Jai Jagat 2020 UK is really pleased to present this short film as part of the Madras Café Unlocked exhibition focusing on Jai Jagat 2020. It was made with ChangeKitchen, based in Birmingham, UK, as a tool for discussion about the place of food in tackling climate change, and issues of food security, especially where they reveal material poverty and inequality.

 

Birgit Kehrer talks about her personal route to setting up ChangeKitchen as a social enterprise in response to the challenges that people with low incomes, and those who experience social exclusion, have in feeding themselves healthy food, and in finding stable employment. ChangeKitchen’s mission is to be ‘part of a revolution that turns access to healthy eating away from a privilege to a right for everyone’, and this philosophy is a good fit for Jai Jagat 2020 UK.

 

ChangeKitchen is celebrating its tenth year at a time when the food system in the UK has been shown to lack resilience in times of crisis with its highly-processed, over-packaged, bottom line accounting, just in time production and distribution. We find Birgit and her Kitchen Manager, Tommy Randa at a temporary kitchen, set up to cook and distribute thousands of vegan and vegetarian hot meals and food parcels to isolated and shielding people, and families who are reliant on food banks. Birgit discusses where the experiences of the Covid-19 crisis point their company.

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