Cooking for someone is quite possibly the oldest and most elemental expression of love, solidarity and caring. Community – or the lack of  – is one of the modern world’s biggest worries. Casserole Club is a community food-sharing project developed by public service digital and design firm FutureGov, which began as a pilot scheme in Surrey in 2011. It asks “Could you cook one extra portion of dinner for an older neighbour?” Like a local, community-led meals on wheels project, the aim is to connect keen cooks with communities, and especially to ensure older neighbours all get a home-cooked meal once a day.

Cooks sign up using the Casserole Club website and diners sign up to the project via local groups and people they know and trust. The club also helps facilitate matches and meal-sharing, hoping friendships develop over dinner and strengthening local neighbourhood relationships. Currently at work in local areas across England and Australia, 7,000 people have signed up to take part in the service to share thousands of meals – and counting.

Chris Moss has been writing on travel, tech, sex, food, art and books for nearly two decades. He co-founded street paper Hecho en Buenos Aires, writes regularly for the Guardian and Telegraph newspapers, and is now writing a thriller set in Andalusia.