Boy Scouts Collect Food for Needy : Hunger: Youths give their time to help the disadvantaged and discover that good will is still in abundance in this post-holiday period.

Aaron Hoke usually plays basketball or baseball on the weekends.

But Saturday was different. Hoke, 15, of Santa Ana, and a handful of other Boy Scouts took time off from their usual activities and collected canned and packaged food for the hungry in Orange County.

“We’re doing this for the needy, for the people without any food,” Hoke said. “It makes us feel proud and lucky that we have enough food ourselves and can give it away.”

Hoke, an Eagle Scout, attacked a table laden with hundreds of canned and boxed foods, stacking them into brown boxes with the speed of a grocery store bagger.

He and his fellow Boy, Cub and Explorer Scouts from Orange County had distributed plastic bags in neighborhoods Feb. 3 as part of the “Scouting for Food” campaign. They collected the bags, filled with canned goods, Saturday morning and boxed the food to be trucked to the Food Distribution Center Serving Orange County by evening.

Their efforts were part of a national campaign by the Boy Scouts of America to combat hunger. Most regions ran their food drives before Thanksgiving, but the Boy Scouts’ Orange County Council and five other councils in Southern California waited until this month to start their drives, anticipating the post-holiday shortage, said George Trosko, Orange County Boy Scouts director of support services.

“We’ve become so self-centered these days. We all say, ‘Me, me, me,’ ” said Carl N. Karcher, chief executive officer of Carl Karcher Enterprises, the parent company of the Carl’s Jr. restaurant chain. “This gives us . . . the chance to take a little time off to express concern for the other person.”

Karcher was chairman of the Scouts’ food drive in Orange County.

The local Scouts expected to collect 1 million containers of food. Last year, they gathered 810,000 containers. Only the Boy Scouts’ Council in St. Louis collected more, Trosko said.

The Boy Scouts “expect people to put a can or two in the bag when (the Scouts) leave it at their door,” Trosko said.

“In Orange County they don’t do that. They fill the whole bag. The bags are so full some of them are splitting.”

National Guard trucks hauled the boxes of food from 36 collection centers at church parking lots throughout Orange County, such as the one in Orange where Andrew Ashton worked.

“We could be playing baseball, but we decided to be here today to give our time,” said Ashton, 16, of Santa Ana. “It’s only one Saturday in a year, and the people need it. We have all the other Saturdays. The poor people aren’t going to benefit from us playing baseball.”

Once at the Food Distribution Center, the canned goods will be dispersed to 217 nonprofit agencies that reach an estimated 150,000 hungry and homeless, said Dan Harney, the center’s executive director.

“We’re so affluent here, we don’t understand it,” Harney said. “We don’t have starvation or swelled bellies, but we do have hungry people.”