The University of Guelph’s new Gryphon Field House was a hectic spot Saturday as a new world record was set for packaging the most emergency relief meals in one hour.
The event saw about 2,000 people work in assembly-line fashion to package more than 300,000 meals of rice, soy, beans and a vitamin packet, sealed in a plastic bag.
“That’s 100,000 meals over our goal,” Gavin Armstrong, a U of G  student who organized the event, said in a news release.
“It’s amazing what an impact you can have in other people’s lives by working together for just one hour,” said Armstrong, who also organized a similar event a year ago on Johnston Green. This year’s event was moved inside because of the threat of rain.
Last year’s event saw about 160,000 famine relief meals packed to send to schoolchildren in Haiti. This year’s meals will be shipped to the West African country of Mauritania, which has been affected by severe drought and is one of the poorest countries in the world.
The food was sponsored by Kinross Gold Corp., which has several ongoing corporate social responsibility efforts in Mauritania.
Armstrong is planning other initiatives to help raise awareness and engage students to deal with emergency relief and hunger in a permanent and lasting way, the release said. For his efforts, he last year became the first Canadian recipient of the President William Jefferson Clinton Hunger Leadership Award.