London’s Community Kitchen, which helps to feed an extraordinary 14,000 people a week, began, in 2014, with a simple observation: Mumtaz “Taz” Khan noticed his seven-year-old son had started asking for double the amount of food in his packed school lunch every day. When Khan asked why, his son said he was taking the extra food for his pal who couldn’t afford to bring lunch of his own and was always hungry. Khan, a chef who had briefly worked under Marco Pierre White in the late 1990s, was shocked to hear that story.
He’d been working in Dubai for a good deal of the previous decade, and he hadn’t noticed all the ways his London neighbourhood had changed. When he talked to his son’s headteacher, however, he discovered that the hungry classmate was far from an exception. With the help of donations from local bakeries, Khan started to take regular food parcels to a few of the parents who seemed most in need, and then helped to fundraise and sponsor a breakfast club.
