Uneaten Cafeteria Meals Feed Hungry Indiana Students On Weekends

SOUTH BEND, IN — A disturbing fact in America is that nearly 13 million children are hungry and don’t know what they're going to eat in their next meal — or if they’ll get a next meal. That’s one in six children. An elementary school in Elkhart, Indiana, saw how much cafeteria food was being wasted because cooks prepared too much and decided to do something about it.

The Woodland Elementary School partnered with Cultivate, a South Bend-based nonprofit, to rescue the wasted food and provide weekend meals for students who don’t have enough food to eat. Through the end of the school year, 20 Woodland students will receive backpacks, each filled with eight individual frozen meals to get them through the weekend.

Elkhart Community Schools plans to expand the food-rescue program to more of its buildings, news station WSBT reported.

Cultivate founder and CEO Jim Conklin told the news outlet that “over-preparing” food by large food-service businesses and catering companies “is just part of what happens.”

“We take well-prepared food, combine it with other food and make individual frozen meals of it,” Conklin explained of the food-rescue process.

The Elkhart Chamber of Commerce’s Leadership Academy pitched in to help Woodland Elementary start the program.

“It’s making a big impact,” Melissa Ramey, the Chamber’s director of business development, told WSBT. “I am proud of that. It was heartbreaking to hear that children go home on the weekends and that they don't have anything to eat.”

The program helps the school, too. Natalie Bickel, supervisor of student services and attendance officer for Elkhart Community Schools, told the news outlet that “a lot of food” is wasted, but there weren’t better options before the partnership with Cultivate.

Food Insecurity A Problem In Indiana, U.S.

The Elkhart children who aren’t getting enough to eat aren’t alone, in Indiana or across the country. No Kid Hungry, a nonprofit group dedicated to easing hunger in America, offers a startling view of the extent of the problem.

More than 19 percent of Indiana children under the age of 18 live in households that are considered “food insecure” — that is, at some point during a given year, they’ve been uncertain about whether there would be enough safe, nutritious food to go along, according to data from the hunger-relief organization Feeding America. Nationally, 17.9 percent of children, or about 13 million, are considered food insecure.

Programs like Elkhart Community Schools’ food-rescue pilot project address the problem in the short-term, but No Kid Hungry notes that five out of every six of the millions of kids who rely on free or reduced-price meals don’t get free meals in the summer. In fact, the national summer meals program reaches just 16 percent of U.S. children, the organization said.

No Kid Hungry offers a texting service that to date has helped more than 1 million families find free summer meal sites in their neighborhoods.

More information about how to help kids is found on the Cultivate and No Kid Hungry websites.