Countywide : Scouts to Pick Up Food on Saturday

Boy Scouts will be walking throughout the county Saturday to pick up canned food for the poor from thousands of households.

Boy Scout representatives say they hope to collect cans from more than a quarter-million homes in their “Scouting for Food” project, which they say is the largest food drive in the county. About 25,000 Scouts plan to participate.

The canned food will be donated to the Food Distribution Center in Orange, which supplies 230 community and religious organizations in the county with food for soup kitchens, food banks and emergency supplies.

Richard Lamm, program manager at the distribution center, said the goal is to collect at least 450,000 pounds of food this year.

“But we don’t know if we’ll make that, because of the tough times,” Lamm said. He said the holiday season is the time when food is most needed, because so many charitable organizations feed the hungry then.

Lamm said the Scouts’ drive is the largest single source of food for the distribution center.

The Scouts “are very enthusiastic because they can do something as a regional effort,” Lamm said. About 40% of the food goes to children and an additional 16% goes to needy senior citizens, he said.

The Scouts have spent the last week distributing hundreds of thousands of bags to residents around the county, with a note asking for two cans of meat, fish, stew, chili or vegetables.

Residents may also donate dried food, Lamm said.

On Saturday the Scouts will return to county households to pick up the bags of food and take them to one of 25 collection sites around the county.

Members of the National Guard will help sort, box and load the donated food onto military supply trucks at the collection sites, and then will deliver it to the Food Distribution Center.