What Happens To That Bag of Food the Boy Scouts Collect?

What does 24,000 pounds of boxed cereal, canned vegetables, rice, pasta and dried fruit look like?

Ask sophomore Tyler Heatley or junior Mitchell Kaiser. Or ask any of the other 100 or so Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts who took part in this past week's Scouting for Food drive in Rochester and Rochester Hills.

As Heatley and Kaiser explain it, it's the Scouts' biggest communitywide service project.

It's also the one with the most tangible impact.

"The food will go to soup kitchens and Gleaners and to people who don't have food," said Heatley.

"It helps everyone in the community," said Kaiser. "People that you see, you don't know what's going on with them, but you know you can help them."

Heatley and Kaiser are members of Boy Scout Troop 40, which includes scouts from all of the Rochester high schools and middle schools; the troop managed the food drive, which started last weekend with hundreds of scouts distributing plastic bags to homes. It ended Saturday with scouts picking up the full bags and delivering them to the parking lot in front of on Livernois, where the Gleaners truck awaited.

The Scouts estimate they filled 23 to 24 pallets of food; each pallet weighs about 100 pounds. The Gleaners truck was driving back and forth between the Rochester drop-off site and its Pontiac warehouse to deliver the food.

Scouting for Food is a regional stewardship project; it includes Oakland, Wayne and Macomb counties and involves hundreds of scouts. Last year, the project collected 392,725 pounds of food — enough to provide three meals a day for an entire year for 89 families of four.

For more about the project, see www.GCFB.com or www.GLCScouting.org.

 What? Your bag wasn't collected?

Because Scouting For Food is such a huge initiative involving three counties, there may have been a missed pick-up or two. That's okay; you can still help out.

The following area food banks are always accepting pantry food:

• 248-651-0622
• , 248-651-5836
• , 248-852-7400