Vegan group gives away thousands of meals to help the hungry and warns of dangers of animal consumption

Help the Hungry exclusive: ‘We hope the $100,000 of food will help relieve suffering from Covid-19 but the real value of our work lies in telling people how and why pandemics emerge’

Distributors are going out on bikes to give out meals (Million Dollar Vegan)

A group that promotes awareness of the environmental risks of animal consumption is spending $100,000 (£80,000) distributing thousands of vegan meals to vulnerable families in London and abroad during the pandemic.

Million Dollar Vegan, which challenged the Pope and Donald Trump to go vegan for a month in return for a $1m donation to charity, has teamed up with an east London charity to provide 3,800 plant-based meals to some of the area’s most needy people to spare them from hunger.

The charity had already had so many applicants for food that it had been forced to turn people away.

“Now, with our support, they can significantly increase their output, and offer an additional 3,800 meals, which will mean they can feed a lot more families and for longer,” said a spokesperson for Million Dollar Vegan (MDV).

The Independent’s Help The Hungry campaign is highlighting the UK’s hunger crisis to help those who cannot afford supplies during the coronavirus lockdown.

A survey by YouGov has indicated up to 350,000 people have gone hungry at times during the lockdown because there wasn’t enough food.

MDV is also working in nine other countries, including Italy, where distributors are giving out 1,000 vegan meals to patients on Covid-19 wards at a Turin hospital.

In Argentina, they have put together 7,000 “ethical aid” packages consisting of meals, hand sanitisers and masks, and are handing them out in the most deprived neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires.

MDV was established to raise awareness of how the rearing and consumption of animals “affects the environment, both farmed and wild animals, and human health — including the global risks of zoonotic diseases and antibiotic resistance”.

It says the initiative, called #TakePandemicsOffTheMenu, combines a charitable effort with an education campaign to help the world avoid another pandemic.

The London meals are prepared in Hackney and delivered by bike around the area.

In France, MDV is giving out 1,200 vegan bowls from a Paris restaurant to homeless people and caregivers in the city’s hospitals, and in Spain it is providing food to frontline care workers in Madrid hospitals.

About 6,400 vegan meals will be provided to those in need in Mexico, and about 3,000 in Brazil. In Los Angeles, US, 700 food packages will go to homeless military veterans. Other projects are in India and Ethiopia.

Naomi Hallum, director of the organisation, which is funded by donations, said: “We hope that the $100,000 of food we are giving will help relieve some of the suffering caused by Covid-19, but the real value of our work lies in education, in telling people how and why these pandemics emerge, in showing the destruction caused to our planet and our bodies when we eat animal products.

“The coronavirus pandemic, like many others before it, is creating tragedies for families all over the world. None of us wants this to happen ever again but to prevent future outbreaks, there are some difficult lessons we must learn.

“If we continue to stress wild animals by decimating their habitats and capture and cage them in markets — and if we continue to mass produce domesticated animals inside squalid factory farms and transport them long distances — there will be no avoiding a future pandemic.”

T Colin Campbell, professor emeritus of nutritional biochemistry at Cornell University, New York, claimed: “A wholefoods plant-based diet can prevent, perhaps even reverse, the chronic degenerative diseases that make older individuals more susceptible to Covid-19.”