CANNONVILLE, Utah (March 18, 2023) — At 9:00 a.m. on Saturday, youth groups from Cannonville began picking up bags of canned food as part of the statewide Feed Utah food drive, the biggest locally-driven food drive of the year.
The town had been preparing for the event all week. Leaders and youth groups spent a significant amount of time taping flyers and door hangers on doors and making sure everyone in town knew how to help.
That morning Cannonville residents donated over 200 cans, along with a number of chips, rice, granola bars and cereal boxes. These added up to about 20 grocery bags of food! That may not seem like much, until you consider that the number of cans donated surpassed the population of Cannonville by about 40!
Cannonville wasn’t the only one either. Towns and cities across the state participated — with the partnership of the Utah Food Bank, Macey’s grocery store, JustServe and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — to donate foods such as canned meats (beef stew, chili), peanut butter, boxed meals, and canned fruits and vegetables.
Utah Food Bank Statistics
In a blog post, the Utah Food Bank estimated this food would go to some “289,000 Utahns and 1 in 9 Utah kids who are unsure where their next meal will come from.”
Last year the food bank provided 56.1 million meals to those in need across the state. About 2.5 million pounds of that was donated through food drives. Though food drives provided only two percent of the total items collected and distributed by the Utah Food Bank, they brought a variety of food groups that can’t be acquired elsewhere.
The food collected by the food bank goes to:
- Emergency food assistance for adults and children across the state.
- Mobile school pantry, going to schools and families.
- Kids cafe, providing snacks and evening meals for kids to take home.
- Mobile pantry program for areas without access to a traditional brick-and-mortar pantry.
- Food box programs for elderly citizens living in poverty without access to a food pantry.
“It is rewarding to see so many partners working alongside us to fight hunger statewide,” said Utah Food Bank President & CEO Ginette Bott. “We are still distributing record-setting amounts of food as the need for assistance remains high thanks to rising food costs and other inflationary pressures. Your support is needed now just as much as during the height of the pandemic.”
– The Byway
Feature image caption: Over 20 bags of cans were collected from the Cannonville food drive.