2008 Food Fight: Battling Hunger!

Despite the dark skies and rainy weather, six champions participated in a Wings Eating Contest on Saturday, the first event in the week-long Food Fight competition to raise food, money, and awareness for hunger issues in the United States. Food Fight is an annual food drive started in 1997 by the University of Michigan through the SGA and Global Citizenship Council. The contest pits the top business schools against each other in a friendly competition to collect food and monetary donations for Feeding America (formerly America's Second Harvest). The event kicked off on Saturday with a Wings Eating Contest at the BUS and will run through Friday, November 21st.

Brad Tisdahl, representing Section 3 won the wings contest after eating 26 wings in only 5 minutes. Other competitors in the contest included Jason Clark (Section 1), Mike Holland (Section 2), Matt Turner (Section 4), Lucas Rauch (Section 5) and Mark Leo (Section 6). To raise money, members of each section have been asked to donate money per wing eaten by their wing contest competitor.

The three primary goals of Food Fight are to collect food and monetary donations for affiliated food banks across the country, raise awareness of poverty and hunger among business school communities, and to foster friendly competition among the top 25 Business Schools. Eleven other schools will be participating in this event, including MIT (Sloan), NYU (Stern), University of Chicago, Northwestern (Kellogg) Purdue, Yale, and more.

Each school is ranked through the total pounds of food collected for their local food bank during the week of Food Fight. In addition to food, cash donations are also accepted with each dollar counting as seven pounds of food. The winner of the competition will be ranked #1 and awarded the annual Food Fight trophy.

In addition to the Wings Eating Contest, this year's campaign will feature a silent auction. Also, students are encouraged to drop of non-perishable goods in the bins in the student lounge or at any of the week's events.

In 2006, about 3.8 million households accessed emergency food from a food pantry one or more times. Feeding America (formerly America's Second Harvest) is the nation's leading hunger relief organization. In 2007, the official poverty rate in 2007 was 12.5%, of the total US population, an increase from 2006. The Feeding America network of over 200 food banks provides food assistance to more than 25 million low-income people facing hunger in the United States.

Food collected by The Ross School at the University of Michigan will go to Food Gatherers, the Ann Arbor Feeding America affiliate. Since its inception in 1998, Food Gatherers has distributed over 33 million pounds of food. In any given week in Washtenaw County, 5,569 different people receive assistance from the Food Gatherers' network. Food Fight is an opportunity for MBA students across the country and here at Ross to give back to the local community and minimize hunger during the holiday season.