Fighting hunger in NOLA

 On Monday (11/16) and Wednesday (11/18), I volunteered at New Orleans's Second Harvest Food Bank. Second Harvest food bank  feeds communities in 23 parishes across all of southern Louisiana. The organization distributes 32 million meals annually and has been distributing even more food since the pandemic began.

I was interested in volunteering with Second Harvest because I want to help people struggling with food insecurity. When I was a teacher, I saw firsthand the effects that food insecurity had on some of my students. This motivated me to want to help fight hunger.

To be frank, I was expecting my time at the food bank to be quite boring and monotonous. I thought that I would struggle to stay awake while mindlessly filling boxes of food. To my surprise, the work was incredibly thought-provoking. As I scooped pasta onto tray after tray, I kept imagining each meal's recipient. I wondered if a tray would make its way to a young child or a septuagenarian. Envisioning a meal being enjoyed by its recipient made me want to sneak an extra meatball onto every single tray. At one point, I was told that I was putting too much pasta into the trays and that I needed to stick to exactly 4 ounces per tray. I began to take bits of pasta out of the "over filled" trays and, despite the task seeming mundane and meaningless, I felt genuinely sad. I never expected myself to get so attached to the imaginary people I assigned to each passing tray. 

Overall, I enjoyed my time volunteering at the food bank and will continue to do so in the future. The other volunteers were nice and I enjoyed our conversations as we packed trays, peeled sweet potatoes, and cubed vegetables. I was even pushed outside of my comfort zone when I had to assemble trays of raw chicken breasts. I dissected cadavers as a teenager without issue but for some reason handling raw meat makes me feel uneasy. It was nice to be challenged but next time I may just stick to veggies.

While I was volunteering at Second Harvest on 11/16, the news channel 4WWL / WWLTV filmed a segment about the food bank. The video can be found here. Photos from that day are below.