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Help Is In The Can: If You Build It, They Will Eat

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: February 14, 2008

PORT RICHEY - Can one can of food really be a catalyst in fighting hunger?

The design and construction professionals behind Canstruction say it can. So do the operators of The Volunteer Way, a local faith-based food bank.

The idea of Canstruction is to build structures solely from full cans of food. Just imagine it and teams from the United States and Canada have built it: an hourglass, eagle, ocean liner, bowling pins, bonfire, gnome, Chinese dragon, cathedral, lotus blossom, lion and lamb, yellow submarine, "The Thinker," even the carnivorous plant from "Little Shop of Horrors."

Have a look at the designs from previous competitions at www.canstruction.org.

At the close of exhibitions in North American cities, all of the canned food used as building blocks is donated to local food banks for distribution to emergency feeding programs that include pantries, soup kitchens and senior centers.

Participating in The Volunteer Way's contest so far are Atelier Architecture, Schenkel Shultz Architecture and Gresham Smith & Partners.

People who donate money or canned goods to The Volunteer Way will be eligible to vote for the local Canstruction winner. Entries will be on view March 24-30 at Gulf View Square mall off U.S. 19 north of Ridge Road in Port Richey. An awards gala is at 6 p.m. March 29.

The New Port Richey-based charity offers:

•Free food, training, sundries and assistance for homebound seniors to other nonprofit groups

•A Brown Bag Program that provides low-income seniors with 40 to 60 pounds of food every third week of the month when their Social Security checks run out

•A "recycling" program called Reaping The Harvest that puts nutritional food from supermarkets, restaurants and other food handling businesses on dinner tables instead of in trash bins. Last year, the program recycled more than 1.1 million pounds of food.

•A Kids Against Hunger Food Drive that helps stock the shelves in the 60 food pantries, soup kitchens and domestic violence shelters that depend on The Volunteer Way

Food is in such short supply right now that the organization's officials have been considering raising their own produce and other crops. "I have never, ever seen it as bad as it is now," Chief Executive Officer Lester Cypher said.

A recent shipment of 40,000 pounds of food from a regional supplier was gone within a day, Cypher said, adding, "That's something, isn't it?"

About 10 to 20 new applications are filed each day at the food bank, said Martha O'Brien, Cypher's assistant.

"We distributed 6.5 million pounds of food to families and other food pantries and soup kitchens; all this was given free of any fees," Cypher wrote in the 2007 annual report, released Friday.

For information, visit www.thevolunteerway.org; call (727) 815-0433; fax to (727) 848-5494; or e-mail lester @thevolunteerway.org or martha@thevolunteerway.org.

Since Canstruction's inception, some 10 million pounds of food have been donated. Initiated by the Denver, Seattle and New York Chapters of the Society for Design Administration in 1992-93, Canstruction has more than 100 individual competitions scheduled during the 2007-08 cycle.

Teams have 12 hours to defy logic and gravity as they assemble structures from thousands of cans of food.

Carl Orth of The Suncoast News contributed to this report.

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