With $23 and an hour to give, one person can make 100 meals to feed some of the world's hungriest people.

Roughly 375 volunteers learned this first-hand Saturday as they scooped, sealed and boxed more than 70,000 dried meals in a downtown Durham church.

The event was one of several planned by local Rotary clubs in the coming weeks to help reach their goal of packaging 1 million meals for hungry people abroad by July.

Saturday's event, organized and financed by the Downtown Durham Rotary Club and hosted by Trinity Avenue Presbyterian Church, drew volunteers from area churches, service groups and N.C. Central University.

Getting the volunteers was no trouble, said Rotary member Mitzi Viola. All three two-hour shifts filled quickly.

"It's just very powerful to know that the very little time you spend working can be a matter of life and death for somebody else," Viola said.

"What you see here is the spirit of Durham -- the spirit of Rotary and the spirit of Durham," she added.

Food that won't spoil

At long tables, volunteers wearing hair nets and baseball caps carefully funneled textured soy protein, chicken-flavored vitamin powder, dried vegetables and rice into small plastic bags.

Others weighed the bags to the gram -- each bag feeds a family of six -- then sealed and boxed them.

The Rotary clubs are working with the Raleigh-based nonprofit Stop Hunger Now to assemble the meals. The organization uses a meal formula developed by several food scientists from U.S. food corporations for Feeding Children International, a Minnesota-based nonprofit that was looking for a cheap, nutritional meal that wouldn't spoil.

Purchased in bulk, the contents of each meal cost about 23 cents. The bags have a shelf life of three to five years.

Some of the volunteers sampled the cooked rice mixture as their shift came to an end.

"It's good -- very healthy," said Latoya Bradley, a freshman at NCCU.

"Needs salt," said Natika Geter, her classmate. But the textured soy and meat-free chicken flavoring surprised her. "It's kind of meaty. It tastes much better than I imagined," Geter said.

The first 250,000 meals will go to a partner Rotary club in Bolivia, said Tim Mannix, governor of Rotary District 7710, which includes the Triangle.

Many of the meals will go to a feeding program for schoolchildren, he said. The rest will be given to farmers willing to try new farming techniques to assure them that their families will not starve while they master new skills.

Rotary Clubs in Haiti, Ghana and possibly India will receive the subsequent 250,000-meal shipments.

Schools first

"We're asking them first and foremost to support a school feeding program," said Neil LaGarde, district chairman for Rotarians Against Hunger.

That helps communities in a number of ways, LaGarde explained. "The girls are usually sent to school to be fed and they end up getting educated, which lowers the pregnancy rate and the HIV infection rate," he said.

Leaders in Rotary District 7710 hope that their success will inspire other Rotary clubs around the country to set up similar partnerships to end world hunger.

"I sort of have this feeling that we're at the beginning of something that could be very, very big," said Susan Ross, president of the Downtown Durham Rotary Club.