Yes!
Yes!
Oh, god.
Sorry, Martha.
Yes!
Yes!
Yes!
Yes!
Yes!
Yes!
Yes!
This is my daughter Martha. She's 10, she's asked me to come along and give us some support.
We've done a little talk where Martha and I were going to read, so I'll be Martha for a bit and we'll see how we go.
Hey, I'm Martha, I'm 10 years old. It might be better if you do it.
Martha lives in Loch Gillpedd in Argyll on the west coast of Scotland and she lives on a small holding with a family with us.
A small holding is what we call a tiny farm and we try and grow enough to eat ourselves with some extra to share.
It's fun growing up with animals and plants and the sheep come running when they see Martha and the pigs try to knock her over and the hens peck at her boots.
But when her friends visit, what they love to do is pick apples from the tree and pick berries from the polytunnel and she's quite accustomed to me coming home with a deer which I hang in the garage and she comes to the slaughterhouse to see her lambs away.
She wrote, I'm not an expert on food but I do like living with my food and there you can see a little sister Polly and where we live.
One day last year, Martha came home from school really excited, her teacher and so many of these stories do start with an inspirational teacher.
Her teacher had asked her to write like a journalist and she'd written about the sinking of the Titanic and she'd loved doing it.
Over supper that evening between mouthfuls, Martha declared, I want to write every day like a journalist.
And I did that whole dad panic thing when one of your kids suggests doing something educational.
You want to encourage them but not be so keen that you put them off.
And so I suggested she wrote a blog and I think I even suggested that blogs were cool.
Martha said, I didn't know what a blog was at first, they looked like a cross between a paper with only one author and a diary.
And the best ones had pictures and ratings so I decided to copy them and I had the perfect subject I wanted to write about my school dinners.
So I contacted the school and asked permission and being the great school that it is, the answer came back very quickly from the head and it was yes.
I thought it was a brilliant subject as dad, writing every day was always going to be a real challenge.
But between her school dinners and the food we produce, I thought there would always be something to say.
So that evening, Martha and I sat down with the laptop firmly on her knee and set up the blog.
Because of her age, being under 13, she used my email account and we just followed the instructions.
Martha said, I want to call it more please after Oliver Twist but someone had already taken it.
But because we're not allowed to go back for a second helping at school, she decided to call her blog Never Seconds because there were never seconds for her.
And we had to give it a description because when you set a blog up, you get a series of instructions.
And so we gave it a description, one primary school pupil's daily dose of school meals and then we also had to write something about the author.
And being kind of sensible, Martha decided that she was going to keep her name secret.
And she called herself Veg and I kind of thought, so I came up with a Latin bit to keep it.
But one of the things that Martha had found when she looked at other people's blogs was that she really enjoyed blogs with photographs and blogs with ratings.
And so she came up with a list of ratings that she enjoyed.
And your two favorite ratings were pieces of hair and number of mouthfuls.
And it's because Martha found a piece of hair in a school dinner and she thought it would make people smile.
And she was always hoping that it would be zero, it would never be found.
And one of the special things that Martha liked about her blog was the fact that there was a publish button.
And when she clicked it, that's when she felt like a proper journalist.
We were so busy lambing on our farm that I completely forgot about Martha's blog.
Being a small-scale farmer in Scotland doesn't stop me from being one of the proudest.
Scotland has amazing produce.
From the school kitchen, you can see sheep and deer on the hills.
In the bay beyond the school, fishing boats use pots for lobsters and prawns.
Salmon spawn in the hills behind the house.
You kind of get the picture.
Scotland has great food and we are lucky that it's right on our doorstep.
And then Martha showed me her first school dinner photograph.
She wrote on it, I need to concentrate all afternoon and I can't do it on one croquet.
Do any of you think you could?
No.
She wrote, I was being honest, not mean.
I know some people think I was being mean, but I think it's because my photo embarrassed a lot of adults.
And I think that's the reaction that we received.
I tweeted about Martha's blog once that evening to my kind of 200 followers.
By 8pm, 10,000 people had visited the blog and were tweeting about it.
By the next morning, there were 25,000 hits and I found myself writing a letter to her teacher.
Just thought I ought to let you know.
So whilst Martha was at school that day, journalists were using Twitter.
