After Malappuram Municipality and Kozhikode district administration introduced innovative projects for a hunger-free city, a restaurant in Kochi too has catered for a ‘public’ refrigerator to feed the city’s hungry lot who are unable to spare money to feed either themselves or their families.
Minu Pauline who owns Kochi’s popular ethnic tea stall-cum-restaurant ‘Pappadavada’ has placed a fridge in front of her restaurant’s second branch in Kaloor, where people can drop in food for the poor. The venture was named “Nanma Maram”.
“My intention is to save food as most people seem to waste a lot of food. With this venture, people can bring in edible leftovers to feed the hungry poor,” Minu told The News Minute. She added that the date and time at each food-packet is dropped is marked to ensure that no packet which is more than a day old stays in the refrigerator.
Minu says that it was the system “Coffee on the Wall”, which is followed in western countries that first gave her the idea and later she also read about the Malappuram Municipality’s decision to place a public refrigerator for the poor.
“In this case, people needn’t even spend money to buy fresh food to deposit in the fridge. Fresh leftovers are available in plenty,” she smiles.
The Nanma Maram was inaugurated on March 23 and since then it has garnered good public response. Minu is glad that her venture has proved beneficial to the famished needy in the city.
The refrigerator has a capacity of 450 litres with a daily distribution of 50 food-packets donated by the way-side eatery itself. She elaborates: “The last three days saw the fridge filled to the brim with not a single packet left by evening, with most of these being picked up by daily wage earners.”
It was in January 2015 that the Malappuram Municipality had started a project called ‘Akshayapathram’ wherein people could deposit fresh food and leftovers in government-owned refrigerators placed in certain locations.