Your stomach is too loud. It growls during class. It rumbles on your way to work. Sometimes it keeps you up at night. With your thin bank balance making you thinner, you learn to get around the noise. You move your chair or cough loudly when it speaks out during class. You play your music louder on your way to work. You shove a pillow over your stomach at night to suffocate it. You train your stomach to be as silent as you are when you’re starving, and eventually, you silence the noise. But the noise isn’t the problem, food insecurity is.
Feeding America, a non-profit organization trying to end hunger in the U.S., defines food insecurity as, “a federal measure of a household’s ability to provide enough food for every person in the household to have an active, healthy life.” In 2017, an estimated 1 in 8 Americans were food insecure. That’s 40 million people, including more than 12 million children. Hunger is not something a Snickers bar can fix, no matter what the advertisements say. Hunger leads to mood swings, poor work performance, and slow physical and educational growth in children.
Food insecurity isn’t as noticeable as you would think. Take a look around our diverse campus. Statistics show that 6% of our student body is food insecure. In order to make ends meet, students who are barely able to pay for tuition, housing, textbooks, or transportation are making the tough decision to skip meals. A recent study found that 1 in 10 community college students have gone at least one day without eating this month. Campus-wide hunger isn’t a new crisis, and it isn’t getting any better. Last year, it was discovered that 36% of college students experience hunger, an increase from the 11.2% of students attending a four-year college that had the same difficulties in 2015.
“What it means to be food insecure is much more complicated than people think,” said Jonathan Chin, the creator of Share Meals, an app to help college students connect with each other and share unused meal swipes. “A fact that still surprises a lot of people that are food insecure is that a lot of them have more than one job. Sometimes some of them even have meal plans, but it’s just not enough. They can’t supplement all their outside food.”
Chin, a current student at New York University, frequents NYU Secrets, a website where students anonymously confess to having crushes, rag on teachers, and also where one student said they couldn’t afford to eat. In his TedTalk, Chin describes his desire to help this student, and how, after hearing another student talk about not being able to afford food, either, he sprang into action.
“When I first started, I had no idea about food security. I had no idea about the scope of the problem, or any of it. I just saw two students who hungry.” In one night, Jonathan Chin created Share Meals for NYU. The application’s look was much like its concept: plain and simple. If you are hungry, you can go on this website and tell someone. Then, someone close by can swipe one of their meal swipes for you.
Today, Share Meals has over 5,000 users and is represented in over 118 universities, both internationally and across the US. When using the app, you can also post events where there will be free food. Chin and his team host monthly dialogues and cooking classes for students in need. The New School introduced Share Meals to their students in January. In addition to working with Jonathan, our school has a food pantry located at 6 East 16th Street in the 12th floor café. Open on a rotating Tuesday and Friday schedule throughout the semester, the school opens its pantry doors to all current students and faculty. When the pantry is open you can receive a bag with enough food for nine meals.
These are steps in the right direction, but we must also first be able to talk about our insecurities. “Part of the way to normalize food security it to stop using labels,” says Chin. As the problem of food insecurity continues to grow, awareness should grow, too. With resources such as Share Meals and the school pantry, I urge you to no longer silence your stomach, but to raise your voice. For those who want to help, please donate to The New School Pantry and use Share Meals.