Members of the Benicia High School Interact Club have an ambitious project ahead of them Saturday: packaging 10,000 meals in three hours.

That is not a typo. The club will put together 10,000 meals.

The club, Rotary International’s service club for students age 12 to 18, is “a community service organization, so it is pretty much like a high-school based Rotary Club,” said Amy Carpenter, Rotary Club of Benicia youth services chair. “They do projects both locally and internationally.”

The 10,000-meal effort is part of the club’s collaboration with nonprofit Stop Hunger Now, the culmination of two years of fundraisers to collect the $3,000 for necessary food and materials.

The supplies needed for Saturday’s meal assembly are a combination of soy, rice, dehydrated vegetables and a flavoring mix that “includes 23 essential vitamins and minerals, which will be assembled into small meal packages,” Carpenter said.

She said stations will be set up, each with six to eight students, and meals will be put together “in an ‘assembly line.'” Assembled meals will be sealed and shipped to 65 different countries to support school feeding programs, orphanages and crisis relief.

The meals are stored easily, transported quickly and have a shelf life of two years, Carpenter said. Stop Hunger Now has packaged more than 189 million such meals since forming in 1998.

Carpenter said even as Interact Club members worked to raise the $3,000 necessary for the project, they still maintained their commitment to other efforts, including collecting blankets for foster kids and the elderly, and the group’s Seventh Street cleanup project.

“I’m incredibly proud of these students,” she said.

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