Sue Perkins counts down to pancake day – with seven bowls of porridge
Howard Lake | 3 March 2011 | News
A TV presenter and a champion porridge maker have joined forces to help feed some of the world’s hungriest children, in the the run-up to Shrove Tuesday, a traditional day of feasting in the UK.
Over the course of the next few days, Sue Perkins, known for her appearance in the ‘Supersizers’ series, and cook Anna Louise Batchelor, freestyle winner at the World Porridge making Championships, will be filmed creating seven different dishes.
The recipes and tasting sessions will be shown online to raise money for the charity Mary’s Meals, which runs school feeding projects in developing countries.
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All the recipes feature porridge, the meal given to children at the charity’s schools in Malawi, and one of the foods that christians in Britain could traditionally eat during lent, when fasting meant that rich foods like butter and eggs were not consumed.
The recipes and films will be shown on website See the Difference (www.seethedifference.org), a new initiative which helps charities to raise money and awareness through short films – and guarantees donors that they will see evidence of the difference their donation has made.
Sue said: “I eat porridge most days, I just take it for granted, but half way around the world it’s a life-transforming food. Mary’s Meals’ very specific remit is to feed children so they are full and able to study. What they do on one level is incredibly simple, but on another level quite profound. Education is the greatest gift you can give a child.”
Dom Vallely, from See the Difference said: “In the UK, Pancake Day is often spent enjoying lots of rich, luxurious food. We felt the days leading up to it were a perfect time to draw attention to the lives of children who don’t have enough to eat – focusing on porridge, a food that isn’t rich or a luxury, but can be delicious as well as life-changing.”
It costs less than £7 to provide a child in Malawi with a mug of nutritious, maize-based porridge every school day for a year. See the Difference hopes that the recipes will encourage many supporters to donate £7 towards the £3,563 needed to feed all the children at Mchenza primary school, in the Balaka region of Malawi, for a year.
“If we manage to raise enough money to feed these children, we will definitely be celebrating with a pile of pancakes, and maybe a bowl of porridge as well,” said Dom.
Mary’s Meals is one of over a hundred charity projects supported by See the Difference. Other small organisations who have benefited from high profile support through its films include Women and Children First, backed by Sarah Brown, and the National Bat Helpline, which has been supported by Chris Packham.
You can see the films online at Mary’s Meals or See The Difference.
- A happy charity pancake day (1 March 2017)
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About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.