Childhood hunger is one of the most urgent global challenges, with millions of young people facing food scarcity and malnutrition every day. The situation is worsening, as global hunger rates continue to rise. 

Magnus MacFarlane Barrow, founder of Mary's Meals, has dedicated his life to fighting this plague, driven by a calling from the Virgin Mary of Medjugorje during the devastation of the Bosnian war, where he witnessed the hunger and suffering of those around him. 

Now from one single shed his organization provides school meals to youngsters in extreme poverty and has reached millions of children worldwide offering them not only food but also an opportunity for education. 

We sat down with him to delve deeper into the topic and gain a better understanding on how Mary’s Meals addresses this hunger crisis. 

Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow — CEO of Mary's Meals: 
Our response is about providing one meal every day to the world's poorest children, always in a place of education. So, we meet their immediate need for food. But by serving always in school, we're enabling those children to come into the classroom and to gain that education that sets them free. 

Andreas Thonhauser — EWTN Vatican Bureau Chief: 
How much does that cost to feed a child per day? 

Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow — CEO of Mary's Meals: 
It costs $25 for us to feed a child for an entire school year, and that sounds maybe like a makeup number. It's real, you know, and it's possible largely because nearly all of this work we do is done by unpaid volunteers. Especially volunteers living in those impoverished communities. So, in Malawi alone, where we feed a million children each day, we have over 50,000 Malawian volunteers, people very often living in great poverty themselves and choosing to give this gift of their time. It's a very beautiful thing and it's a large part of the reason why the cost is so low. 

Andreas Thonhauser — EWTN Vatican Bureau Chief: 
This sounds very simple. How did you come up with this? How did this come about? 

Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow — CEO of Mary's Meals: 
I first did get involved when I tried to just do one small thing in in the early 90s, my brother and I decided to look locally, collect aid where we lived in Scotland and deliver that to the people who were suffering because of the war in Bosnia Herzegovina that was taking place then. This work of Mary's Meals was born 10 years later, 2002, and by then I was in Africa, working in an emergency feeding programme and I met this family. The father of the family had just died and the mother was dying. When I met them, she was called Emma. And I began talking to their oldest child, who was called Edward, and he was 14 years of age. And at one point in the conversation, I asked Edward: “What's your hope? What's your ambition?” And he said to me: “Well, I'd like to have enough food to eat. And I'd like to go to school one day.” And that was all his ambition at 14 years of age and it was really his words that prompted this whole mission. I loved that. The fact that this thing that's grown unexpectedly around the world was ignited by the words of a child. 

Andreas Thonhauser — EWTN Vatican Bureau Chief: 
How does your personal faith inform or influence your work? 

Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow — CEO of Mary's Meals: 
It informs everything. It's why I do this work, this work, by the way, is named after Mary, the mother of Jesus. It belongs to her. So, at the very beginning, after meeting Edward and starting out, you know, there were three important things. One was, you know, that we knew this had to be owned by the local community more than us. Secondly, we believed strongly that we wanted to use locally produced food. And then thirdly, and most importantly, we had this conviction that this new work belonged to our blessed mother, and we asked her. She showed us how to do this and that's not a small thing. It's a big responsibility to dare to do this work in her name to try and do it always in a way that does honour her, to do it in a way that does point to her son Jesus. And so, she's my boss, and she's a very good boss to have and we're also a universal mission. You know that we feel from the outside, God wants this simple work to be something that everyone's invited into. 

Andreas Thonhauser — EWTN Vatican Bureau Chief: 
What would have to happen that all children do not have to starve? 

Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow — CEO of Mary's Meals: 
That's our vision, that every child in this world should be able to eat a meal every day at school. And it's not just some nice sounding notion. It's absolutely possible. In this world in which we produce more than enough food for all of us to eat. Well,. I think there's this myth out there that hunger somehow is inevitable, or that there's not enough food in the world, or worse than that, that there's too many children in the world. None of those things are true. To provide a meal to all the children in the world's lowest income countries, who are currently without school meals it would cost something like $3 billion, roughly speaking. We spend about three times that amount on our pet dogs and just in the UK every year. So, this isn't really about what's possible. It's about what our choices are. 

Andreas Thonhauser — EWTN Vatican Bureau Chief: 
Thank you very much for being with us and thank you for all the work that you're doing, for the many lives that you've touched. 

Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow — CEO of Mary's Meals: 
Thank you very much. 

Adapted by Jacob Stein 

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