This past weekend, our Cub Scout pack held a drive-thru food drive. It's the time of year we'd usually do our door-to-door Scouting for Food event, but with Covid that was not happening this year.
We ended up with great weather and collected 1,080 pounds of food. As part of the process, we sorted any expired food out and I brought that home, opened it, and fed it to the chickens. Any packaging that could be was recycled or composted.
There wasn't a ton of expired food, it worked out to a couple of 5-gallon bucketful's once opened, but it was nice to keep that waste out of the landfill, and to save the food pantry the sorting time they'd have had to spend going through the donations.
The food donations stay super local in our community, actually to the same church food pantry where we have been donating our eggs.
This is so important because there is so much need in the community. I am writing this on Wednesday evening (Veteran's Day). I dropped off six dozen eggs at the pantry earlier today, as they are open Wednesday nights from 4-6 PM. I made my drop at 3:45 PM, and there were already 20 cars lined up waiting.
Those six dozen eggs put us over 200 dozen eggs donated so far this year. Considering this is still our "building" year, that feels pretty good. That being said, the increased production that next year will bring can't get here soon enough.