Move over Regina. Toronto has just nudged you out – by some 18,800 kilograms – for the title of world record holder in the amount of food donated by a city over 24 hours.The new record of 119,068 kilograms was raised in one day by the Greater Toronto Apartment Association for the Toronto Daily Bread Food Bank, easily smashing the previous Guinness world record of 100,244 kilograms set two years ago by Regina.
"I've always said that Toronto is the greatest city in the world," Bonnie Hoy, co-ordinator of volunteers for the drive, told the cheering throng of some 100 people at the food bank's warehouse on New Toronto St., near Islington Ave., yesterday evening. "And the city just proved it all over again."
Starting Tuesday at 6:30 p.m., volunteers canvassed more than 160,000 apartment suites in 1,000 buildings in the Greater Toronto Area asking for donations, said Brad Butt, president of the apartment association.
Fifty trucks worked through the night hauling the food to the west-end warehouse, where each container was weighed, recorded by a panel of independent referees, and then moved to a nearby storage area. The final figures were sent to Guinness, and officials hope the record will be verified in a few days.
"I think the residents who live in those buildings should be very proud of themselves," a happy but exhausted Butt said last night.
"It feels great to break the record but more importantly we're battling hunger," he said.
Donations to the project, called the Spring Hope Food Drive, couldn't have come at a better time, said Gail Nyberg, executive director of the food bank.
"Hunger doesn't take a summer vacation, but many of our regular donors do," she said. "I'm just so proud of those tenants. It's just an incredible feat. Thank you, Greater Toronto."
The food bank is a non-profit charitable organization dedicated to fighting hunger. Last year, more than 905,000 people in the GTA relied on food banks, 34 per cent of them children.
But there will be no resting on the laurels of the world record.
Today, said Nyberg, the sorting of the donations begins.
