The East Meadow High School gymnasium on Saturday morning transformed into an assembly line of student-athletes packaging fortified meals to benefit children and families facing food insecurity.
In less than two hours, the group of about 100 students, all wearing hairnets, packaged 20,000 meals with rice, soy and dehydrated vegetables, through a partnership with the nonprofits Rise Against Hunger and Million Meal Project.
As music from Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus and Outkast blared from a speaker, the students worked in teams to measure ingredients, fill and seal bags, and package them into boxes. Rise Against Hunger, based in North Carolina, distributes the meals to international communities.
At 10:44 a.m., a volunteer placed the final bag into a box, and soon afterward a gong sounded three times as a pair of students yelled into a microphone: “20,000 meals!"
“Athletes are committed, so when they decide to do something, they’re good,” said Mariquita Blumberg, whose family, based in Edgemont, founded the Million Meal Project in Westchester County.
East Meadow junior Callia Chung proposed hosting an event at her school and brought the idea to athletic director Rachel Barry. A three-year varsity cheerleader with an eye toward community service through events like a breast cancer walk, Chung said an Instagram post caught her attention from a friend who participated in a similar event at Manhasset High School in February.
Chung said pairing the event around Thanksgiving was fitting. Like most of the students Saturday, she said she envisioned it involved putting bags of chips or cans into boxes.
“When I came and I saw this, I was like, ‘Oh, this is fun,’ ” she said.
The students mostly broke into four groups. At the first tables, they measured one cup each of rice and soy to place in a bag along with a scoop of dehydrated vegetables. A second group weighed and sealed the bags before the students at a third table labeled them. At the final table, students worked in tandem to load 36 bags into a box to then place on pallets outside.
“It makes me feel so good that we’re helping so many people,” Chung said.
Each bag contains six servings. One box with 216 meals can feed a student in school for a year, Blumberg said.
Anthony Vaber, event manager for Rise Against Hunger, said the boxes are transported to Union, New Jersey, where they’ll be stored in a warehouse until the nonprofit has accumulated 20 pallets of 66 boxes each.
Then they request a container for overseas shipment. At that point, they find out the destination.
Blumberg said a recent shipment went to Vietnam. Others have gone to the Philippines and South Africa.
Junior Tommy Primrose, a three-sport athlete, said many of the participants also were members of the school’s Athletes Helping Athletes club.
“It’s really cool, kind of hands-on and filling the bags,” he said as he filled bags with soy.
Barry said the event could become a tradition for athletes to participate in community service on the weekend that bookends the fall and winter high school sports seasons.
"We're definitely very proud of them," she said.
