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Every Saturday morning, 55-year-old Sally King happily makes the hour-long return trip from her home in Palmerston to a supermarket in Darwin, rescuing food from an alternative route to landfill. 

Returning home with her ute stacked with groceries, Sally then starts unloading crates of fresh produce into a heavily air-conditioned room.

Her home is quickly transformed into a makeshift distribution centre for the mutual-aid kitchen Sally organises over Facebook.

For almost six years, Aunty’s Free Feeds has been serving home-cooked meals to anybody who needs them from a pop-up buffet in the car park of a Palmerston swimming pool.

The concept was founded by local Reanna-Dawn Sanders, who launched the program with a simple menu of sausages and bread, explains Sally.

“She is the original Aunty and the rest of us just consider ourselves the adopted aunts,” she says.

Pop-up buffet in pool car park

By 4:50pm on Sunday afternoon, a bleak and shadeless car park in Palmerston rapidly transforms as volunteers set up trestle tables and trays of food.

The team is well practised in bumping in this efficient operation, which often feeds over 150 people.

From roast chicken to stews, salads and desserts, the colourful line-up is a welcome sight in a part of outer suburban Darwin where many are doing it tough.

The types of meals on offer “will depend on the volunteers’ skill set”, Sally explains, adding that the availability of ingredients also dictates the weekly menu.

“Some people can make something out of almost nothing,” she says.

This week’s offering includes a savory mince dish with edible gourds, after the group received a bulk donation of the squash-like vegetable.

“We do have a couple of people who will regularly give us a cash donation, and we mainly use that to buy ingredients for the volunteers to then make other food,” Sally says.

‘Severe food insecurity’ rife

According to Foodbank’s 2025 Hunger Report, released last month, one in three Australian households experienced food insecurity in the past year, with cost of living the “number one concern” for 87 per cent of homes.

One in five Australian households experienced “severe food insecurity”, defined as skipping meals or whole days of eating, in the year up to July 2025.

It’s a 1 per cent increase on the previous year.

Moulden resident Sharlene Keegan says without the meal service, she would struggle to make ends meet.

“It helps tie up loose ends and basic needs, and getting a feed every week is really good,” Ms Keegan says.

“It has helped me a lot with my health and made me a lot better.”

Regular volunteer Greg Steunebrink says the benefits of Aunty’s Free Feeds have flowed to his family, too.

“It’s just really been a way of life for the past six years,” he says.

‘A little community’ of aunties

While Sally is open to the idea of Aunty’s Free Feeds partnering with a registered charity to access more funding, she says there is a sense of camaraderie that comes with being a smaller outfit, and the informal charity has become “its own little community within itself”.

“We’re not unregulated, but we’re a casual organisation, and so I think we also take a bit of pride in just being a group of volunteers who just want to help other people,” she says.

“We have a little chat group, and the volunteers will often talk about how they love the like-mindedness of the other volunteers.