A WWII refugee who experienced hunger is the inspiration behind a charity making good use of food waste from shops
You’d be forgiven that at 91 Lotti Henley had more appetite for slowing the pace of life down than an energetic resolve to end World hunger.
Yet nothing could be further from the truth as Lotti is the heart and soul of Plan Zheroes, a London-based charitable organisation which, through its unique mapping system, links together businesses with excess food, to charities and food banks that need it.
It was Lotti’s incredible story - recounting her own personal experience of extreme hunger as a refugee during WWII - that led to the creation of Plan Zheroes alongside co-founder Maria Ana.
“Personally I've known what it's like to not know where your next meal was coming from,” said Lotti. “It started with my experience during the second world war, I ended up in a camp with very little food, eating what I could out of bins.
“That experience shaped my whole life and I have never taken food for granted since.”
As a teenager in Germany, Lotti Henley, scion of the Austrian Windisch-Graetz dynasty, found herself interned in a Russian camp for refugees waiting to be repatriated at the end of the Second World War.
“The Russians fed us once a day and the only food they gave us was hot water and potato peels masquerading as soup,” she recalled.
“I was so hungry that I sucked pebbles because it made my mouth fill with saliva and made my stomach think I was getting food. The Russians didn’t care if we lived or died and so after seven weeks we decided to walk over 100 kilometres from the camp outside Munich to Salzburg.
“Along the way I sold my spare pair of shoes for a loaf of bread. I still remember the hunger. To this day, I panic that I will run out of food when I leave home. When I go to the post office, I always take a sandwich with me.”
Lotti, who became a nurse, married an English officer and came to live in London after the war. She was holding court in the kitchen of her airy Kensington flat — “the very kitchen where Plan Zheroes began,” she said.
“Food is life. It makes me angry that there is more food being thrown away in London than would be required to feed everyone in food poverty.”
The name they Plan Zheroes references the modern-day heroes working towards a zero food waste society as well as being a “Plan Z” counterpoint to Marks & Spencer’s then much publicised “Plan A” to reduce waste.
Fighting for social justice was something Lotti learned as a child from her father, a doctor as well as a prince: “Towards the end of the war we were living in German-occupied northern Italy and a woman came to my father and said her son had fallen off a ladder and needed to go to hospital.
"My father knew immediately what had really happened — her son was in the resistance and had been shot by the Germans — but the mother couldn’t say so.”
When a business has surplus food to donate, they upload their information online. Nearby charities receive a notification of the available food and can claim the food online then volunteers and transporters in the local area get involved by helping transport the food.
Plan Zheroes comes in response to an increasing number of people across the UK facing issues of food insecurity.
Malnutrition and obesity are on the rise as people struggle to afford or access to healthy, nutritious food.
On the other end of the scale, businesses and hundreds of thousands of individuals each day throw away and waste unused and uneaten food.
Yet in the UK, 13 million people are living in poverty, while 650,000 tonnes of perfectly good food is thrown away by food businesses.
In response Jeremy Pang is to run Wok for 1,000 in London’s Borough Market this weekend to raise cash for the project. Participants will learn how to cook three different Asian dishes from scratch, creating over 1,000 homemade meals to then be delivered to charities supporting those in need.
All profits from the event will be donated to Plan Zheroes.
Pang said Lotti’s story encouraged him to get involved. “I was so moved by Lotti’s story; it really brought home how much we have as a nation, and yet how many people are still in need of a nutritious meal,” he said.
Since the charity started this initiative at Borough Market in 2014, they have rescued 29 tonnes of perfectly good food that would otherwise have been thrown in the bin — providing an impressive 58,000 meals to 33 charities working with the homeless, the elderly and people with mental health issues.
Paul Burness, who runs Waste Zero, which collects surplus food from retailers in Glasgow for distribution to homeless charities and low income families, said he was in talks to run a similar scheme in the city.
“It has to be easier for retailers to give food away than to bin it,” he said. “Unfortunately while here is now a huge need for surplus food, there isn’t the means to distribute it.
“Plan Zheroes is exactly the right kind of approach needed. Once traders are alerted to the scheme they’ll use it. There’s no reason it can’t be successful up here.”
