You know, my mum, she'd done the best she could.
I remember we used to go to a shop called Pound World and everything was under a pound and,
you know, we'd sort of schedule out the week.
So we'd get seven yogurts and you can have one yogurt a day and this is all going on at a time where kids should be concentrating on schoolwork and it's just crazy to think
that this is still going on at this,
you know, we're in 2020 now and it's just something that I don't believe should be happening.
One Saturday in early November,
the 23-year-old Manchester United footballer Marcus Rashford was celebrating his team's victory over Everton when he received an unexpected phone call.
It was Boris Johnson who wanted to personally inform him of the government's decision to spend an extra £170 million to support low-income families over Christmas and the coming year.
Rashford is a star striker who has spoken about his own childhood experiences of relying on free school lunches and food banks.
More than one million people signed his petition demanding free school meals for disadvantaged students over the holidays.
There is also an ongoing outpouring of empathy on social media.
The extra government money will go to local authorities to support thousands of vulnerable children,
many of whom simply don't have enough to eat due to the economic crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
It is the second time this year that Rashford has forced the government to change its policies In June,
it agreed to keep funding meals for poor students over the summer holidays after initially resisting.
Welcome to LSEIQ.
I'm Joanna Bale and this is the podcast where we ask social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question.
This month we are bringing you a mini-episode asking, how can we end child poverty in the UK?
Kitty Stewart is Associate Professor of Social Policy at LSEI and Associate Director of LSEI's Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion.