ALT Selfie of Mariana in Zumba clothes looking very sweaty. Her grey top says 'Leading the way'. There is a mirror behind her.

ALT One day very early on in the crisis my phone rang. ‘Hi, it’s Adam Smith, one of my board has rung saying Alan Lane needs help. What do you need?’ I explained we’d taken on answering the social care referrals, which meant sourcing food at scale, which we didn’t really know how to do. He invited our van down to the warehouse to take whatever we wanted that afternoon, something he would reiterate every day for over a year. There would be times when a lorry pulled up outside the club with half a dozen pallets full of everything from noodles to Nando’s hot sauce, hot cross buns to tons of blueberries. It was extraordinary, the things and the amounts that Adam would deliver. A hundred bags of popcorn, each one as tall as me; several hundred bottles of alcohol-free gin. A transit van full of Marks and Spencer chocolate one time. Everyone in Holbeck pigging out on high quality easter eggs in June for a week. On St George’s day my phone rings, ‘Alan, it’s Adam, have you got a van and a driver?’

ALT ‘Okay pal, I’m on my way’ I get to his warehouse, stop the van. A forklift immediately pulls up and loads one pallet of boxes onto the van. You can just about get two pallets into our transit if you’re a very good forklift driver and sure enough this lad is back with another one and just manages to slide it in. And then Adam appears. ‘These are Burger King vegan burgers. Frozen. We’ve no more space for them here. I’ve got dozens of pallets’ worth.’ ‘Okay,’ I say, wondering where I’m taking them. ‘In each box is one hundred burgers. There’s sixty boxes on each pallet. If you’ve got another van, I’ve got another two pallets for you.’ ‘Sure, I’ll call Matt, we’ll bring the church’s van.’ ‘Brilliant, owe you one.’ ‘Not at all, just paying you one back for once. Adam, where are these going?’ ‘Wherever you want. They’re yours.’ And off he swooshed as the other two pallets of vegan Burger King burgers arrived. I now had several thousand frozen burgers to get rid of.

ALT Ruth and Joanna in the office hit the phones whilst we race two vans of slowly defrosting burgers around the city. School kitchen managers were rationalising freezer space, soup kitchens reorganising menus as the city was awash with Burger King vegan burgers. And at 5pm we returned to the club, exhausted, having given away tens of thousands of burgers to anyone (literally anyone) who would have them. Sweaty, tired and broken, Joanna met us in the car park. ‘How did you do?’ We opened the first van. ‘It’s empty, that is brilliant! How many burgers is that?’ ‘12,000 I think, maybe a few more, I’ve lost the list.’ I opened the second van. ‘Oh shit.’ ‘Yep.’ ‘How many is there?’ ‘Sixty boxes maybe.’ ‘What happened?’ ‘We filled every freezer we went to, we couldn’t fit any more. We’ll have to skip them. We can’t let Adam know, he’ll go nuts.’ I was beat. We’d been at it all day and I was ready for my bed. Joanna on the other hand had other ideas.

ALT “We’re getting rid of them. Come on, get the van started.’ And so that is how, on St George’s Day 2020, [we] spent two hours walking behind a slowly crawling van with the doors open shouting, ‘FREE BURGER KING BURGERS!’ Word spread. People came running out of their houses, called friends, cars raced round the estate to find us. We gave away the final 6000 burgers to absolutely anyone who wanted them. It wasn’t the only time we would find ourselves with preposterous amounts of wholesale food…but we would get better at finding homes for it. It was only in those first few Wild West months that there was a need for driving the streets tossing boxes of frozen burgers to strangers. But there was a thrill to it, despite it being hard work. And a usefulness that was immediate and kind and galvanising. There are few real-life radicals alive today. We are lucky that Adam Smith is one and he is our friend. Because we would have been lost without him and his The Real Junk Food Project.