More Than Just a Meal: Stella Stewart on 700 Daily Meals, Modified Food, and Why Elderly People Deserve Better from Government
Stella Stewart has spent 30 years with Fife Council — managing eight residential care homes, running three Meals on Wheels kitchens, and delivering 700 community meals a day across Fife by a fleet of 30 electric vans. In this episode she talks about the meal that arrives with a welfare check built in, a centenary birthday party attended by the Lord Lieutenant of Fife, and why there should be legislation protecting Meals on Wheels the way there's legislation protecting school meals.
Stella Stewart set the scene before the episode even started — roller banners positioned behind her in the Fife Council care home where she's based, the same ones she takes to hospitals when she's out promoting the service. The phrase printed on them, \"more than just a meal,\" turned out to be as close to a summary of everything she said as anything Rob Spence could have scripted.
Stella's role covers eight residential care homes, three Meals on Wheels kitchens delivering 700 daily community meals and afternoon teas across Fife, and sheltered housing buildings where she oversees catering and cleaning for tenants. She's been doing it for ten years in this specific role, and for thirty years with Fife Council before that — working her way through education catering contracts, community food and nutrition education in areas of deprivation, and a training coordinator post writing and delivering programmes before the care home job came up. She also trained as a nurse. When the position appeared, she says, it encompassed everything she'd ever done.
She's been there ever since.
Her passion for the sector is direct and personal: she believes elderly people are sometimes forgotten. The schools side of Fife Council's facilities management works hard for children — rightly so — but she keeps coming back to the idea that the people who built the world we live in deserve to be looked after in the same spirit. That belief shows up in the detail of what her team actually does. Breakfast is cooked to order from seven o'clock in the morning. There's home baking every day. Two courses at lunch, two at dinner, and an alternative menu of fourteen options — baked potatoes, omelette, soup and a sandwich — because some days a resident simply doesn't want what's on the menu, and that should be fine. Modified meals for residents with dysphagia are treated as a matter of inclusion, not just clinical management: the food goes up looking palatable because that matters. Stella is currently working with Glasgow College through the NACC to develop and deliver a training course in food modification, and every member of her catering team will be going through it. She's genuinely excited about that.
Subscribe wherever you listen — and if you know someone in Fife, or anywhere else, who could benefit from a Meals on Wheels service, this one's worth sharing widely.
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