Volunteers can stand the heat in our kitchen Volunteer Julian Pang with trays of pies in the FareShare kitchen. Picture: Jason Sammon Source: HeraldSun I WORK for a food charity. We work with businesses to collect their surplus food and our hundreds of volunteers cook it into 4000 nutritious meals a day. We give them to charities across Victoria who help feed people doing it tough. Recently I read a message posted on our Facebook page. It was a heartfelt thanks from someone who had fallen on hard times and received some of our meals. You couldn't helped but be touched by Lisa's message. I printed it off and took it into work the next day for staff and volunteers to read. The response I expected was, "This is why we do what we do." Instead, one of the volunteers with a dry sense of humour responded: "Did a PR company write that?" In this day and age of message crafting and spin, you can forgive such a cynical reaction. But what the message provided was an insight into the modern face of hunger in Melbourne. Lisa explained her partner had lost his job and for the sake of the children they had to seek relief from a charity. She brought the food home, saw a FareShare sticker on a meal and looked us up online. She said, "the social and environment relief you provide is incalculable." The message was well written. Lisa was clearly well educated. She and her family were not homeless. They even had a computer and internet access. For decades charities have provided support to groups such as isolated elderly, homeless and indigenous people, and people with mental health issues. What's changed is that more people knocking on charities' doors are not homeless and unemployed. They have a job, maybe two. They have a roof over their head. They are simply struggling to stretch the household budget to cover rent, electricity, gas, water, petrol and food. That is the modern face of hunger. Australia has become an expensive place to live and many people are struggling to afford three meals a day, seven days a week. Or they are buying enough food, but it's heavily processed food, high in salt and sugar. A family struggling to make ends meet may send a child to bed with three peanut butter sandwiches for dinner. The child is not short of kilojoules, but nutritionally deficient. Four years ago I was at a buck's party. The buck was entrepreneurial and most of his friends were business-minded and doing quite nicely for themselves. I sat down next to a bloke and introduced myself. Pete asked what I did and I talked about food going to waste and the need for food relief in our community. He said he understood. Pete ran a landscaping business with 20 staff but during the drought, business became tough. He wanted to look after his employees and not put any of them off. But Pete also had a mortgage, a wife and two boys, and eventually he turned to a local church group for help. He visited them only twice and that was enough to get his family through and business picked up again. But he understood the need to be there for people in hard times. As the economy softens and people are laid off or lose hours, charities are likely to have more people on their doorsteps. The rapidly expanding middle class in Asian countries, the rising cost of doing business in Australia and climate change will all continue to push up food prices. But 700,000 tonnes of food go to landfill every year in Victoria, much of which is perfectly fit for human consumption. It's a matter of logistics - to get it to people who often, for no fault of their own, are experiencing hard times. It's a test of a society whether we let people fall through the cracks or rally to help. FareShare has opened Australia's biggest dedicated charity kitchen in Abbotsford with the capacity to cook a million free meals a year for charities to donate to those going hungry. We rely on volunteers to cook the meals. We have 500 people who are regular volunteers and now we have a waiting list. Every day in our new kitchen we have school students join us in the morning and corporate volunteers in the afternoon. The shifts are booked out two to three months ahead of time. These are promising signs that we do live in a compassionate society and one that will rally to people in tough times. I hope I'm right. Marcus Godinho is the CEO of food charity FareShare