JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — A University of North Florida program that turns leftover hospital food into free dinners for older residents of Jacksonville, Fla., has passed 250,000 meals delivered in Duval County, a milestone that comes as food and gas costs keep climbing for people on fixed incomes.
Meals on Wings is run through the university’s Center for Nutrition and Food Security in the Brooks College of Health. It now serves about 300 seniors who are referred through neighborhood community centers, and student volunteers make drop-offs three days a week.
The food comes from hospital kitchens. When patients order more of one entree than another, the unused trays are set aside rather than thrown out. The university lists Mayo Clinic, UF Health, Baptist Health, Ascension and Brooks Rehab among its hospital partners. Students collect the surplus, portion it into ready-to-heat meals in a campus kitchen and take it to seniors in low-income neighborhoods.
One regular stop is a Kings Road site, the Schell-Sweet Community Resource Center, where a recent run brought 120 meals for 30 people. Seniors there say the meals stretch their grocery money and help them stick with goals such as controlling blood pressure.
The need is real. The center says hunger among older adults in Northeast Florida runs close to twice the national rate, with about 1 in 7 seniors going without enough food, and it puts the Duval County food insecurity rate at 12.6%. The program has also recovered more than 185,000 pounds of food that would otherwise have been wasted.
Meghan Niemczyk, the program’s advisory chef, already teaches cooking classes at the Kings Road center and hopes to open a community kitchen on the UNF campus where residents could learn to cook healthier meals. The program says cash gifts are the most useful way to help, and UNF students can sign up to volunteer through Osprey Impact.
Filed under: Jacksonville FL Health News
