When it's too hot to cook, feeding people is still the job

The Met Office has a red extreme heat warning on Wednesday and Thursday, with 38°C forecast and the UK Health Security Agency's heat-health alerts already running. Most of the advice you will hear is about you — drink water, stay out of the sun. I want to talk about the other person: the one you feed, or could.

Heat is a care problem dressed as a weather problem. The people most at risk are often the ones who eat least well in it — the very old, who lose their appetite and their sense of thirst; anyone living alone who will not cook a hot meal for one when the kitchen is already an oven. In a heatwave the danger is not only the temperature. It is the quiet slide into not eating, not drinking, not bothering, because bothering feels like too much.

So the kitchen's job this week is not to be clever. It is to be cold, easy, and shared.

Cold first, because a working oven in a 30-degree flat is its own small cruelty, and because food you do not have to cook is food you will actually eat when you are wilting. This is not light eating in the diet sense — forget all that — it is simply matching the food to the weather so that people get fed. A proper plate of cold food is a full meal, not a punishment.

Here is one that works, costs little, and asks nothing of the hob. For two: drain and rinse a tin of butter beans and a tin of chickpeas. Tip them into a bowl with a tin of good tuna (or a block of feta, crumbled, if you would rather), a cucumber cut into rough chunks, a handful of cherry tomatoes halved, and whatever soft herbs you have — parsley, mint, both. Dress it with three tablespoons of olive oil, the juice of a lemon, a teaspoon of salt and plenty of black pepper. Mix with your hands. Eat it cold from the fridge, with bread if you have it. It keeps overnight and is arguably better on day two. That is dinner, done, with the windows open and the oven cold.

But the recipe is the smaller half. The larger half is the door.

If you have an older neighbour, or someone on your street who lives alone, the most useful thing you make this week might be theirs, not yours. A second portion of that bowl, carried round in a tub. A jug of water with ice and a cut lemon, left in their fridge. It sounds like very little. In a heatwave it is close to everything, because the risk the alerts are really flagging is isolation as much as temperature — the person who simply stops, alone, in a hot room, and whom nobody checks on.

This is what the paper means when it keeps asking what we do when we are not working. Care is the answer that has been there the whole time. It does not show up in productivity figures. It rarely shows up in the news. But feeding someone — actually carrying a cold meal to a hot flat and sitting with them while they eat it — is among the most human things a free hour can be spent on.

It is too hot to cook this week. It is never too hot to feed someone. Make the cold bowl. Make two. Knock on the door.