We continue our series on the ordinary Malaysian out to make Malaysia a better place. The focus today is on Hayati Ismail, the woman behind the country’s first food bank.

EVERY day in Malaysia 15,000 tonnes of food are consigned to landfills, blithely dumped into drains and rivers, by roadsides, of which 3,000 tonnes are still fit for consumption.

One answer to this criminal waste – the Food Aid Foundation (FAF), a “food bank” where manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers can donate still edible stuff to welfare homes, soup kitchens and poor families.

The seed of FAF came from Rick Chee, a businessman with over two decades of providing kitchen facilities for the F&B business, and Mohamad Faisal Ghazali, vice-president of the Malaysian Institute of Interior Designers.

From the seed, there is now a board of trustees headed by Ibrahim Ahmad Badawi, executive chairman of Brahim’s Holdings and Brahim’s Airline Catering Sdn Bhd. The other board members are chef Zamzani Abdul Wahab, Abdul Karim Yusof (over two decades of experience in the hospitality industry), and Ronald Tung, an advocate and solicitor.

Supporters of FAF – hotels like Hotel Bangi-Putrajaya, chain supermarket Tesco, fast-food chains like McDonald’s, KFC and Kenny Rogers Roasters, provide the basic ingredients – still edible food.

Three times a week, the two FAF vans are out in the morning picking up food from eight Tescos in the Klang Valley, from bakeries and the food caterers in Bank Negara’s cafeteria.

FAF is situated at Desa Tun Razak, Cheras. It has two rooms that can chill anything from potatoes and sausages to bread. In a smaller chiller are packets of cooked food from hotels – not scrappy leftovers that had been picked over at the buffet table, but extra, kept warm in the kitchen – beef stew, sausages.

These will go out fast. That’s when the link with the Malaysian Association of Hotels, the chefs association and culinary colleges is activated, and chefs and students come in to FAF’s spotless kitchen to process anything from hundreds of loaves of bread to thousands of potatoes.

The cooked food will be despatched to welfare homes, soup kitchens.

All this activity is kept humming smoothly by its director of operations, Hayati Ismail, an escapee from the corporate world, because she couldn’t bear “sitting in a cubicle, working for just a company, working 9-5, actually nearly always way past five.”

So, pregnant with her youngest (of three) child, she quit to become an interior decorator. That didn’t satisfy because her experience in that line was: “you local, not mat salleh, we pay you less”.

That dissatisfaction with “local” bias and a desire “to give back to the community,” led to helping Syed Azmi with the Free Market, and the Feeding The Needy soup kitchen in the Chow Kit area, and a meeting with Rick Chee, arranged by a mutual friend, in 2015.

FAF was started in 2013. Now Chee wanted someone to take it to the next level, who could put together proposals, raise funds and solve problems.

One example was when Kellogg’s supplied packets of breakfast cereals to FAF. Schools were willing to receive them, but all food consumed in schools is strictly, governed by the Ministry of Education.

After months of inactivity attending FAF’s submission of all the required documents to the ministry, Hayati solved the problem by donating them to parents associations of schools. Parents are kosher.

Then there was a friend who made contact and said Thai friends have 29 tonnes of French fries, not up to specs, rejected, willing to ship to Malaysia, you just pay for import charges, whatever.

Red-tape applying to get charge exemption, bucraucratic delay at the port because 29 tonnes, must be for sale. Hayati gets the nomadic food through.

Then there were 18 pallets (about 9.7 tonnes) of muesli donated by Tesco. This would have been another windfall, except Malaysians had no taste for this alien grain. It wasn’t wasted. Hayati sends out word on the grapevine, and the muesli is off to feed refugees in Syria.

Back in the Klang Valley, FAF is feeding up to 7,000 people – welfare homes, poor families, schools, the homeless via a growing coaliiton of NGOs and soup kitchens.

Buoyed by the success of the first food bank, Hayati now hopes to have one established in every state in Peninsular Malaysia by the end of the year.

If you want to donate, volunteer time, effort, money, food, contact Hayati Ismail and Food Aid Foundation at 03-92265500 or email [email protected] – April 16, 2017.

Part 2: A pit stop for the hungry.