The man who is fervent about feeding hungry kids, but hates food banks | Aditya Chakrabortty

Along the road sped the white Transit van, carrying its precious cargo. In its back were stacked rows of black Thermo boxes containing 750 freshly made children’s lunches. Chefs had been making them since around 4.30am that morning, working in a large kitchen on a small industrial estate a few minutes from Liverpool airport. Now it was just gone 9.30am and we were driving them over the bridge to north Wales and the playcentres of Flintshire.

For some children at the other end, this white van contained their first meal of the day. Simon Bazley, a play worker at the biggest centre of the lot, Quayplay, said, “If they don’t get school meals, some of them won’t eat. They come here hungry and angry.”

None of this is unusual. For around 13 weeks of the year when school is out, free meals are over – and family poverty across Britain is pitilessly exposed.

Here, in the sixth-richest country in the world, up to 3 million children spend their school holidays at risk of not getting enough food, according to an investigation by a cross-party group of MPs and peers. Their , published last summer, contains testimony of a child vomiting “because their diet consisted entirely of crisps”, as well as a group of kids dropping out of a football tournament “as they had not eaten a meal” for days beforehand. “Their bodies simply gave up on them.”