Vacation Food Collected for Needy - Coastal Review Online
HOLDEN BEACH — Many a beach visitor has been perplexed by the end-of-vacation question: What to do with all the leftover food. For many, the garbage can is the answer, but that solution disturbed one beach resident so much 10 years ago that he decided to offer an alternative. “I’m of the generation where it was just a sin to waste food,” said Bill Spier, 81, a Holden Beach resident. So Spier parked himself, his 1990 Nissan pickup and a food-donation sign where departing vacationers couldn’t miss him in the parking lot of Holden Beach Chapel, less than a block from the Inland Waterway bridge. Nonperishables go to the food pantry at Brunswick Island Baptist Church on the mainland. Downs has worked with Spier from the beginning, when, he said, “I really didn’t recognize the need. But now that he’s seen “people elderly, people that have lost their jobs,” he said, “it’s been more of a blessing for me” (than for them). News of Holden Beach’s A Second Helping , spread up the coast to Emerald Isle and Topsail Beach and Surf City, where residents began their own versions last summer, collecting more than 6,000 pounds of food. Source: www.coastalreview.org
