Village makes meals for truckers in Covid-19 lockdown

With restaurants and autoroute service stations closed, lorry drivers who keep vital deliveries going have nowhere to get a meal while they are on the road. So an entire village has stepped up to make sure that they have something to eat.

A rest area on the RN88 near Rodez, in the Aveyron, has been transformed into a free drive-through picnic area by the inhabitants of Canabols, who hand out about 100 meals a day to lorry drivers and any passing essential workers who are going hungry.

The pitstop was the brainchild of village resident Marc Loubière, a truck driver currently on furlough. "I think it's immoral to leave people driving on the road every day without eating. It's not normal," he told Franceinfo.

"Some people cry as soon as they see us. The whole village is doing it."

Food for the truckers is donated by local businesses and handed out between 11:00 to 14:00 and from 19:00 to 20:30 daily.

"Some drivers have planned meals in their cabins for the whole week. Others haven't. So they have to go to a supermarket, run their errands like everybody else. But their break time is counted... so it's complicated," explains the trucker.