A Useful Way to Spend a Sunday Morning -- Capital Area Food Bank

If you've ever wondered what happens to nonperishable food that is mislabeled or slightly damaged, some members of the Beltway Atheists can tell you. On Sunday, March 1, 18 members of the Beltway Atheists volunteered at the Capitol Area Food Bank (CAFB) in Washington, DC.

The CAFB primarily serves as a distribution center for surplus food, distributing 20 million pounds of food ever year to over 700 partner agencies. While there are many different sources of this bounty of surplus food, some comes from food drives or in enormous bins of slightly damaged packages from grocery stores. All of this food needs special and careful handling before it can be distributed to partner agencies according to their needs.

After arriving at the food bank, Beltway Atheists members were shown an orientation video about hunger in the community and given instructions for their task of the day: packaging sorted food items into smaller boxes. For the next three hours, they pored through metal bins that were waist-high and several feet wide in order to neatly pack each box with variety of food in the same category (pasta, pantry goods, canned meats, etc). Boxes were taped shut, labeled with markers, and neatly stacked against the warehouse wall. After the warehouse was swept clean to guard against pests, they were done for the day.

It was a fun and social way -- and perhaps more important, a useful way -- to spend a Sunday morning. In the Washington DC Metropolitan Area, 633,000 people are experiencing hunger or are at risk for it. Of these, 200,000 are children. All of us are faced with a choice: we can hope that the world will get better and ask an imaginary friend to make that happen, or we can take actions that have a tangible effect. This past Saturday, the Charitable Works Committee of Beltway Atheists voted to return to the food bank quarterly.

This article was written by Michigoose - Co-Chair of the Charitable Works Committee. More information on this event is available here.

Submitted by shelley on Wed, 2009-03-18 14:15.

The CAFB primarily serves as

The CAFB primarily serves as a distribution center for surplus food, distributing 20 million pounds of food ever year to over 700 partner agencies. While there are many different sources of this bounty of surplus food, some comes from food drives or in enormous bins of slightly damaged packages from grocery stores.- Thank you