It’s getting close to lunchtime at Redmond Community Centre and people are starting to come through the doors to try out the food which is not only largely sourced for free but also cooked by Well London volunteers and then served up for lunch.

The Well London Café has been running more generalised cooking classes in the Woodberry Down, Well London neighbourhood of Hackney since October but more recently, sessions have focused on cooking to improve health and wellbeing. Previous weeks topics have included detoxing and juicing, how to make guilt free snacks and the much discussed Japanese session.

Today though is all about how to cook food that is friendly for diabetics. Justas Mazeika, who has led the volunteers through their mornings cooking, explains that, “we need to focus on foods which have whole grains and avoid low quality refined sugars, this is the key to cooking for diabetics.” 

His skills clearly extends beyond this little nutritional snippet which I overhear and after 3 hours of brilliantly co-ordinated work in the kitchen we’re presented with a meal which, diabetic or not, you’re going to enjoy!

Well London co-ordinator, Kristina Georgiou described how the café started.

“We wanted to get more people in to use the space so we were thinking

… how else can we engage people? And what better than with food? So teaming up with local people we knew what skills were here… and also we’re quite conscious about food waste so we thought about a food surplus café. It started off slow [a friend] suggest going to this wholesalers in Stamford Hill called Fresh and Fruity and we started to make a connection with them and it was like gold dust.”

It’s clearly a popular community fixture and I count about 40 people come through the door before I give up and start eating. If you live locally and you’d like to come and see what’s going on at the Well London Café then drop by Redmond Community Centre on a Wednesday at 10am or contact the centre beforehand on 020 3819 5619.