Eating is such an everyday act, it’s easy to forget the startling intimacy of it until something disrupts your habits. Eating spaghetti, for example, is a very different experience in the company of a stranger or a crush, as you self-consciously wipe sauce from your chin. Sharing food centers our common humanity and is often the most effective way that we can express care for one another. It also requires a certain level of vulnerability; whenever we eat, we’re trusting what we consume won’t kill us, something that I’m reminded of every time I eat with my friend with Celiac disease.

It’s fitting that residents of my hometown of Ashburton, on the edge of Dartmoor National Park in Devon, came up with the idea of installing a community fridge in 2020, during the height of the Covid pandemic. Against a backdrop of general anxiety about how to feed ourselves and the loss of the many social and spiritual gatherings that cement human connection, a group of volunteers from the Ashburton Climate Emergency group proposed this endeavor to address food waste.

The fridge has been up and running since March 2021. Volunteers pick up the bulk of the food dispensed via the fridge from supermarkets with excess food that is close to its sell-by date. Locals are also able to share surplus produce they’ve grown, or sealed food that they’ve bought, as long as it hasn’t been tampered with. (Due to health and safety rules, someone can’t, for example, bake something at home and put it in the fridge without a food hygiene license.)

There’s a certain degree of trust that needs to be established in initiatives like these, where no money is changing hands. I’ve noticed the need in myself to overcome an irrational worry about whether or not the food is “safe” to eat, simply because I haven’t paid for it. This instinctive recoiling from free food was so unconscious in me at first that I was only able to confront it when my daughter, with all the innocent honesty of youth, asked, “Is it clean?”

We must trust the good intentions and experience of the people involved in the running of the fridge. We must also use our own senses to check that the food hasn’t gone off and is still good to eat, more than we are used to doing when presented with food in a supermarket.

Sometimes – as when a large delivery of leeks is dropped off – the news ripples through the town, the fridge acting as a conversation starter between people who wouldn’t usually talk to each other. Cya Parker, one of the key organizers, tells me that she has heard of new friendships being formed as people bond over what they’ve found in the fridge and exchange recipes with each other. She’s heard from fridge-users that they have also tried new fruit and vegetables because they were available.

The fridge is located in the center of town and is open access, 24/7, free for all to use without requiring proof of financial need. It has become a much-loved feature and is used by people from every demographic, which means that there isn’t the same stigma attached to it as there is to other community food projects, such as food banks.

The environmental charity Hubbub estimates that there are over seven hundred community fridges around the United Kingdom now, going some way to address the 6.4 million tons of edible food that the United Kingdom throws away every year. Ashburton’s community fridge saved thirty-eight tons of food from landfill in 2024.

About twenty minutes’ drive away in the nearby town of Totnes, another initiative is flourishing. Food in Community was set up in 2013 as a way of providing for people in the area who were struggling financially and faced, as director David Markson described it, “the indignity and inadequacy of provision … [having to queue] to receive a plastic carrier bag of poor-quality food.” Their idea was simple: team up with local organic farmers to collect surplus food from the fields. This process, known as gleaning, ensures that surplus crops are put to good use and that high-quality organic produce can be delivered to households in need who are signed up to the free service.

As around 40 percent of recipients are registered disabled, the direct delivery to the homes of people in need is vital. These people struggle to get to food pantries, community fridges, and other projects designed to feed the community.

Food in Community repurposes over 150 tons of crop surplus each year. They have plans, David tells me, to quadruple that amount with a new community food processing project that is underway thanks to a $2 million farming grant that they recently secured to fund the initiative. “Project Beetroot” will be a not-for-profit surplus food processing center working with local organic farms to reduce food waste and the South West’s carbon footprint while increasing food security and providing training and jobs.

Both the community fridge and Food in Community weave together care for the environment with a belief that high-quality food should be available to everyone.

This is the secret to their success. The charitable model that suggests a passive recipient is turned on its head when the recipient of free food becomes someone who is also actively engaged in the process of reducing food waste and helping to tackle climate change.

Feeding each other remains a radically vulnerable act, highlighting our interdependence and our often embarrassing, awkward bodies and needs. As so many of us discovered when we weren’t able to gather to share meals in 2020, the spiritual and relational nourishment of these shared meals mirrors the more tangible physical nourishment. It’s no wonder that a meal is at the center of Christianity; the very first relationships of our lives are forged by feeding and being fed. Where there is hunger, there is life, and wherever we can come together to respond to this hunger, there is still hope for humanity.