They were going back through what I'd written.
They were using my description of my identity and they were starting to track us down.
They were trying to get hold of us and it was really scary how quickly it happened.
So we're back to Martha's writing.
She says, it was really hard.
Everyone wanted to speak to me and so we decided to do one interview for the radio.
I was asked about my lunches and then a lady from the council came on
and told the whole country that it was my fault.
And that really upset me.
Journalists a couple of days later were invited to go to the school for lunch
and the kitchen changed everything for them but it only lasted one day.
It didn't feel fair at all.
What kept me going were the children from around the world who sent me in their dinner photos.
And that's what happened.
Children responded and they did what Martha was doing.
They went to school with their cameras.
They took a picture and they sent that back in with their ratings.
And so from Israel and Finland and China and America and Brazil
and loads more the photos came in and the friendship was developing.
And one little girl called Annie sent Martha a lunch photo from Taiwan.
And because Martha put it on a blog, Annie featured on the Taiwanese 6 o'clock news that night.
And I think what the council didn't realize was that she had made many friendships across the world.
So we're back to me now.
School dining halls are so often at the heart of a school
and I really do feel the school dining hall is an opportunity to teach the next generation about food and healthy eating.
Lunchtime shouldn't be just about refuelling.
Lunchtime should take its place as one of the most important lessons in the school every day.
Schools I think can instill really good healthy eating habits that can last a lifetime.
And studies show time and time again that if decent school lunches are served,
then pupils' results improve.
Teachers comment that well-fed kids behave better in class as well.
In Scotland, we're facing the growing cost of treating weight-related diseases
and we shouldn't be squandering these chances to tackle the problem.
I'm back in Martha mode now.
Someone commented on my blog that I was lucky to get a meal at all. They were right.
I have helped my grandpa raise money for a charity called Mary's Meals for years.
They provide free school dinners in a place of education in 16 of the poorest countries around the world.
Children can go to school instead of working or looking for food.
Because of a school meal, they get an education.
My blog was getting 50,000 hits a day, so I started a just giving page and managed to raise £2,000.
It was brilliant.
Enough to feed more than 300 kids like me for a whole year.
And things were starting on me again.
APPLAUSE
Of course, as a parent of a nine-year-old who becomes suddenly very famous,
you get very, very nervous and you get quite scared by all the press attention
and TV cameras phoning you up and saying we're going to come and see you
and us saying, well, no, thank you. But by this point, things were starting to die down.
A month after her first blog and encouraged by chefs like Rene, Nick Nair,
and Jamie Oliver and Raymond Blanc, Martha was still photographing.
She was still writing and she was still scoring her dinners.
And her dinners were improving. Salad was available to help yourself too
and there was fruit for everyone.
And then on June the 14th, she had a little slip.
She was running a race. She loves running.
She stumbled, she broke a wrist and she was in a stookie,
which is what we call in Scotland a plaster.
And she gave her meal 10 out of 10 because she could eat it with one hand.
LAUGHTER
And this was the last meal that Martha blogged before...
Well, in Martha's words,
the next day my headmistress took me into her office.
She told me I wasn't allowed to blog anymore and she showed me a photograph in a paper.
There was a photo of me cooking at a school food event with Nick Nair
and there were flames coming out of the pan.
And above it it said, time to fire the dinner ladies.
It wasn't a very funny joke.
It wasn't my fault either.
I was very upset and everyone in school knew I was banned
and some weren't very kind.
This is me.
So I phoned the council.
It was after school. They hadn't contacted me.
Martha told me in the car.
I remember apologising to them and saying, oh, I'm sorry, this might blow up again.
And in return I was phoned by the director of education.
He wasn't a happy man.
He spoke of unwarranted attacks.
He made me feel bullied and he laughed a lot when I spoke to him on the phone.
But whilst he was on the phone giving me grief,
Martha was quietly writing at the table in the corner
and she wrote a farewell post on Never Seconds,
which has been viewed 2 million times now.
And she wrote, this morning in maths I got taken out of class by my teacher
and taken to her office.
I was told that I could not take any more photos of my school dinners
because of a headline in the newspaper.
I only write my blog, not newspapers.
And I am sad I am no longer allowed to take photos.
I will miss sharing and rating my school dinners
and I will miss seeing the dinners you send me too.
