Tip of the Iceberg

Warehouse Workout

At City Harvest’s Acton Park Industrial Estate warehouse, one GoodGymer started her volunteer shift feeling a bit like Cinderella before the ball, faced with a seemingly endless task. Not sorting peas from fire ash, but tasked with trimming a mountain of iceberg lettuces, removing browning leaves and stems to reveal crisp, fresh leaves at their heart.

Resigned to an evening getting intimate with slimy lettuce leaves, the fairy godmother of this story was an Amazon Direct lorry delivery of palates piled high with black ‘Amazon’ crates full of fresh food. Lettuce trimming and other tasks ceased and everyone in the warehouse immediately swung into action to unload the black crates and sort the food into categories and re-pack it into smaller delivery crates, ready for immediate freezing, refrigeration and onward van delivery the following day.

Finally twenty minutes of clearing up and dealing with stale bread and emptying pouches of unusable miso soup brought the shift to a close, leaving dozens of iceberg lettuces for the Tuesday morning team to trim.

Home Warehouse Workout

No one signed up to join this week’s ‘Home Warehouse Challenge’, an alternate Fitness session at home aimed at anyone missing their Monday night (or any other night) Group Run, an opportunity to combine a virtual walk/run/cycle journey to Acton Park Industrial Estate with a ‘warehouse workout’ challenge at home:

(a) The virtual journey: 7.8km in 26 minutes (a cycle ride or a Farah-esque run from Wholefoods in Richmond to City Harvest in Acton) Simulate your journey to Acton with an exercise session at home. Use a running machine or exercise bike or use your imagination to shuttle-run, trampoline, sofa-surf, sun-salute, skip, hula-hoop or HIT-train for the time it would have taken you to reach Acton.

(b) The ‘Home Warehouse Challenge’ for this week was a bit more Zen, a challenge to learn or improve a ‘Sun Salutation’, a short yoga sequence for flexibility and mindfulness and a also great tool to employ if you’ want to de-stress.

City Harvest is a non-profit organization that redistributes surplus food to provide support to over 300 organisations that feed London’s most vunerable people including homeless shelters, soup kitchens, children’s programs, centres for the elderly, and refugees. City Harvest is on the Front Line during the COVID-19 Emergency and they need FOOD, FUNDING & VOLUNTEERS to help them distribute food to organisations that feed the vulnerable. Find out more about them and the work that volunteers do on their website at: http://www.cityharvest.org.uk