The Day Food Network Skips Lunch

By: Emily Silman

Skip lunch, you say? At Food Network? Blasphemy! But don't worry, it's all for a good cause. Every year, our office participates in the "Skip Lunch, Fight Hunger" event that benefits City Harvest, an innovative local NYC food charity. In their own words: Now serving New York City for over 25 years, City Harvest is the world’s first food rescue organization, dedicated to feeding the city’s hungry men, women and children.

What they do is quite cool: City Harvest's fleet of trucks rescues perfectly edible food that would otherwise be thrown out at restaurants, event venues, farmers markets, office buildings and grocery stores, and then redistributes that food to soup kitchens and food pantries across the city.

In fact, our own Food Network Kitchens participates in City Harvest food donations every Friday -- you see them in action at Food Network by going here. City Harvest has a lot of other great programs, and they've teamed up with Food Network's official charity partner Share Our Strength(SOS) to provide SOS's " Operation Frontline" nutrition and cooking education classes in New York (which I'm actually a volunteer for!)

The Skip Lunch, Fight Hunger fundraising idea was dreamed up by Dana Cowin, editor-in-chief of Food & Wine magazine and one of City Harvest's board members. The premise of the idea is simple: brown-bag your lunch for a day, then take what you would have spent on lunch and donate it to City Harvest. Lunch in New York is rarely a cheap proposition, especially in our temple-to-gourmet-food office location of Chelsea Market. One can easily spend $10 here on just a sandwich and a drink. But according to City Harvest, that $10 would help feed seven children for a week.

This year's fundraiser is today, May 6th, and many of our employees will be chipping in their lunch money to help support City Harvest's efforts to make sure no New Yorker goes hungry. If you'd like to learn more about the fundraiser or would like to make a donation online, visit www.skiplunch.org.

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