Mother’s Day marks the first day of the annual Feed the Kids food drive in New York City by City Harvest, a food rescue organization dedicated to feeding the city’s hungry. Feed the Kids brings together companies, organizations and individuals to collect kid-friendly, non-perishable food during the month between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day – May 13 to June 17, 2012.
City Harvest is also partnering with the New York Mets through the team’s season-long hunger relief program, Feeding the Big Apple Presented by Hain Celestial. Students from P.S. 12 in Queens will be rewarded for collecting more than 2,000 pounds of food during the 2011 Feed the Kids food drive, more than any other school, when the Mets drop by their school at the end of May to play catch.
The Feed the Kids campaign helps stock shelves at community programs during the summer so children who depend on meals at school will not go hungry. In 2012, City Harvest hopes to collect 160,000 pounds of food that will be immediately delivered to more than 600 community food programs.
City Harvest says the most needed foods are canned fruit, canned vegetables, peanut butter in plastic jars, packaged macaroni and cheese and hot and cold cereal (family-sized packages).
Throughout the year City Harvest collects excess food from the food industry, including restaurants, grocers, manufacturers and farms. This year they will collect more than 38 million pounds of food.