Feeding thousands is bread and butter to OzHarvest

It's not every day that a cook whips up 17,000 bread and butter puddings. But last week the founder of food rescue service OzHarvest, Ronni Kahn, turned her hands to the task after taking a call from a company that had 3000 litres of surplus cream.

''Normally it would have been turfed,'' Ms Kahn said. ''But it still had two weeks' lifespan so we collected it and decided to make puddings and freeze them.''

The dessert will be one of the items on the menu at OzHarvest's new initiative Feeding the 5000, a giant free hot lunch to be held at Martin Place on July 29. The event, part of a global initiative in partnership with the United Nations Environment Program, aims to raise awareness about saving food and encouraging people to produce less waste.

''Three million tonnes of food gets wasted in Australia every year,'' said Ms Kahn, who will attend a Feeding the 5000 event in Amsterdam next month. ''Unless we shift our behaviour, this is not going to change.''

More than 30 Sydney chefs, including Neil Perry and Matt Moran, will be involved.