On a sunny Thursday morning in September, the Pantry in north London is buzzing. Customers browse the wooden crates for celeriac and butternut squash; one picks up a tin of organic tomatoes and pops it in her basket. The smell of rich mushroom soup wafts through the air.
But this is not a luxury food shop with prices to match; it is a “people’s pantry” on an estate that may be a stone’s throw from the high-end retail outlets of King’s Cross but feels a million miles away.
A new social enterprise, the Pantry is stocked with surplus food. Once a week, customers pay £3.50, and take close to a week’s worth of shopping that may have a value of between £15 and £20. Served by volunteers from the Priory Green estate, shoppers stick around, have a cup of tea or some warming soup, and chat to their fellow residents.
It is not, the members stress, a food bank. “You can pick what you want and just take what you need,” says Sheenika Webb-Rainsby, 32, whose baby Matthew is being passed round the room with glee. “There shouldn’t be any stigma about going to a food bank, but I think some people do feel a sense of shame. Here, it’s more like you are doing a shop and giving back to the community at the same time.”
The social enterprise behind it, Cook for Good, also runs team-building events based around food for companies, with all profits ploughed back into the community. Profits from events held in a new kitchen at the heart of the estate go back into the area, and Cook for Good also runs workshops on cooking and life skills for residents.
Zeina Nour, 38, says volunteers helped her with her CV and to find voluntary work to help her get a job. Her friend Anan Faraj appreciated receiving tips on how to sneak vegetables into nutritious meals for her kids. “They make us feel part of this family,” she says. They love their new friends Eileen and Doreen – “the old ladies” – who wave from across the room. Nour says: “They love the kids and now, when we are walking around the estate, we can say hello.”
Other help is more ad hoc. Rose John, 71, explains how Martha Ahmet, a community coordinator who grew up on the estate but has since moved away, helped her when her electricity company tried to force her to pay money she did not owe. “I was sick with worry. I couldn’t eat, but she put my mind at rest,” she says. “She has a halo, that woman.”
New high-rises frame the skyline in King’s Cross, but within a short walk of the shops and restaurants of Granary Square and Coal Drops Yard lies an area in the bottom quartile of the deprivation index, where a quarter of all residents report being in a dire financial situation.
Cook for Good provides local businesses with a means of giving back to the community they have plonked themselves in the middle of, argues its co-founder Karen Mattison, who previously ran social enterprises to help women with caring responsibilities. She calls it “hyperlocal giving”, otherwise known as being a good neighbour.
“Money changes hands, but it’s for a locked-in social good,” she says, doling out soup in the pantry, located in a refurbished old circular laundry on the estate.
Cook for Good gives companies the chance to cook together, then eat their own menu, or share their three-course meals with local shelters or charities. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta funded the refurbishment of a derelict estate cafe a short walk from the Pantry – offering up the company’s architects, designers and contractors – while kitchen appliance maker Ninja donated a full set of kit.
It is not simply good PR, insists Mattison, who founded Cook for Good with Robinne Collie, whose background is in food-based corporate team-building events. “Businesses want to connect with communities – not just with funding, but by using their resources to help solve social problems that they see,” she says. “Companies want team-building, they want events, they have the resources and they are going to spend them anyway. What we’re trying to do is get them to spend the social pound, not the corporate one, and then you’re hitting a double bottom line.”
The Pantry’s users are effusive about the boost it has provided to community feeling. Deolida Pereira, 58, who was told about the project by her GP, says that after the deaths of her son and daughter, it has given her a reason to get out and meet people again. “I was very lonely,” she says. “But this place is special for me. Everybody seems to love me and I love them. I feel like I belong.”
