81-year-old ex-restauranteur from Dorset wins award for family cooking workshops
3,400 cook boxes have been delivered to families in Dorset during lockdown.
An 81-year-old food crusader and ex-restauranteur from Dorset whose recipe for success includes online cookery workshops and healthy ingredient deliveries, has been awarded a 2020 National Lottery Award in the Education category.
Tony Gibbons' charity helps struggling families in Dorset learn how to cook healthy meals.
Tony set up The Friendly Food Club in 2005 to address the lack of education and confidence among struggling families about healthy and nutritious food.
Following the outbreak of COVID-19, families were no longer able to meet for Tony’s cooking classes. However, the 81-year-old cooked-up a complete restructure of the club’s free classes.
Instead, they've been sending out Cookboxes which contain all the ingredients a family needs to cook a healthy meal together.
Tony said it's been a massive success:
"We started off by making 16 boxes, and I think by the end of October we did 230 in that last week. So we made over 4,000 in the three month period.
"We used to work from community centres, church halls, places like that and obviously as COVID came along we couldn't get into those centres and we couldn't work with the 12 families we used to do before COVID."
The Cookboxes they're producing contain ingredients for a meal as well as quizzes, games and facts about the meals.
They've also launched a Facebook group to encourage families to share the meals they've made together.
Tony said:
"The whole ethos of the Friendly Food club is to do something that's very informal, very friendly. We don't wear white coats, and gloves and hats and we don't have charts and we don't teach.
"We just get in there and work with families to cook together, making mistakes and having a laugh, and we're trying to keep this going by giving quizzes and little bits of interesting information about the recipies and where the food comes from."
Tony was selected from almost 5,000 extraordinary individuals who were nominated for a 2020 National Lottery Award- the annual search for the UK’s favourite National Lottery funded people and projects.
In November 2016, The Friendly Food Club received £10,000 of National Lottery funding. In February 2020 the project received a National Lottery grant of £14,736, followed by a grant of £11,800 in May 2020 allowing the project to continue delivering Cookboxes throughout lockdown.