Monday the 8th of July was when the stars perfectly aligned and two food delivery vans landed flawlessly on time at St Mary’s Church to keep the regular volunteers and five GoodGymers occupied for over an hour with a mission to save nearly out-of-date food from going to the bin.

"It has never been so busy since I started coming here weekly. And that was three months ago!" - Martin.

The day was bright and full of secrets that were about to be exposed in the daylight.

• The regular at SECFC, Kamal, revealed himself as a crypto-GoodGymer who registered with us a few months ago but didn't get into the nitty-gritty of mission sign-ups just yet. Welcome Kamal!
• The first-timer at the St Mary's Church Monday task proclaimed herself as Kash, the organiser of the sessions and a bane of inboxes of the Ealing GoodGymers. She will keep the newsletters coming - if you have any questions about GoodGym, just email back!
• Anita, considered to be a newbie to GoodGym, demonstrated that she had already attended one community mission in South Ealing a few weeks ago and knew what to expect.
• Martin, who hadn't had a chance to sign up for today's task, revealed himself as a regular volunteer who comes to help SECFC each Monday anyway.
• Mystery canvas bags that the volunteers unloaded from the second van alongside the food revealed their contents: cleaning sponges, certainly not edible.
• I really wanted to give Alan a shout-out about his big reveal, but he's been an icon of transparency in his red t-shirt throughout the whole session, leaving no material for a mystery story. Maybe all that air of openness was to conceal that his next GoodGym task would be his 200th good deed?

The big team quickly dealt with two food deliveries, the latter being packed with a plethora of goodies saved from waste. Vegan rice pudding, easy peelers, pineapples, bananas, raw chicken and savoury pastries were numerous. After unloading the vans, there were still plenty of jobs for us to help organise the food:

• Martin was on chicken duty, handling raw meat and pondering, together with Alan, whether the experience makes people go vegetarian.
• Team Double-A (Anita and Alan) worked like a true A-Team on the watermelon slicing and bagging the portions to serve more households.
• Team Double-K (Kash and Kamal) packed the sausage rolls into family-size portions.

"It's a real transformation!", observed Alan, seeing how the empty room transformed in an hour into a treasury of foodstuffs.

All the volunteers were welcome to help themselves to the abundance of rescued surplus food.

South Ealing Community Food Cupboard is a community project set up to reduce waste and make surplus food from the supermarkets available to anyone in the local area. Join the great cause with other GoodGymers each Monday morning!

Sign up for your next session with them here:

• 15th July
• 22nd July
• 29th July
• 5th August
• 12th August
• 19th August