26,000 signatures is a real milestone.

We're not going to take credit. You deserve it all. Your shares have driven this petition - your compassion for those children who we all know will go hungry in the future if we don't take action today.

So first of all, thank you - and second of all, a furthering of the appeal... with some of my own history.

Thirty years ago, I was a child in poverty - when I was a child carer. My parents had a budget far too small for the "disability tax" imposed on my father by his conditions and by our society. They did their best to stretch the money to make all of my meals happen - but I knew they stretched it.

The stress came out in myriad ways - in anxiety that every meal be eaten, in their own obvious hunger, in my dad's at least partly poverty-induced eating disorder.

Today, I'm an adult with ARFID - Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder. I strongly believe that had I not grown up in a household with constant food anxieties - especially had I had access to proper nutrition at school, where I often went without lunches entirely and nobody particularly noticed or cared - then I would not have my endless unrelenting struggle with food today... a struggle that amplifies my own poverty.

Today, millions of kids are living in households either experiencing food poverty or increasingly at risk of it. Millions of kids know kids who are. The injuries that food poverty inflict on children are complex and long-lasting, with ongoing impacts for our wider society too.

It's a very vicious cycle: parents can't afford to feed children who grow up to be parents who are terrified of being unable to feed themselves or their children, and when they can't, the outcomes are almost always negative for everyone involved.

We have the power to end that cycle.

Please share this petition - and let's demand far better for children today and tomorrow.