A meal of grilled chicken, hamburgers, red potato salad and eggplant Parmesan with a side of peas marked the beginning Tuesday of Natividad Medical Center's food-sharing program with Shelter Outreach Plus.

The delivery of leftover meals from the medical center's cafeteria to the shelter fed up to 20 people, said Cori Thomas, Natividad's director of food services. The shelter provides emergency lodging and transitional housing for thousands of families every year. Women and children make up the bulk of Shelter Outreach Plus clients, which does not disclose its location for safety reasons.

In a testament to the tastiness of the entrées, Thomas said, medical personnel usually ask for more. Still, she said the cafeteria typically has about a dozen entrées left at the end of each business day. What cannot be resold or used for soups has been thrown away, but now the shelter deliveries will keep the meals from going to waste.

"We're looking at people who don't have three meals a day," Thomas said. "Maybe they're lucky if they get one meal a day, and that's usually from a soup kitchen or that type."

While Tuesday's delivery was donated in recognition of National Hunger Awareness Day, the hospital plans to share food daily from now on.

"Monterey County is high (cost of living) to live in and sustain yourself and much less if you're low-income, so the food is really going to help our clients," said Dolores Steel, program director for Shelter Outreach Plus.

Other agencies in the region will commemorate Hunger Awareness Day on Thursday with Dining Out, Helping Out, a program in which participating restaurants will donate 10 percent of their proceeds to the Food Bank for Monterey County.

A 2006 survey conducted by the food bank found that 74 percent of its recipients had to skip meals to survive.

"I don't think that people know that 21,000 children live in poverty in Monterey County," said Executive Director Leslie Sunny. "When people think of hunger, they think of a starving child with bones sticking out. Our hunger is different - it's malnutrition and not having enough to eat."

For those earning low wages, spending money on food takes a back seat to rent and other expenses, Sunny said.