THE BBC has featured the work of a local lunch club that feeds hungry families in Thurrock.
Free school meals help almost two million children in the UK during term-time, but when schools are closed, so are the kitchens reports the BBC.
To help stop children going hungry when there are no school dinners, a network of church-goers is working to fill the gaps.
The charity Make Lunch is attracting volunteers across the country to cook hot lunches during the school holidays.
In a simple kitchen, three volunteers are chopping tomatoes, onions and mushrooms with a speed born of long practice. One of them, Modupe Falase, works as a cook in a school, and during the holidays she volunteers to do yet more cooking – this time, for local children who otherwise might go without a hot meal.
The hall itself is festooned with balloons, but the pinboards on the walls bear rather more sombre messages in this season of goodwill during which some parents will stretch already strained family finances to give children a Christmas treat. Some posters offer families help with debt, or invite them to a hot Christmas lunch.
At Socketts Health Baptist Hall Church in Grays, Essex, it is not quite the feeding of the five thousand, but the volunteers have produced vats of hot pasta plus healthy salad, and fruit for pudding.
Like Modupe, all here are giving their time and their energy for free to the Make Lunch kitchen, one of the wider Cinnamon network of Christian charities.
Modupe Falase: "It’s a very sad thing that children sometimes have to go without food."
"I think it’s a very sad thing that children sometimes have to go without food," says Modupe. "It’s heartbreaking and I feel we need to do something to stop it."
"When I heard about Make Lunch, I thought ‘I can give my time and my skills, and it’s good to know the children leave here with a belly full of healthy food and they go home happy’."
One of the older children here is 16; she’s brought her younger brother and his twin sister to have a cooked lunch. She explains in a matter-of-fact way that their mother is ill, and unable to work.
"We get free school meals and it’s all right but… I don’t think anyone knows, I think they’ve done it (giving school meals) discreetly, which I think is a good idea so that it doesn’t embarrass people that they get free school meals.
"But at the same time it doesn’t bother me; I think I’m just the same as everyone else."
Not every child will be able to celebrate with a hot Christmas dinner this week, but at least some of those in need have found somewhere that offers companionship and a hot meal to tide them through the leaner days.
