Tucked away in a discreet office at Brooklyn College’s student center, beyond the pool tables and wide-screen TVs where her classmates congregate, Rebecca Harmata discovered a lifeline.
A psychology major who works in a doctor’s office to pay for her education, Harmata describes a break-even, paycheck-to-paycheck existence, with little left over for luxuries — or even for food.
So when she saw a sign in autumn last year advertising the school’s new free food pantry, she decided to take advantage. On a recent Wednesday afternoon, she selected food from several shelves stocked with nonperishables as diverse as artichoke hearts, dried milk, pineapples and tuna.
Illustration: Mountain people
For many students, the abundant all-you-can-eat smorgasbord in the college cafeteria is far from reality. As tuition prices have increased, and with more low-income students attending college, food pantries such as the one at Brooklyn College, part of the City University of New York, have sprung up at more than 300 colleges across the country to address a problem the US Department of Agriculture calls “food insecurity” on campus.
In addition to working and attending college full time, Harmata, who has visited the food pantry several times, is the goalkeeper on the college’s women’s soccer team.
Food insecurity — which means that people lack access to enough food for an active, healthy lifestyle — can be invisible, according to Brooklyn College dean of student affairs Ronald Jackson.
“It’s one of those hidden populations,” Jackson said. “You wouldn’t really know it’s there.”
To address it, the college has been promoting its food pantry, as well as emergency assistance grants, he said.
In the spring semester, Harmata was one of 48 students who used the pantry, one of nine operating in the City University of New York system.
“Even with a full-time job, it’s hard to save money for tuition; I really appreciate it,” said Harmata, who recently completed her sophomore year.
At the University of Maryland, College Park, which also has a food pantry, officials said they decided one was needed after realizing several years ago that a greater percentage of students were struggling.
Many of the students were from low-income families. A decade ago, they might have entered the workforce right after high school, but now they realize that a college degree is practically a necessity.
“If you don’t have a college degree, it’s very difficult to get a job at all,” the university’s coordinator of nutrition services Jane Jakubczak said. “They aren’t able to ask their parents for more money because mom just lost her job, or their parents simply didn’t have the money to start with.”
For some students, “it comes down to making this decision: Do I pay for my books or do I pay for food?” Jakubczak said.
These students also experience a lot of stress and anxiety over where their next meal is coming from, she added.
The University of Maryland food pantry served 170 people in the fall semester last year. About half of them were students, and the rest were university employees.
At Stony Brook University, part of the State University of New York, Teresa Tagliaferri, a recent graduate who served as site manager for the school’s pantry, said students often appeared at the end of the semester, when their prepaid meal plans ran low.
“That’s when we see a larger number of people,” she said.
A report published in January by the Wisconsin Hope Lab, which studied 1,007 low and moderate-income students at 10 Wisconsin colleges and universities, found that 30 percent of the students said they had been hungry, but could not afford to eat.
Researchers said their findings went beyond the frequently cited college “ramen diet,” instead describing students who consistently struggle to put food on the table.
“This underscores what our previous research has found — low-income students and even some moderate-income students struggle to provide for their basic needs,” said Sara Goldrick-Rab, one of the study’s authors.
A 2008 Hope lab study of low-income students at 42 colleges and universities in Wisconsin found that 71 percent of the students had changed their food-buying habits because of lack of money.
The Hope lab, a research institute at the University of Wisconsin that focuses on post-secondary education issues affecting low-income students, has recommended expanding the National School Lunch Program, which provides free lunches to about 30 million children in about 100,000 schools across the US to college students.
While the Hope research focused on undergraduates, the problems also affect graduate students, as well as so-called nontraditional students — those who have been in the workforce for years but decide to go back to school.
One of the first campus food pantries opened at Michigan State University in 1993. Now, 311 colleges are active members of the College and University Food Bank Alliance.
New York University is starting a food voucher program in the fall that would permit students to obtain meal vouchers six times per semester as a short-term solution if they are hungry and do not have money, university spokesman John Beckman said.
Some colleges have adopted yet another approach, permitting students to donate “swipes” from their dining plans to others who cannot afford to eat.
An organization called Swipe Out Hunger, started six years ago by students at the University of California, Los Angeles, has partnerships with nearly 20 universities. In some cases, it arranges for excess money on a student’s meal plan to be donated in the form of food to pantries. In others, the money goes to food vouchers for students.
“Students can enter the dining hall with the voucher and have a warm, wholesome meal,” Swipe Out Hunger founder and executive director Rachel Sumekh said.
Columbia University last year unveiled a plan to permit students to donate up to six unused meals per semester through an emergency meal fund, and students who need food can receive up to six vouchers per semester.
Despite the prevalence of the problem, there is still a stigma associated with food insecurity, particularly on college campuses. To protect the privacy of students, some food pantries would not permit the New York Times to visit.
At Brooklyn College, where Harmata agreed to meet with a reporter and photographer at a specific time, a reporter was asked to leave while another student selected her food.
Brooklyn College’s food pantry is not an expensive operation. To supply the food for one year, the Carroll and Milton Petrie Foundation donated US$9,000. Other food is donated by student groups and individuals. Shelves are organized by food groups, and students are permitted to choose several items from each group.
Another visitor to the Brooklyn College food pantry, Keith Short, is a graduate student studying mental health counseling. Because his classes meet during the day and his degree requires an unpaid 20-hours-per-week internship, it has been difficult for Short to have a paying job while pursuing his master’s degree.
“It can be a bit of a struggle,” Short said.
At the food pantry, he likes to get canned soups, which he opens and eats at the school cafeteria.
“The food pantry has really helped me out,” he said. “It kind of shows me that the school cares about me.”
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