A typical shift at the OC Food Bank involves sorting through donation boxes and stocking shelves. Every item has a designated spot: peanut butter goes here, pasta down there. It’s not demanding work, intellectually speaking, but it garners another kind of reward. And when I pop in some AirPods and put on my favorite playlist, I can get into a good rhythm, a good groove.
On that particular day, as I was stocking the shelves, I happened to look over at the line of customers waiting to come in, and among the faces I noticed a familiar one. I won’t share his real name as confidentiality is an integral part of working at a food bank, but he was someone I knew from a class, and we had also played basketball a few times. We’ll call him Brian.
I suddenly felt extremely uncomfortable, not knowing where to look or how to behave. Should I acknowledge Brian? Give him a nod or a wave? Or should I ignore him altogether? Did confidentiality mean I had to pretend he was a stranger?
The moment took me completely off guard. I had worked at the OC Food Bank for just over a month, and up to that day, the food bank felt like a separate world from Orange County; I never knew or recognized the people who came through the door. It was almost as if the customers belonged to a different reality, one I was cognizant of—and empathetic to—but not connected to personally. Brian shattered all of that. It had never occurred to me that a friend of mine might be suffering from food insecurity – that they might be hungry.
That same realization applies to a college campus. Food banks on American university campuses are now commonplace, and as tuition prices continue to soar, it’s safe to say they are here to stay. For many students, finding the funds to eat is a real issue; the decision to purchase a $50 textbook can mean not having a decent meal for a week. Or longer.
While food banks are an essential resource for many students, we need to ask ourselves why they are needed in the first place. If a student is paying for college, shouldn’t a decent meal be included in the bill? What’s next, charging students to use drinking fountains? I would even argue that education and eating go hand in hand. Sitting through a three-hour chemistry lab is challenging enough—try doing it with a rumbling stomach.
The average college meal plan costs around $5,656 a year, which works out to around twenty bucks a day. Given these prices, it’s hard not to see food as simply another cash grab. But the very fact that we have built-in systems to feed hungry students tells you something about the system itself – it’s broken. It’s almost like setting up a field hospital for the sick directly outside of an actual hospital.
Instead of food banks, why can’t all students simply eat at the cafeteria? It’s also worth pointing out that many scholarships, even full-tuition scholarships, don’t include room and board – and certainly not meals. You may be brilliant, you may be a future leader, but you’ll spend your college years fasting – whether you like it or not.
All of this begs the question: Why does it cost so much money to attend college in the first place? When did universities start prioritizing revenue over education? Student debt is now at a whopping 1.8 trillion dollars. In many European countries, attending university is free. If you told a kid at Oxford or Cambridge in the UK that American universities have food banks to feed hungry students, they’d think it was a joke and ask for the punchline.
Back to that day at the OC Food Bank with Brian. Unsure what to do, I decided to avoid talking to him altogether – by moving deeper into the building where I couldn’t be seen by the customers. But a few minutes later, to my surprise, Brian came looking for me. It turned out he’d seen me from the line, but couldn’t get eye contact (probably because I was looking away the whole time).
He greeted me with neither shame nor embarrassment. He was carrying a bag of food. Food he couldn’t afford. Food he desperately needed. Yet his tone was friendly, even casual. “When will I see you on the basketball court?” he asked.
And that’s the thing. I was the only one who was embarrassed. Coming to the OC Food Bank was part of Brian’s routine. On the one hand, I was happy that Brian felt comfortable enough to come find me, but the fact that collecting food from a food bank did feel normal to him was also a little disturbing to me. It has become a very unsettling pattern in America: accepting things that should be unacceptable.
Brian and I make a plan to meet at the basketball court the following Sunday. After that, he headed off with his food.
As a country, I think we can do a lot better. I know we can do a lot better. Let’s give all students a meal plan as part of their education. We mustn’t let our next generation of brilliant thinkers and leaders go hungry.
