How to Have a Heart #5

Written by: Kate Snyder, Executive Assistant

How to Have a Heart for Hunger

#5 -- Organize a Food Scavenger Hunt

Try a Food Scavenger Hunt for a fun and easy variation on the traditional food drive theme. It’s especially good for groups of kids – youth groups, school classes, neighborhood play groups, etc. – but is also endlessly fun for the perpetually young at heart.

Here’s how it works:
1 -- Create a list of scavenger hunt items and assign them point values (see below for a sample).
2 -- Divide your pack of participants into however many teams you like.
3 -- Assign each team an adult leader (or just a team leader if you’re doing this with adults, and I highly recommend that you do some time. Nothing says bonding like scouring the neighborhood with your friends for a frozen turkey).
4 – Distribute bags (preferably cloth—let's be good to Mother Earth, shall we?).
4 -- Decide on a time limit .
5 -- Hit the streets! (If you’re covering a large area or have high hopes for collecting large quantities of food, you might want to have a driver with each group so that you don’t have to carry thirty tons of groceries with you from house to house).

At the end of the designated time limit, count up the point values for the foods collected and whichever team has the highest number of points wins! The great thing is (and this is a wonderful opportunity for a “teaching moment,” by the way, so take note) that everyone really wins because the more food you’ve collected the bigger a difference you will be making in the lives of our less fortunate community members.

Feel free to assign whatever point values you like to food items but here are some ideas to get the creative juices flowing:

Peanut Butter -- 5 points/jar
Jelly/Jam -- 3 points/jar
Macaroni and Cheese -- 1 point/box
Canned Soup -- 2 points/can
Juices -- 1 point/fluid ounce
Spaghetti Sauce -- 5 points/jar
Pasta -- 3 points/box
Canned Tuna -- 1 point/can
Hamburger Helper -- 3 points per box
Frozen Turkey* -- 50 points

* Why the fascination with frozen turkeys, you ask? Call it sentimentalism. When I was in high school, my youth group did a food scavenger hunt and my team was the undisputed victor due in large part to the fact that for some mysterious reason (it was nowhere near Thanksgiving) my family had a nice chubby butterball turkey in our freezer. So feel free to put some tricky items on the list. It makes it more fun.