Liz, Fair Food’s cook who puts recipes together every week, sent through this 99 Reasons Why 2016 Was a Good Year link as a life-line to get me out of the news-feed negativity spiral I had found myself trapped in these last 6 months. It was a long list of affirmative things humanity had achieved this past year – facts like the humpback whale got taken off the endangered species list for the first time in 46 years.
It worked, I needed to be reminded that good things had happened this year, big things. And it reminded me to think of my own reasons why 2016 was a good year:
- First just looking across the lunch table at those beautiful people captured in my terrible phone picture above. There were 40 Fair Food crew working in 2016, they came from 15 nations and every day I felt so lucky to come to the warehouse to work with them.
- Bonnie Halliday started bringing her salted fudge (Smalt) in a tupperware container to the Fair Food warehouse (life-changing)
- Joe Sgro (who every week grows bins and bins of amazing produce for Fair Food customers) was back on board again after his hip op – (we were so worried about you Joe).
- Every Wednesday volunteers from Free Feed turned up to at Fair Food to collect produce they turned into free hot meals for Melbourne people experiencing homelessness.
- Jean Garita (that’s her above), our late mentor’s wife, taught passata making for Crowdsaucing Day at Joe’s Market Garden.
- Fair Food’s leading hand, Hassan and his wife, Loula, who were separated for 4 years, (him here in Melbourne and she in a refugee camp in Egypt) welcomed a set of healthy twin boys.
- At the beginning of the year farmer Vince at Joe’s Market Garden took on Emily as his apprentice. Now at the end of the year he is beginning the process of handing over the farm to her.
- The Food Hosts (all 74 of them new and old) who this year went above and beyond the call reuniting stray boxes to their owners, solving “where’s my milk mysteries” and just being so friendly, trusting and opening their homes to their neighbours.
- And all the customers who sent in poems, hip hop songs, special recipes, gut bacterial transformation stories, who dropped off food for asylum seekers, sang praises or gave constructive criticism – without you there would be nothing, nada, nilch – we owe you everything, thank you.
For all these things and too many others we give thanks, and we give thanks for the chance to do it once again next year.