I don't think I will be able to finish raising enough money for a kitchen
for meals either.
Goodbye, Veg.
And the reaction was immediate.
In the next 24 hours I received 11,000 emails.
I am still answering them.
At one point we were getting, for a few hours,
we were getting more than a thousand emails an hour.
Twitter lit up, trending across the globe was Martha Payne,
Never Seconds and Mary's Meals.
Newspapers, TV, radio, they blocked the hospital switchboard
where Martha's mum works as a doctor,
trying to get hold of Martha in any way they could.
But by one o'clock that afternoon the decision had been reversed
because her friends and supporters had risen as one
and backed her across social media.
And the whole world then wanted to meet the nine-year-old girl blogger
who had defeated the council with her words.
Back to Martha.
Whilst mum and dad answered the phone,
I was at my Just Giving page.
People weren't just supporting me,
they were supporting my favourite charity, Mary's Meals.
Every time I hit the refresh button the total acclaimed.
I was aiming for 7,000 pounds to build a kitchen in Malawi,
but it went through that and didn't stop.
By the end of the day we'd raised 35,000 pounds.
A week later it was 100 and now it's 130,000 pounds.
So when Mary's Meals asked me what the sign should read on the kitchen,
I said, friends of never seconds.
Back to me.
When Martha's school term ended, other schools guest-blogged.
The blog was written as it travelled across the globe to Wales
and South Korea, Australia, Finland, Canada, America
and finally back to Martha, but not in Scotland, in Malawi.
Martha had faced bad food, bullying and bans.
Visiting Malawi brought balance to the experience.
There was no way out and we're joined by a BBC documentary team.
This is Martha.
Being a kid in Malawi is tough.
Kids there just don't have.
They don't have beds.
They don't have toys.
They don't have electricity or water.
And most of all they don't have food.
The markets sell everything in one meal portions,
one spool of oil, one egg.
Beans are sold one by one.
Families have to grow food to survive
and kids must work together to help.
To me, a school meal in Malawi is a life-changer.
Kids don't have to spend the day struggling to find food.
They go to school knowing they will get a mug of likeunipala.
It's a porridge made from maize and soya.
Mary's Meals buys the ingredients in Malawi.
A Malawi company mills and delivers the sacks to the kitchens
where volunteers, the kids' mums, start before dawn
eating water on a special wood-fueled stove.
And Martha says,
Every morning you see kids walking to school with their mugs for their porridge.
They waved them to me and shouted because they saw my Mary's Meals t-shirt.
When I got to Larangwe, where our kitchen is,
the whole school lined up and sang.
It was a wall of sound.
A thank you for a new kitchen and the promise of a meal every day.
The head teacher took us into her office.
And on the wall was pinned a thick wad of papers.
It was thicker than this.
It was thicker than all this put together.
And it was tightly written.
Date, name, age.
Date, name, age.
Date, name, age.
And it was the school death record.
Every line, a child lost.
Tragedies that Mary's Meals is working to prevent
the nourishing school meal that now reaches 755,000 children every day.
And so kids are growing up stronger, brighter,
and with an education that helps break the cycle of poverty.
Martha says,
I don't eat my school lunch without thinking of the 2,000 children in Larangwe eating theirs.
They sit outside and the whole school goes quiet as they eat.
There's just the soft sound of porridge eating.
Watching children share a mug so they can take the other home
for their family is heartbreaking.
Once every last mouthful has been eaten,
it's like a switch has been thrown and bang!
There's energy again.
There's football. There's clapping. There's skipping.
There's energy to learn. It's brilliant.
It's changing the world one school dinner at a time.
Back to me.
Somehow Never Second's got kids talking about their food in a different way.
We started a community of children using the internet to share with those that have less.
So please join in with us.
£10.70, 95 Krona, feeds a child for a year.
I reckon my little farm could feed about 20 people for a year.
Martha's little blog is feeding this year 14,000 children.
So please join us, grab our book which raises money,
and stop those names being added to that list inside the Headteacher's office.
And Martha wrote, she wanted to end by saying,
I've met loads of amazing people because of my blog,
and when they say to me I've been brave, I say only a little bit.
I tell them they should meet the kids in Malawi
because they are this brave every single day.
Thank you.
