"food bank" news and stories

Anyone writing checks to a college (or who caught the video of the Royal limo riot), knows that tuition is up worldwide, making any dollars for living -- books, housing, food -- tighter than tight. Low-income students, who may have received free or reduced-priced school lunch from pre-K to senior year, are hit especially hard. Enter the college food bank.

Laura Pick, a graduate student and coordinator of Oregon State University's (OSU) emergency food pantry, told Food Safety News: "Food pantries on college campuses are unique because they seek an underserved population of students that many people may not be aware is struggling."

OSU's food pantry, also open to the general public, serves upwards of 200 students each month. They usually open the doors "toward the end of every month because that's when people generally tend to run out of food stamps," says Pick. According to a September 2010 report by the USDA, food stamp numbers are up by about 50 percent, with 22,000 new applicants every day.

Pick believes every college should have a food bank, and OSU is now trying to partner with other colleges to get them started. UCLA also offers a food bank, which is run out of an abandoned storage closet. And we thought we had it bad with ramen and Easy Mac.

Aussie chef and Kitchen Daily expert contributor Curtis Stone spent Thanksgiving cooking at his girlfriend Lindsay "Lipstick Jungle" Price's parents place on the West Coast. "We did turkey and a beautiful stuffing, green beans and mashed potatoes, you know, it sounds really simple, but I think there's something really important with [keeping traditions] around food. I love sticking with traditions."

But the day after Thanksgiving found chef Stone on the East Coast, representing for one of his new traditions: Feeding America. At The Mall at Short Hills, New Jersey, Stone helped kick off a food drive for one of the network of Feeding America's food banks, the Community Food Bank of New Jersey.

The food drive was launched at the Mall's new Continental VIP Lounge from Chase, which gives shoppers who happen to have a Continental Airlines Chase credit card a place to check bags, sit in a massage chair for a little downtime between stores, and even get free gift wrap. We're not sure if chef Stone bought any gifts for Lindsay at Short Hills, but we know he's giving back big time through his work to help feed the hungry.

In Toronto's Union Station this week, there are people living in glass houses but they are decidedly not throwing stones. OK, it's not "people," it's one magician, and he's living in a glass box as part of a Halloween food drive.

As reported by The Toronto Star this morning, 25-year-old magician and social activist Scott Hammell is living in a glass box until 6 p.m. this Halloween in hopes passersby will stock his little 12-by-6-by-8-foot transparent digs with nonperishable goods for the Free the Children social justice charity, for which he works.

Grinning behind his plate-glass window, pumping away at his Twitter and Facebook accounts in his "Think We" T-shirt, Hammell tells the Star, he hopes people will make him "disappear" by filling the house's two-can-width glass enclosure. Sounds like an impending life-size Warhol to us, and one with admiral merit, to boot. We wonder how anyone could say no to this goofy guy (and fully support a national tour, by the way).

Even before the recession hit, food banks nationwide were struggling to collect the donations they needed to provide their clients with complete meals.

"With the takeovers and mergers in the food industry, producers got much more efficient," Larry Reynolds, vice president of food resources for the Second Harvest Food Bank of Middle Tennessee, explains.

While food banks don't shun the canned cranberry sauce and cereal boxes collected by well-meaning church groups and elementary schools, they've long relied on industrial donations – overruns and errors, mostly – to fill their pantries with protein-rich items. But as producers cut down on waste in the mid-1990s, all they had to spare were samples of failed food trials.

"A lot of stuff we got was snacks and sugaries," Reynolds says. "New cookies, new crackers, new sports drinks. It's not exactly nutritious."

What do you get when you combine hundreds of engineers, a charitable mindset and about a zillion aluminum cans?

You get Canstruction. Each year, major cities across the U.S. raise awareness about hunger by hosting building competitions, which are then deconstructed and distributed to local food pantries and day care and senior centers.

Since 1992, Canstruction has donated ten million pounds of canned food to organizations, and one hundred more competitions are scheduled for this year.

The designs range from an octopus to bowling pins to a lotus blossom, each carefully designed and meticulously constructed. And if you think the hot dog and condiments are cool, check out the gallery for more food-inspired designs.