Every week, thousands of children rely on Kids Company for their main meal of the day. They come to be fed, to learn how to cook, and to find a safe place to be a child

Late afternoon in a south London kitchen, and the evening meal is being prepared. As in so many kitchens it’s an opportunity for a chat.

“What’s a good thing to eat at home when you haven’t got much food?” asks Susie Cunningham, one of the Kids Company therapeutic support workers who helps run the nightly afterschool cooking classes. Around the table are three 11-year-old girls, and Toby, a quiet little blond boy who’s seven. They’re getting their hands mucky, turning out homemade fish fingers by dipping pieces of raw cod in beaten eggs they have cracked themselves, and then dredging them through breadcrumbs.

“Cereal or noodles,” says Esther, her fingers smeared with the coating mix, her hair in tight cornrows, like the other girls.

“How often do you have to eat that?” Susie says.

“A lot,” she says simply.

Cassie, on the other side of the table, says: “Sometimes I miss breakfast.”

Esther nods. “I didn’t have anything till lunch today. My belly was hurting.”

We ask what they eat when there is very little in the cupboards at home. “We have to eat rice with nothing,” says Esther. “Just rice.”

One of the other girls says: “When we don’t have food at home, my mum sends us all to Kids Company and tells us to make sure we get seconds.”

None of this is talked about gloomily. There is nothing doom-laden about the chatter in this simple, white fitted kitchen, off the main play room with its woodland murals. The tone is gossipy and conversational. It is merely an account of children’s lives in the winter of 2015, lived at the bottom of the economic heap. It’s the point of Kids Company, a charity which has been supporting children whose lives have been damaged by poverty, abuse and trauma, since it was founded in 1996 by Camila Batmanghelidjh. They run therapy centres. They run gang membership prevention programmes, and myriad sporting and social initiatives. But at the heart of what they do is food, not just cookery classes like this one, but an evening meal service.

Children during dinner service. Photograph: Richard Saker for Observer Food Monthly

Through their centres in north and south London, Liverpool and Bristol, they now support 36,000 children and provide 3,000 meals a week. Of those children, 85% rely on Kids Company for the main meal of the day. “We find children coming to us with quite severe issues of malnutrition,” says campaigns director Laurence Guinness, who left the music business five years ago to work with the organisation. “We have toddlers with rickets, 10-year-olds who look like seven-year-olds. When you see adolescents looking skeletal you understand why they join a gang.” So where is the responsible adult? “There is no responsible adult caring for these children. There’s a gaping hole in the safety net. There is no allocation of resources to the lone child.”

And so the lone child has to find their own way. Kids Company is a rare children’s charity in that the people it feeds and looks after are self-referring. Children come to them by themselves, and later they bring others who are also in need. “Between 2011 and 2012 we saw a 233% increase in these self-referrals,” Guinness says. As a result they launched the Plate Pledge, a fundraising drive built around the £2 cost of a meal. While they get some funding from central government they get none from the boroughs of Lambeth or Southwark whose kids they look after, and still have to raise more than £24m a year to keep services running. The Plate Pledge has meant they have been able to serve another half a million meals.

“But we’re not meeting demand,” Guinness says. Not that anyone is clear what that demand actually is, because it’s hard to get definite numbers. “We tried to get real hard figures on child food poverty when we were researching our report into school food,” says Henry Dimbleby, founder of the Leon healthy fast-food chain, who co-authored the recent School Food Plan. “We found it impossible to do so.” It requires getting deep inside the private domain, into the tight weft and weave of the home and that is a very secretive and emotionally charged place.

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A team from Reading University recently conducted interviews with children who came to Kids Company, which painted a dismal portrait of need. One child, asked how they deal with hunger, said, with a brutal logic, “I just want to sleep cos… when I [go] to bed hungry and sleep, I’m not hungry.” Another child, asked how common she found cupboards empty when she got home from school, just shrugged. It was, she said, “Normal. It’s like... don’t know... it’s normal.” Guinness is dismissive of the idea that it’s impossible to get data on these experiences. He has an email from a Department of Health official who admits that, while they do undertake nutrition surveys of the population, they don’t analyse the lowest income groups because “the sample size is too small”. Guinness knows from the demand they are seeing that the sample cannot be too small.

I ask him, slightly desperately, if there is any sunlight in this story. “Yes, of course. When you feed a child, when you provide a family-like environment, they thrive. They turn in to fine young people. And it doesn’t cost much.” They get support from the likes of waste food charity Fareshare, Whole Foods Market, Compass, Marks & Spencer, Booker and Premier Foods, but they need more. Right now they are spending £1.3m a year not only on hot meals but emergency food parcels, food vouchers and all their catering overheads.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Serena Urquhart who works with the children, focusing on the food programme. Photograph: Richard Saker for Observer Food Monthly

Back at the cooking lesson, 30-year-old Serena Urquhart who runs the classes, is getting the fish fingers in the oven, and sorting out the salad dressings: there’s mayonnaise and sweet chilli and hot pepper sauces, tomato ketchup, and fresh lemon and mint. The children are told to do what they like. They spoon and squeeze and squirt and mix. “We won’t make you eat anything you don’t want to,” she says. “It’s about cooking.” Serena trained to be a doctor but has since embarked on training as a psychotherapist, first with Kids Company itself and now outside the charity.

