Food Insecurity on College Campuses

By: Baylee Durantini

     My friend worked every day: morning, noon and night. He even scheduled his classes around his work schedule. My friends and I always questioned why this was, and then we finally realized it was because he was all on his own. He had no help from his parents, no financial aid or scholarships, and all his paychecks went back to paying for college. Thankfully, at SUNY Morrisville there is a policy that when you work at the dining halls you must eat on your breaks, so this is how my friend ate every day because he couldn’t afford to pay for a meal plan. My friends and I went two years without realizing this was happening to him.

     Because of my friend’s situation I wanted to better understand what had affected my friend. I learned that it was a food insecurity and that it happens on college campuses quite often. 

     Food insecurity can happen at any college campus and can happen to anyone. Food insecurity isn’t biased against race, gender, or age. Food insecurity can even happen to you. 

     I was given a job opportunity at SUNY Morrisville that allowed me the chance to go to a SUNY Student Assembly conference, where all SUNY campuses send their student senates twice a year. Last year our main point of discussion was food insecurity and solutions that could help combat this problem. Within this article you are going to learn what a food insecurity is, what it effects, how it’s happening and what we can do to help. 

     Based on a survey given to a class on Alfred State campus, 77.7% of the students didn’t know much or anything about food insecurity. A food insecurity is when someone has no access to an adequate amount of affordable and healthy food. This can happen at any college campus: community, two year, and four year. 12.3% of the general population in America reported being food insecure, 66.6% of students reported being food insecure in college. The University Wire Journal of April 8, 2016 reports that, “According to the Food Research and Action Center, food-insecure students had lower GPAs and higher rates of poor health than their food-secure counterparts. They were also twice as likely to work a job on top of their class loads.” 

     Food insecurity can have many negative effects. Lack of nutrients can lead to depression, anxiety, behavioral problems, social issues, and learning problems, which in turn affect performance and focus. Sometimes this becomes a new problem to students coming from kindergarten through 12th grade, because they are used to have school lunch programs, because of those programs in place attendance rates increased, improving literacy and concentration, encouraging kids go further in their studies.

     In her book Food Security, Kathy W. Peacock states that, “reduced-cost school lunches have been a feature of the U.S. school system for at least two generations and have proved a popular and enduring way to combat hunger.” Food pantries are another way to combat hunger in the community. They can help households cope and alleviate food insecurity by distributing unprepared food to homes. Amber Waves Journal of November 2018 states that, “the emergency food assistance program supplied 709.4 million pounds of commodities to community emergency food providers. And that 26% of food insecure households used a food pantry.” But we don’t have any kind of resources like these on college campuses. In a survey taken by students in a class 61.1% of them couldn’t afford to pay for their own meal plans out of pocket. 

     Here on the Alfred State campus, the largest meal plan consists of 18 meals per week and $125 dining dollars and costs $2,870. The smallest plan is any 5 meals per week and costs $1,185. These two meal plans only have a difference of $1,685. There are students on this campus that still can’t afford the smallest meal plan.

     At this point you are probably wondering what we can do to help. The April 4, 2018 issue of Clasp stated that, “solutions are needed on campus, in the community, and at the state and federal levels.” We need to address food insecurity by having links to outside sources. Have campus food pantries, just like in 2013, Oregon University and Michigan University combined to establish the College and University Food Bank Alliance that help advise and support colleges with campus food pantries. 

     In 2017, there was more than 566 colleges registered to this program. However, we also need to create task forces that help advocate for the basic needs of students, hire a case manager to be in charge of the issue, and we can even make staff members a point of contact for students to go to that are in need of assistance. 

   We also need to consider sharing our left-over meal swipes with our follow students that are in need. We can do this by creating mobile apps. Swipe Out Hunger was created by students after hearing about a fellow student’s hardships. Share Meals was created by New York University, Swipe Share was created by MIT, Swipe it Forward by Tufts University and had over 300 participants involved, or Swipes by Columbia University. 

     We also need to help students get access to federal, state, and community resources, such as the SNAP (Federal Supplemental Food Assistance Program) which has $76 million in initiatives and serve 46 million Americans. Lastly, we need to consider extending the National School Lunch Program to college students, which is the school feeding program that is utilized from kindergarten to 12th grade. 

     Solving food insecurity is going to take time and effort and will be a continuing battle that everyone needs to take part in solving. After having my fellow classmates take a survey and finished my research, I told them the same thing that you have read today, but what truly hit home for them were the last words I stated to them that 44% of them knew someone with a food insecurity and 22% of them had a food insecurity themselves. After speaking these words, I watched as they all looked around at one another, finally realizing the severity of food insecurity. I hope that just as my fellow classmates did that you the reader can take something from this as well, let’s all try to come together to help fix this problem.