Food, quite obviously, is important to the Suffolk Meals on Wheels program.

Fortunately for the 141 people who receive two meals a day, five days a week from volunteers working in the program, that food is prepared by the fine folks of the Sentara Obici Hospital Food Service Department, which means recipients are getting delicious, nutritious meals every time a volunteer knocks on the door.

Also, because the hospital’s food service workers are used to working with the special dietary requirements of patients with a huge variety of needs, Meals on Wheels recipients can be sure their own special needs can be met.

And since the program gets support from Obici Hospital, from grants, from fundraising efforts and from the work of volunteers, recipients benefit from low costs. Just $6 a day buys one hot meal, one chilled meal and two beverages every day.

All of those things make Suffolk Meals on Wheels a popular service for those who participate in it. The service isn’t just for elderly residents — people who are disabled can receive it too. The 141 current recipients are ages 41 to 93. Some doctors even write prescriptions for patients to receive Meals on Wheels.

But Meals on Wheels is about much more than just delivering food to people who might otherwise have a hard time getting or preparing it for themselves. One of the great benefits of the program is the daily social contact its participants have with the volunteers who deliver their food five days a week. Many Meals on Wheels participants live alone and would have little or no contact without those daily visits.

The program also allows for earlier release from hospitals and long-term care facilities and aids in keeping elderly and disabled people out of institutions altogether, helping them live in their homes longer before having to be transferred to nursing homes and similar facilities.

Folks who participate in Meals on Wheels can feel safer in their own homes, knowing they’ve got caring volunteers who are regularly checking on them.

And those volunteers are the ones who make the program such a success. In Suffolk, about 170 of them were honored — appropriately, with a meal — on Thursday.

For all they do to improve the lives of people suffering the frailties of age and sickness, these wonderful volunteers deserve and receive our sincerest appreciation.