Guardian
March 14, 2012
It used to annoy Xenia Papastavrou, the way Greek tavernas always give you loads of bread, way more bread than you can eat. She started taking it home, just to avoid the waste. Then one night last year a waiter suggested she might as well take all that day's leftover bread away with her, and she had an idea.
"I thought, there must be lots of other restaurants in this situation, too," Papastavrou said. "And I was sure none of them knew where they could usefully give it. And at the same time, I knew there were many, many welfare organisations in this crisis that were spending good money on buying fresh bread. It just needed someone to put the two together."
Boroume – it means "we can" in Greek – was born last May in Papastavrou's living room. "I went first to the two bakeries nearest my home, and they were only too delighted to help," she said. "An average bakery could have as much as 30kg of unsold bread at the end of the day. I told a soup kitchen three minutes away, and they couldn't believe their luck."
A volunteer at Athens' Food Bank, Papastavrou promptly put her masters degree on hold and enlisted the help of friends to build a web platform on which companies with any kind of fresh surplus food could offer it, and welfare groups that needed it could accept. She started talking about the idea on Facebook and Twitter, and one of Greece's biggest newspapers, Kathimerini, wrote about it.
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