A World Food Prize event in Des Moines this week has set a verified Guinness World Record.
Nearly one million hunger relief meals were packaged by over a thousand volunteers in just one hour. The effort is part of marking the 40th anniversary of the World Food Prize.
“Half of the meals will stay in the Midwest and in Iowa,” World Food Prize Foundation CEO Tom Vilsack said. “The other half will be distributed around the world to help families in need.”
Each meal containes rice, soy protein, dehydrated vegetables and essential vitamins and minerals. Volunteers worked along 60 assembly lines set up in the Iowa Events Center to fill bags with those ingredients. “People from all walks of life, every age, every political persuasion, every religion,” Vilsack said. “We were one single community with a single focus.”
Organizers say the nearly 990,864 meals produced would be enough to provide over 2000 chldren with nutritious food for an entire year. The previous Guinness Record for this kind of operation was just over half a million meals produced in an hour.
The World Food Prize event was sponsored by the Meals from the Heartland organization and Purdue University as well as corporate sponsors Cargill, Growth Energy, Holganix, NCMIC, Niman Ranch.
