Kind-hearted couple find romance over a parsnip recipe while volunteering with community dining charity FoodCycle

Keen cooks Dan Humphreys, 27 and Chandana Shankar, 34 bonded over a shared passion for cooking after meeting at their local FoodCycle community meal in Thornton Heath, South London.

It’s among 30+ FoodCycle projects across London, and 100+ nationwide, where each week volunteers take part in a ‘Ready Steady Cook’ style challenge to turn surplus food that would otherwise go to waste, into delicious free meals.

Everyone is welcome to turn up and eat for free at the meals, which help tackle loneliness and food insecurity, improve people’s nutrition, and helping the planet by reducing food waste.

Dan was so impressed with Chandana’s cooking skills after watching her improvise a five-spiced parsnip dish without a recipe – that he asked her out on a date! One date led to another…and now the couple are planning their wedding this autumn.

Product manager Chandana and software developer Dan are encouraging others to get involved in volunteering with FoodCycle. Since moving in together and getting engaged, they now volunteer at their closest local project, FoodCycle Roehampton.

The couple say in addition to bringing them together, FoodCycle has helped them meet a diverse new group of friends. It has also changed the way they cook at home, with more of a focus on reducing food waste.

They are now confident cooking for large groups and even catered a middle eastern feast for their housewarming last autumn.

FoodCycle currently provides a hot 3-course meal for 3,500 people each week, and has 25,000 volunteer slots nationwide that need to be filled to run meals in 2025.

Chandana said: “Dan and I are really good at cooking together, which makes sense given how we met. You have to cook to a deadline at FoodCycle, and we’ve learned how to pull together to do that. So that makes it super easy and smooth when we’re cooking for friends and family.

“Dan has always been a bit adaptive at how he cooks, but I used to like to know a lot more in advance about my ingredients and recipe.

“Now I’m a lot more comfortable being a bit more creative, looking at what we’ve got and working out what flavours will go together. If we’ve got half a cabbage left in the ‘fridge we’ll look at what else we’ve got to go with it so it doesn’t go to waste. So my skills have definitely developed too.”

On volunteering with FoodCycle Dan said: “It’s something I really enjoy. It’s given me a chance to improve my cooking quite a bit and also I’ve made friends through it, I’ve met Chandana through it.

"It helps to build a social network, especially when first I moved to London as I didn’t know many people here.”

Chandana said: “At FoodCycle you meet such different people, whether of different ages or from different backgrounds, and when you sit with the guests it’s such a nice way of meeting lots of people and sharing a meal together which seems like a really simple but nice thing to do.”

“I didn’t I expected to meet anyone through FoodCycle, but food and cooking is such an important part of both of our lives, it’s become such an important part of our relationship.

Chandana added: “We got engaged in November, on holiday in Bologna in Italy which is a very foodie destination so it was perfect for us. We’ll be getting married in September. We’re having a Hindu ceremony as I’m from an Indian background, and afterwards we’ll have a big party with lots of Indian food, and hopefully a really fun time!”

FoodCycle Thornton Heath and FoodCycle Roehampton are among 30+ FoodCycle community meals across London, and more than 100 in England and Wales.

Dan said: “I love the challenge of creating a new meal each week at FoodCycle, and it’s been a brilliant way for me to meet new people over the years too. I’d encourage anyone with an interest in cooking, saving food waste or helping their community to get involved.”

Chandana added: “It’s really good fun volunteering at FoodCycle, we’ve met lots of friends, and it’s great to know you are giving something back to your community, and helping the planet too by reducing food waste.”

For both Chandana and Dan, volunteering was always an opportunity to be able to meet people but neither of them expected to find a romantic partner whilst volunteering.

Chandana had been volunteering for almost a year at FoodCycle Thornton Heath after a friend recommended it, when Dan came along for his first shift at the local project.

She says: “I signed up because I thought it was really fun, I’ve always loved cooking so this was the perfect opportunity for me.”

Dan explained how his and Chandana’s spark started to blossom: “She’d wanted to make honeyed parsnips but there wasn’t any honey, so in true FoodCycle style she substituted it with five-spice for that sweetness.

“I thought that was really clever and from the conversations we’d had earlier, she was really interesting, clearly smart, plus the parsnips tasted delicious!”

Chandana explains how their first session volunteering together went: “I was chatting with another volunteer, talking about having lived in America, that I had done MBA and mentioned my Physics degree, which is what I think got Dan really interested in the conversation because he studied Physics too.

“Later on Dan was making a salad dressing and he wanted vegan mayo to help stabilize it and my immediate thought was, ‘ooh someone’s been reading Kenji [Lopez-Alt, the food science journalist].’ That really impressed me.”

Impressed by Chandana’s cooking skills, Dan asked if she wanted to go for a coffee.

"At first, I thought he just wanted to talk careers,” said Chandana “But when we met, just two days after volunteering together, I knew that this had the possibility of being something more.

“I had been dating for a while, but found dating apps almost like shopping, people weren’t really interested, just browsing, not wanting to meet. So to meet someone in such a natural way, who then had the courage and interest to ask me out on a date, was a real breath of fresh air.” She added: “My head wasn’t really in that space when I was volunteering, so it was really unexpected.”

Dan says: “I’ve never been interested in dating apps and whilst I wasn’t actively using volunteering to meet someone, it had crossed my mind that I could meet someone. Being around people who have similar interests, you hope that might happen.”

No prior qualifications are needed to volunteer with FoodCycle and there’s no minimum weekly commitment – just sign up via the FoodCycle website training will be provided.

Find out about FoodCyle’s projects across London here: https://volunteer.foodcycle.org.uk/london

Sign up to volunteer here: https://foodcycle.org.uk/volunteer-london/

You can also donate to support FoodCycle here: https://foodcycle.org.uk/donate/