I recently wrote about A Second Helping, an operation that takes food donations from those departing vacation rentals on the N.C. Coast. Well, I just heard from John Hodges, who started 2nd Loaf, the food recovery operation that begat A Second Helping.
Hodges’ group, a ministry from the Little Chapel on the Boardwalk, operates at Wrightsville Beach, N.C. They recover about 3,000 pounds of food each summer.
Hodges and the rest of his fellow congregants got the idea from a group called Second Loaf located in the western North Carolina mountains. In addition to sharing a name (sort of), the groups are affiliated. For those scoring at home, the lineage looks like this: Second Loaf–2nd Loaf–A Second Helping.
Second Loaf began as a way to redirect leftovers from gatherings at the National Presbyterian Church’s Conference Center in Montreat to the local food bank in Asheville, N.C. For those of you vacationing in N.C., there’s a “network” of vacation food recovery groups from the mountains to the sea.
OK, there are only five (that I know about), but it seems like the idea is spreading. Hodges wrote:
In the past 7 years we have had at least a dozen inquiries from tourists on how they can take this concept back to their tourist home towns. Though we do not keep official contacts with them, I’ve been told we have one in California, Arizona , Colorado and of course several up and down the NC Coast line.
