For the next few days, I will hate onions with a passion.

Why?

Well, I think sorting the good onions from the rotten ones and then repackaging them had to do with it. First, lemme tell you the whole story.

Today, I went on a school field trip to a large food bank that provides food to people who are in desperate need of it. For those who don't know, a food bank is a place that accepts donations of all kinds of food and redistributes it to homeless shelters, food pantries, and soup kitchens.

Anyways, my school is having a food drive and the food we receive is going to go to the food bank we visited (and that's why we went there in the first place). Originally, we weren't going to do any volunteering (packing food), but something came up and we had an opportunity to volunteer.

The older kids went on the packaging floor since you have to be above 12 to do that and the younger students went and labeled boxes in another room. Since I was older than 12, I got to go on the packaging floor to repackage onions.

We had to repackage the onions because the food bank recieved its onions in large bags with about a hundred or so onions in each and we had to take the "good" ones out and put them in smaller bags while we threw out the rotten ones. For sanitary reasons, we all wore disposable gloves like the one your dentist might wear while examining your teeth. Thank you since I touched some pretty nasty onions that were black and mushy and others had what looked like a fungus on it. Eww. For your info, we threw out more onions than we repackaged. That's how bad the onions were.

Anyways, we got the job done and after that, we took a tour around the warehouse. Very interesting things there. I saw a machine that was designed to crush hundreds of cans of food that were dented or expired into relatively small cubes. Wonder where the juice in the cans went? Well, they are drained out of the machine into large barrels and mixed with other unusable food and given to pig farmers in the area as pig food for free.

Well, that pretty much sums up my trip to the food bank. Please feel free to ask any questions and give any comments. Also, I'm glad I ate my lunch before I went there...

~SB~