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MIDDLEBURY, Vt. (AP) — A Middlebury school is leasing a mobile flash freezer unit to process fresh produce that's been donated by locals farmers to help those in need.
The Patricia A. Hannaford Career Center, which plans to process produce for the Addison County Food Shelf, leased the unit from the state Agency of Agriculture, Vermont Public Radio reported (http://bit.ly/1Mt6GLM ) Monday. The food shelf accepts fresh fruits and vegetables that have a short shelf life and serves them to hundreds of people each month.
The flash freezer currently sits in a garage at the school, where Gretchen Cotell works as a food coordinator for HOPE, Addison County's nonprofit poverty relief organization. She said she noticed the state was seeking a new organization to run the unit and thought the career center, which offers technical, workplace and continuing education for secondary and adult students, could help.
The career center's director, Lynn Coale, said the produce usually needs to be processed prior to freezing, so the center's engineering and design students have been tasked with creating a mobile processing unit out of a donated bus.
"The product comes in here on a conveyor belt, comes across this fan and is dried, and once it's dried it gets put on these sheets and into the flash freezer," he explained.
The bus and the freezer will travel to farms, where volunteers and students will wash, peel and boil vegetables to prepare them for long-term storage.
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Information from: WVPS-FM, http://www.vpr.net
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