So is what they’re doing here simply about nutrition? “No,” she says. “It’s about creating a nurturing family environment. We cook together here and we eat together.” Serena has some catering experience. She took a month’s course a few years ago, and worked for an outside catering company in her gap year. And the most popular dish? “Fajitas, because it’s a family sharing thing and they like a bit of spice, this lot.” She sends them home with recipe cards and she’s gratified when one girl, Maya, says she showed her mum how to make the pasta carbonara they did. But that, she says, isn’t the point. “Food represents memory and family and how you take care of yourself.”

This is not the twee rhetoric of “cooking with love”; it’s about therapeutic processes. The four children seem bright and happy here, but Guinness knows them well and tells me stories of their lives which talk of a greater darkness. The children and young people who come to Kids Company are generally 15 times more likely than the average to have experienced severe or extreme levels of emotional neglect. They are 13 times more likely to have experienced severe or extreme levels of sexual abuse. Half of them report having seen someone shot or stabbed in their community within the past year. But here, in this kitchen, making fish fingers and devising killer salad dressings, they get to be themselves.

“Cooking here is about freedom of expression and letting out feelings, maybe through pounding things,” Serena says. “Our cooking sessions are great containers for kids who might display quite complicated behaviour at school.” The children are arranging their dressed salads on the plate. Serena waves the oven tray of fish fingers. Esther says, “How many do we get?” Serena looks at them. “Four to start off with?” Esther says “How about five?” Five it is.

I leave them to eat, and head over to the Arches II, five minutes walk away, so named because it replaced the first arches in Peckham where Batmanghelidjh started Kids Company back in the 90s. There are art therapy rooms here and a gym and many other units besides.. But right in the middle is the dining room, a colourful galleried space of round tables. Both it and the gym next door are crammed with children still in school uniform, eating BBQ chicken legs, glossy under dollops of sauce, crisp hash browns, dumplings and salads. A large team of adults, both Kids Company key workers and volunteers, oversee the evening dinner. The feeling is less cafeteria than raucous family meal, just on a large scale.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Chefs George Stewart and Hubert Robinson. Photograph: Richard Saker for Observer Food Monthly

Leading the team in the kitchen is Hubert Robinson, bald pate shining under the lights. He has been head chef here for 15 years. When they seem him on the street the children call him uncle or dad. “Food is the first step,” he says, in a brief break from plating up. “First you get them fed. Then you can look at other things.” Can they do seconds if they’re asked? “Sure we do seconds. We make sure they get enough.”

Spanish-born Maria Nieto came here as a nurse four years ago. “I see a lot of children with dry skin which is the first sign of malnutrition,” she says. “Obviously some are extremely thin but there are others who are overweight. Which is a sign they are eating badly.” Too many, she says, will be sent to the fried chicken shop to load up with nutrient-low chicken and chips as a replacement for a proper meal. I ask her if she ever finds herself judging the parents. She shakes her head. You don’t know the reality of their situation, she says, and judging the parents makes no difference whatsoever to the reality of the predicament the children are in. They’re the ones who need looking after.

“I try to educate parents, but it can be a vicious cycle for them. I go to their houses and see. They don’t have enough money so they live in terrible accommodation, perhaps they don’t have access to a kitchen. Or if they do it’s in a terrible state.” Avoiding becoming emotionally involved with the children is far trickier. “But we have emotional support here,” Maria says. All Kids Company staff are offered therapy once a week to deal with the issues that arise from helping children, so many of whom come from those abusive backgrounds. “It’s a way to flush out the system.”

I sit down next to David, just seven, who says he’s been coming “for a long time”. Recently he started bringing his little cousin along. “The first time it was scary,” David says, “but the adults look after me.” I ask him why he thinks the children come. “Some people have food at home and some don’t,” he says simply. At one of the tables set up for dinner in the gym I find 16-year-old Sharon who has been coming since she was 11 years old. In her case, she says, the issue isn’t a complete lack of anything to eat at home. “But if I eat here, there’s enough for the others to eat at home.” So how important is this service? “For some people here it’s very important. It’s all they have.”

It is the awareness of each others’ predicament which is most striking. These children know what it is like to be hungry. They know how much they all need this meal service, the thing the rest of us assume is just part of life. And then they get here, get their plates of chicken and dumplings and the unfamiliar kindness of adults, and for a while over a plate of good food life is a curious kind of normal. It is the normality of the Kids Company meal service which is the most extraordinary achievement of all.

All children’s names have been changed. Visit kidscoplatepledge.org to learn how you can help