On Wednesday, February 15th, about 40 members of our Park Center community visited the Brooklyn Park location of Feed My Starving Children(FMSC), an organization dedicated to providing nutritious meals to children in countries where starvation is far too common. The group representing Park Center was our very active Asian Club. Not only are they an active PCSH group, but they are great food packers. Over 15,000 meals were prepared during their 90 minute shift. An 'average' group of volunteers does closer to 10,000 meals per shift, proving once again that PC students are well above average! The students, along with a few adults, also had the opportunity to spend 30 minutes learning about what they were doing as well as sampling the product they packaged.

Representatives of FMSC explained how one cup of the meal we would be creating would satisfy a starving child for a day. They described how the stomach of a starving child had shrunk and how larger amounts of food as well as certain products such as meat would not be digestible and be wasted. The meal we would create, a chicken flavored rice-a-roni type product, was specially formulated by food scientists from Cargill and General Mills and has been very well received overseas, as well as by the Asian Clubbers who rushed back for seconds of the sampler cups we were offered.

According to FMSC, 40,000 children, like these in Haiti, die from starvation each day in the world.
Feed My Starving Children began in 1987 as a project of a Minneapolis businessman during a humanitarian visit to Honduras. He returned to the Twin Cities and used the resources of his manufacturing company to explore a method of large-scale relief. After an acceptable food product was created, a manufacturing system that was low cost and efficient needed to be put in place. The work that the Asian Club did in the Brooklyn Park plant could be done by a machine, but the machines would add a cost to the production that would decrease the return for the dollar. Plus, as FMSC told us, the machine wouldn’t package any love with the food product. The ‘machine’ that would provide high efficiency and packages of love was you and I, the volunteers of the Twin Cities area.

Both the original Brooklyn Park factory and a new Eagan building run about 4-5 two hour shifts of volunteers packaging on a six day a week basis. The shifts run during the day and into the evenings. Many groups come back on a regular basis. The most prevalent volunteers include churches, schools and corporations although I saw several pictures on the wall of kids who chose to have their birthday party packaging food. Each shift uses a maximum of 40 volunteers staffing 4 assembly pods. Other volunteers work in the warehouse refilling bins of food product, moving boxes and labeling bags. When everyone gets into the rhythm it is a fun-filled beehive of activity.

The product is assembled by taking a prescribed amount of chicken/vitamin powder, adding a medium scoop of dehydrated vegetables, a large scoop of both rice and protein-rich soy product. The package is weighed by another volunteer, sealed by yet another and loaded into boxes for shipping. The Asian Club students took turns trying different jobs. Adults truly seemed to have as much fun as the students. It was fun to watch the students taking ownership for their work and charity.

Feed My Starving Children has a website, www.fmsc.org, where you can sign up to package food, read more about the program, or offer monetary donations.

-PCSH Webteam