This story is part of our Good News series – bringing you positive headlines every day to spread positivity during difficult times.
Our hearts already had a special place for James Martin, but now we love the TV chef even more.
James has been very busy during lockdown, using his talents for the greater good.
Speaking on Good Morning Britain, he revealed he cooked 3,000 bags of pasta and gave them to people in his village.
“I grabbed a big pasta machine, we’ve got this big industrial pasta machine, brought it back to my house and because we’ve got a bakery I grabbed whatever flour I could, whatever eggs I could, whatever semolina flour I could and rather than just deliver 25 kilo bags of flour, I thought I’d transform it into stuff”, he said.
“So I set about doing pasta and it’s just gone a bit crazy. Over 1000 kilos I’ve made now. Tonnes and tonnes and tonnes of it. You make it, dry it out and bag it up.
“I thought I can’t go around the village and drop it off, we’ve got a local Facebook page and where we live is probably eight or 10 miles from a supermarket so it’s not the easiest thing for people of a certain age to go out and get supplies so I put a little post online saying for people to come and collect it from a little table outside the front of the gate and that was it, it’s taken over from there.”
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He also revealed that he’s been inspired to help after seeing appeals on social media, like a care home in Manchester where supplies were needed.
“You’re sat there and you’re watching social media in all this going on and you think “how can I help?”. ‘We’re quite fortunate in the restaurant business to have an amazing group of suppliers, and those suppliers are struggling more so now than they were before because now the avenues to supply are getting less and less”, he said.
“So they have been diversifying a little bit, they phoned me up and said “we’ve got a lot of pies, we’ve got 2000 pies we want to give away, where do you want them sending?”
“And all of a sudden this post came up on the local news, it was a care home up near Manchester and I managed to get that, and I managed to get my veg supplier to supply some produce for them so they’ve got enough to eat now for a couple of weeks.”
How lovely! Well done James…
