At Elkhart Community Schools in Indiana, students receive two meals a day at school – breakfast and lunch. Some students don’t have food to eat at home, and they count on these meals at school; otherwise, they’d go hungry. 

One side effect of preparing food for students at school is that there’s often extra food. Have you ever wondered what happens to that extra food? The schools didn’t know what to do with the food, but they were hoping to put it to better use than just throwing it away.

Then they found out that some students didn’t have anything to eat at home on the weekends. These students would get their two meals a day at school, but when Saturday and Sunday rolled around, they went hungry.Thus, an idea was born.

Elkhart Schools decided to try an experiment. They teamed up with a non-profit named Cultivate that takes extra food from places like restaurants and catering companies and turns it into frozen meals.

Jim Conklin from Cultivate said, “Mostly, we rescue food that’s been made but never served.”

The South Bend based non-profit is working with Woodland Elementary for the pilot program. They are using leftover food from the school cafeteria to create frozen meals for students to take home on the weekends. That way the students will have food to eat when they’re not at school, and the food won’t be wasted.

Even though this program is new, it’s already making an impact. Elkhart Schools hopes to bring this new program to other area schools.

For more information about how this new take-home food program works, watch the video below.

Do you think other schools across the country should adopt a similar take-home food program? Do you think a program like this could help students in your community?