Lesson From Frozen Meat by Caelan

Lesson From Frozen Meat by Caelan - April 2022 Scholarship Essay

It was not until I was thirteen years old and sorting frozen meat, did I really understand how good my
life was. I come from a middle-class two-parent household. My parents have stable teaching jobs with
good savings and have enough extra cash for the occasional vacation. Because of my situation, I really
did not understand that other people do not have it as good as I did: even people in my own community
for that matter. I honestly did not understand the privileges I had until I was in 8th grade.
My family is fairly religious. We attend our Presbyterian church every Sunday morning and volunteer
with them quite often. Every year my dad and I volunteer at the Northeast Regional Food Bank warehouse.
I have been doing it since I was at least five years old. The food bank collects all the boxed and canned
foods not suitable for selling, like expired food not yet gone bad or food with damaged packaging, sorts it,
and sends it across New England to smaller food banks and homeless shelters. Each year the church
volunteers and I throw out the not usable food into large cardboard shipping containers and package the
salvable food for others to use. As a kid I really did not think about where all the food was going to or
even who needed it, I always thought about how cold the warehouse was and how fun it was to race my
dad on who could sort the most items.
When I was in eighth grade, all the church volunteers and I walked into the warehouse and all we could
smell was rotting meat. In front of us were two large cardboard shipping containers filled with thousands
of pounds of meat, from all types of animals. Our job was to sort the meat and package them up into four
feet by four feet boxes. We got to work, all of us with thin plastic gloves that did not save our hands from
the cold or the sliminess of some of the items. About five minutes in, me being the teenager I was, I said in
disgust, “Why do we get the meat?” And someone replied along the lines of, “Well someone has to do it,
people need this.” Right there it really hit me, people need this. People need to eat this meat because they
cannot afford to buy the fresh meat from the local grocery store as I could. From that day forward
volunteering gained a new meaning for me. I realized that my contribution of simply volunteering for
hours at a time was allowing hundreds of families to eat and even live. I never had to wonder whether or
not I was going to have enough food on my table, yet these people had to every single day.
As people say, it really was a reality check for me. I started volunteering at the foodbank multiple times
a year, instead of waiting to go as a church group. My dad is the teacher adviser for Key Club at his
school, which got me inspired to join my own school’s Key Club and get involved with the volunteer work
that they have. I started to do Crop hunger walks in Albany, and I went to neighbors, family members, and
friends asking for contributions to help those in need. I even became more involved in my local Boy Scout
troop, with projects like helping an elderly man chop wood for his wood stove and helping build
community buildings.
It all became clear to me that I needed to help my community because people were dependent on it.
Now years after I was lugging around frozen meat in a cold warehouse in upstate New York, I continue to
volunteer with a newfound sense of helping others, one that took me thirteen years to realize.