thrown away.

At the first Food Surplus Cafe event, volunteer chefs created dishes including black bean salad, chickpea and vegetable tagine and green pasta with olives, with a rhubarb crumble to follow.

Diners paid a donation of their choice for the tasty dishes on offer at the East Oxford Community Centre event on Saturday, designed to raise awareness of the amount of food being wasted in modern society.

Organiser Jade Neville, 25, said: “We’re doing it to help raise awareness of the imbalance in the food system. It’s looking at different ways of bringing the community together over food.

“It’s been really lovely – we had 500 people who responded to invites on Facebook and it’s been very busy.

“It’s been sunny too so we’ve even got tables outside.”

Marlene Bovenmars, 28, who sampled the food, said: “It was really tasty – they gave me a bit of everything and I’m just waiting for my desert.

“I think it’s really important because I don’t think most people realise how much food gets wasted.

“It’s great for people to taste it and be made more aware.”

Peter Lefort, 29, who helped organise the event, added: “The food came from a variety of sources. There was bread from different bakeries around Oxford which they didn’t want at the end of the day and food from many of the shops along the Cowley Road.

“None of it was going to get used if we hadn’t taken it.

“It’s staggering the amount of food that goes to waste.

“We don’t see it because the supermarket shelves are always stocked up.

“We had 47 people helping out as volunteers on the day so this just shows how passionate people are about this kind of thing.

“It’s just finding a way to break the cycle and find a way of stopping food being thrown in the bin.”

“In Oxford we’re quite lucky because the foodbanks do an excellent job. They helped supply some of the food – so we were using surplus, surplus food in some cases.”

The organisers are getting together on Thursday to discuss their next event.

More food surplus cafes could be staged as part of the awareness-raising campaign.