Wolfpacking! 300,000 meals, 9 hours

NCSU students and faculty will pack meals for Africa, Asia and Central America

On Saturday, students and faculty at N.C. State University will outdo the obligatory soup kitchen service project many times over.

In the space of nine hours, they hope to pack 300,000 meals for hungry people in Africa, Asia and Central America.

The massive food-packaging blitz, possibly the biggest ever in the Triangle, is a joint venture between NCSU and Stop Hunger Now, an international hunger relief organization with offices on Clark Avenue, just across from the campus.

About 1,500 students and faculty have signed up, including 175 community members of all ages. Working in three shifts at Carmichael Gymnasium, these volunteers aim to pack high-protein meals on an assembly line.

"We're building a constituency of young people who absolutely know they can make a difference on hunger," said Ray Buchanan, founder and president of Stop Hunger Now.

The collaboration between the university and the hunger relief agency is not the first. At least four previous food packaging events have taken place at NCSU, but none as big as this one. The idea dates to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, when Mike Giancola, director of the university's Center for Student Leadership, Ethics and Public Service, accompanied Buchanan on a trip to Sri Lanka. During the long bus rides in that country, the two hatched plans to help students realize their responsibilities as global citizens.

"Our vision is to help prepare leaders to be involved in the community locally and internationally," Giancola said. "We started talking of ways we could work together."

Before packing the food, representatives from Stop Hunger Now will spend 15 minutes educating volunteers about world hunger. More than 30,000 people die of starvation-related causes every day, despite enough resources in the world to feed the estimated 850 million people worldwide afflicted by hunger.

Then, volunteers will sit at long tables and measure helpings of rice, textured soy protein, dehydrated vegetables and chicken flavoring into plastic bags. The four ingredients, fortified with vitamins and minerals, can be boiled in water 20 minutes and turned into a nutritious casserole. In Haiti, recipients of the food packages often add red beans. In Mexico, they add chilies, and in Indonesia dried shrimp, said Buchanan, who has traveled to each of the countries.

The raw ingredients cost only 20 cents a meal, or $60,000 for 300,000 meals. Half the money for Saturday's event was raised locally, and half was given by Virginia philanthropist John Hewitt of Liberty Tax Service.

Buchanan has big plans for future food packaging events. He wants to get other universities involved. Auburn University in Alabama has signed on and is leading an initiative called Universities Fighting Hunger.

"If you can tie learning to action, it sinks in faster than anything else you can do," Buchanan said. "It's an educational model with a lot of possibilities."

Imani Brodie, a sophomore at NCSU who participated in last year's packaging event and will return Saturday, can testify to that.

"The fact that you can see the meal you're producing gives you more incentive," said Brodie, a civil engineering major. "It's the idea that we can do something that affects people's lives."