I love my mail carrier. Even during the snowstorms last winter, she managed to get down our little dead-end country lane in Soddy-Daisy when I couldn’t even get down our driveway.
So now, I want to do something in return, and I’m urging you readers to do the same. This Saturday, leave a bag of canned and other nonperishable foods in a bag attached to your mailbox to help area mail carriers with their annual food drive, Stamp Out Hunger.
Now in its 19th year, the food drive has become the nation’s largest single-day food drive, according to the event website, stampouthunger.info. In 2010, nearly 1,500 U.S. post offices collected a record-setting 77.1 million pounds of food donations. For that, officials at the Chattanooga Area Food Bank are quite thankful, said food bank president Claire Sawyer.
“It’s extremely important to us,” she said of the food drive. “We get a lot of food in at Christmas, but around March, it starts to dwindle. So, by May, we’re in a world of hurt. The 70,000 to 80,000 pounds we get from Stamp Out Hunger keeps us going through the summer, which can also be a dry time for us.”
All you have to do to contribute is load up a bag of food – boxes of macaroni and cheese, oatmeal, Hamburger Helper, cereal, canned goods and other such foods that won’t perish over time. Attach the bag to your mailbox Saturday morning, and your carrier will pick it up and do the rest. It’s not too much to ask on your part, but it means the world to the folks served by the food bank.