The five-minute warning bell rings and students begin scrambling to gather all of their stuff and head off to class.  Inevitably, students who do not finish their lunches will toss their remains of their lunches in the trash.

What these students may not know is that Drop Squad, a school-sponsored club, provides an alternate solution to wasting food.

“We try to collect unopened, nonperishable food items about once a week,” club co-president Emily Andrews said.

Drop Squad aims to collect these items at the end of a lunch period. They then donate the food to the Manna Food Center in Gaithersburg.  The club does not advertise their food collections very often, however, because they typically just walk from place to place, asking for items.

“The purpose of our club was to conveniently collect excess food that people have in their school lunches, so we just go around during lunch, asking people if they have any unopened, nonperishable food items that they are not going to eat and want to donate,” Andrews said.

The club tries to meet once a month.

“At the meetings, we assign days for members to collect and figure out times to bring our cumulative collections to Manna,” Andrews said.

According to vice president Luke Hall, the club is working on efforts to increase their overall membership.

“We are just trying to gain membership in order to increase the amount of food we collect and are able to bring to Manna,” Andrews said.

According to Andrews, they plan on hanging posters around the building and utilizing the Daily Dose to expand their membership.

There are many ways in which the club can increase its publicity so that more students are aware of its work.

The next time students think that there is not enough time to chow down on their Utz potato chips, they should keep in mind that there is another home for them besides the trashcan.