Enough food to feed 23,000 children came out of the St. Edmond Catholic School elementary gym this week.

That food, in the form of packaged ingredients, was made by 168 students of the school, working in two shifts.

Each shift spent 45 minutes bagging up rice, freeze dried vegetables, and vitamin and mineral powders. That combination may not seem enticing to our American appetites, but for the children in Honduras, where the meals are heading, the food will be not only nutritious, but potentially lifesaving.

”It’s a really good thing to do,” St. Edmond High School freshman Levi Odor-Westrum said while filling boxes with the bags of food. ”And it makes you think about others. Here in America, we are used to having something to eat. It’s nice to think about others.”

The St. Edmond students were the latest members of our community to participate in such a meal packing event. The meals were packed for Then Feed Just One. There have been several other meal packaging events held in Fort Dodge in the last few years. Each one is a marvel of precision assembly line work by volunteers of all ages, most of whom had no previous experience in such tasks.

While the organizations overseeing the meal packing events and the eventual destination of the meals have varied, some things have remained the same. The ingredients, for example, seem to be pretty standard for each meal-packing effort.

The big thing that remains unchanged throughout all these efforts is the care and dedication of the local residents who participate. At every meal packing event, volunteers spend their time making sure that people they will likely never meet will have something nutritious to eat. It is a noble effort, and the students of St. Edmond are the most recent people to continue it.