Food Bank

Busy, busy, busy... let's start with Thursday afternoon! (More pictures here.)

I'm really fortunate to work for a company that encourages employees to volunteer and give back to the community, so I spent Thursday afternoon at the Capital Area Food Bank packing up bags of food for some of the 633,000 hungry people who live in DC.

Our job was to assemble 160 bags of food for a local food distribution center - the Food Bank doesn't give food directly to the poor; it distributes food to shelters, soup kitchens, day care centers, farm markets and so on. All the food they distribute is either donated or grown fresh on their 25-acre farm.

Each bag had a can of vegetables, a can of tomato, a pasta or rice product, a pantry product, a snack, a diet product, and a single-serve drink.

It got a bit surreal -- since we're dealing with donated stuff, some bags had a single-serve can of pineapple juice while others had a bottle of Godiva vanilla latte. Some bags got Carr's Water Biscuits; others got granola bars. Both Ramen noodles and flour are considered pantry products! But, I suppose that if you're hungry, pretty much anything tastes good.

We filled up two big wire cages with bags -- and then restocked all the leftovers into the right bins in the warehouse. Then we cleaned up and headed over to Colonel Brooks' Tavern for some dinner and a couple pitchers of beer. The fact that we could do that, that we could walk into a nice joint and eat, wasn't lost on us.

Once a month my group gets together and makes 100 PB&J sandwiches that we then deliver to a local homeless shelter; we've been doing that for three years now. I hope this volunteer effort also beomes a regular gig as well. It's such a small thing to do with such a huge benefit.

Plus, I can always juggle the Vienna sausage.

 Oh, and see the painting on the wall behind me? It's really all you need to know.