Meet the Meal Makers who offer food and friendship
Dawn Geddes finds out how Meal Makers offers a unique solution to a community problem.
THERE’S nothing quite like a delicious home-cooked meal, but sadly, for many older people who suffer from mobility or other issues, making something complex in the kitchen is just not an option.
Now, thanks to Meal Makers, no-one should have to miss out on the luxury of a home-cooked meal.
Emma Black, Project Manager for the initiative, explains how it works.
“Meal Makers is a community project which encourages people to share home-cooked food with a neighbour over the age of fifty-five.
“It’s as simple as plating up an extra portion of a family meal and taking it round to an older person for them to enjoy, and can be on a weekly, fortnightly or every now and then basis.”
Meal-makers sign up on the voluntary organisation’s website. A member of the team then gets in touch with the volunteer and arranges for them to have a background check done and for them to complete a food hygiene course online.
Once those checks have been done, the initiative matches the meal-maker with someone within their community who would like a home-cooked meal.
“It works very flexibly. There are so many people out there who would like to volunteer but find it difficult due to work or family commitments.
“The beauty of this project is that because so many people are actually cooking anyway, it’s easy to get involved.”
The initiative, which is a subsidiary of the Scottish charity Food Train, was set up in Dundee in 2014, but has since been rolled out to other local authority areas across Scotland.
Within those four short years the project has recruited 520 volunteers who have shared over 8,200 meals within the community.
The need for the service was identified through Food Train surveys, which saw many older people commenting on just how much they missed homecooked food.
“We know through the Food Train shopping service that older people will often make themselves something like a ham sandwich or rely on frozen food because they aren’t able to cook a meal.
“Some older people don’t like eating alone, so they won’t eat regularly, or they may have a condition like dementia which means they might forget to eat.
“Meal Makers encourages them to develop a regular eating habit as well as helping to combat malnutrition.”
And it’s not only health benefits that the service provides. Emma says that once the project has matched a meal-maker and a diner together, it often leads to a long-term friendship between the pair, helping to combat loneliness in the community.
“A lot of our volunteers go way beyond what we ask them to do. We’ve even had older people going round to their meal-maker’s house for Christmas dinner!
“We never ask our volunteers to do any of that, it’s just something that comes as the friendship grows.”
Although the meal-maker should create their cuisine from scratch, Emma says that volunteers do not have to be brilliant cooks.
“You really don’t have to be a Cordon Bleu chef to get involved! The main thing is that you enjoy cooking and that you’re happy to share food with a neighbour!” n