As Food Insecurity Heightens, Students Believe It’s Time NYU Institutes a Food Pantry
Anna Moritz never felt comfortable talking to their friends about being food insecure. During their sophomore year at New York University, the 22-year-old frequently asked their friends if they could swipe them into dining halls just to get a meal for the day. At some point, Mortiz’s friends began questioning why they needed swipes.
“There’s not a way to say, “I literally have $3 in my bank account. I [could] use a meal swipe,’” Moritz said. “It got really frustrating to ask for meal swipes when my friends didn’t really understand the gravity of the situation.”
Moritz felt like their friends were shaming them for seeking help. That can be the case for students facing food insecurity, a state of having limited access or resources to obtaining food, Mortiz says. As a result, the stigma surrounding this topic can make it difficult for students to reach out for assistance. And when they do, they say, they’re often blamed.
Moritz is currently the director of the College Student Pantry — located in Manhattan’s East Village — which is open to all New York City college students. While Moritz is glad that this resource exists, they wish it was around when they were food insecure.
In fact, Moritz is one of many college students, who at one point, or another has faced food insecurity. A 2019 survey conducted by the Hope Center found that around 33 and 42 percent of students attending four-year schools in the U.S. were food insecure. That same survey found that high rates of food insecurity disproportionately affect Latinx, Black, and Indigenous students. And that was before COVID-19.
The pandemic has only exacerbated this issue more within the last year. In response to the increasing number of students living without resources or access to food, some private universities in the city, like Columbia University or The New School, kept their food pantries open. But Moritz’s school did not. In fact, NYU is the only private university in the city that doesn’t have a food pantry.
During the pandemic, NYU referred students to the Courtesy Meals program, where students can request an additional $75 credit — no questions asked — to use at dining halls or to the Share Meals app, a digital platform students can use to share information about extra meal swipes available. But at a time of record-high food insecurity, students on campus say that while these resources are a step in the right direction to combat this issue, they’re not enough. In turn, the need for a food pantry to be established, students argued, has never been more urgent.
Senators At-Large Mehrin Ali and Shamon Lawrence are two student advocates insisting NYU expand their resources to include a food pantry. Their role is to represent students experiencing food insecurity, which they primarily do by participating in initiatives on campus that aim to provide resources to students in need of food, like Swipe It Forward — an initiative that allows students to donate meal swipes on some dining halls on campus. In addition, they seek to educate NYU administrators about the challenges college students face regarding food insecurity.
When Ali was a freshman, the 20-year-old had no idea that what she had experienced during parts of her life was food insecurity. That term was relatively new to her. Similarly to Moritz, Ali remembers asking students to swipe her into dining halls.
“I definitely know what it’s like to fall asleep hungry or to wake up and still be hungry and then just have to live with that feeling every day,” Ali said.
Since then, she has accessed a stable stream of income and support to access food. But many other students at NYU do not. In the fall of 2017, Being@NYU conducted a campus-wide survey that aimed to “gauge the current campus climate as experienced and perceived by all members of the university community.” The survey found that of the students who responded, 22% had difficulty affording food. Add to the fact that New York City is the second most expensive place to live in the U.S. In fact, the average cost of groceries per person is about $471.34 a month as opposed to the national average of $324.20. And NYU racks up a big price tag too, with a cost of attendance around $78,000.
Ali and Lawrence believe that the university shouldn’t try to tackle food insecurity on campus by simply throwing money at the problem. Though lack of financial support is the most prominent barrier college students face in regards to food insecurity, it certainly isn’t the only problem to address.
Last year in August, around 2,200 students returned to the city to begin their two-week quarantine period before the fall semester. At the time, NYU promised students would receive three meals a day. But what quickly followed was a disaster. Some students received late meals, while others got meals that didn’t follow their dietary or religious restrictions. In response to this, students posted videos on TikTok to garner attention toward their situation.
For the first and possibly only time in their lives, some NYU students experienced food insecurity.
“Food insecurity can happen any day,” Lawrence said. “What the university has is only passive programming, you know, they don’t have to do anything. But that’s not what students need.”
Although students vocalized their frustrations and problems about these meals to Dining Services, NYU didn’t immediately address the matter. Rather, students living off-campus, in other parts of the city, and even around the country started mutual aid funds, donated money and dropped off meals for students.
The resources NYU provides for students facing food insecurity are short-term solutions, advocates argue. A food pantry is not going to solve the problem, they say, but they believe that students should not solely rely on capital from the university to have access to food — especially during a pandemic that has upended the lives of many students.
When prompted about why NYU doesn’t have a food pantry or if there are any plans to establish one, the senior director of campus services Kathrina O’ Mahony did not respond to my requests. Instead, she referred me to a list of resources that the university currently provides — most of which have already been mentioned thus far.
There have been plans to create a food pantry at NYU before. In 2016, The Food Insecurity Work Group did consider instituting one on campus but plans fell through and they decided against it. However, some schools at NYU took matters into their own hands. Before the university closed its doors in early March last year, the Tisch School of the Arts, the History Department in The College of Arts and Science, and the Gallatin School of Individualized Study had food pantry tables in their faculty lounges students could get food from. Those three have not reopened as of yet.
Michael Higgins, the co-founder and chair of The Food Pantry at Columbia University experienced first-hand how valuable a resource like this is for college students. Before the pandemic, the Food Pantry disbursed between 75 to 125 bags of groceries per month. At the height of the pandemic in March and April of 2020, they were disbursing around 400 to 500 bags per month. Since then, the disbursements have gone back down to around 250 but Higgins believes that the numbers will never go back to what it was pre-pandemic. Ultimately, the data Higgins collected shows that there is a big need for this resource to exist on college campuses.
“[The Food Pantry] allows students the opportunity to get food that they may not necessarily be able to afford or find elsewhere,” Higgins said. “We’ve brought awareness to a subject that no one really wanted to talk about.”
Because food insecurity received less attention at the time Mortiz was experiencing it, this made them believe that they had to solve this problem on their own. For a while, they survived by stealing groceries from Whole Foods or getting meals from the soup kitchen they volunteered at. Of course, these were not long-term solutions — and Moritz knew that. They have since found a job which provides them financial stability, but Moritz’s experience is something they’ll never forget.
Now as they enter their second semester being the director at the College Student Pantry, their goal is to use this space and their work as a way to pressure NYU to consider establishing a food pantry again.
“It’s NYU’s job to just start a food pantry by themselves,” Moritz said. “It shouldn’t take the College Student Pantry started by a non-profit run by a student to get NYU to do their job.”
