Local food bank receives 7,500 pounds of pork

Hoosier Hills Food Bank, a Bloomington organization that distributes food to agencies in six Indiana counties, makes about 30,000 pounds of food available to the hungry every week.

HHFB receives goods from restaurants, grocery stores and food distributors who donate excess or damaged products.

More than 100 food drives contribute to HHFB annually, according to its website.

HHFB programs such as Plant-a-Row for the Hungry and gleaning efforts have brought thousands of pounds of produce to the food bank, but in a HHFB press release from Monday, Julio Alonso, executive director, said protein is harder to come by.

“It’s not donated in large quantities, and it’s expensive to buy,” he said.

Indiana Pork, Feeding Indiana’s Hungry and the Indiana Soybean Alliance started the Million Meals Program with the goal of distributing one million pork meals per year to the hungry, according to FIH’s website.

The group will donate 7,500 pounds of frozen pork to HHFB.

“We distributed 29 percent more food last year than the year before, and we’re up almost 20 percent in the first quarter of 2010,” Alonso said in the press release. “Meat is the number one request of our member agencies, and it is something we can’t always provide.”