Hunger Crisis in American Universities

2014-08-20T14:12:00-04:00

As low-income populations have gone to college and food insecurity has risen up to swallow the lower rungs of the middle class, hunger has spread across America’s university campuses like never before. In some places, it’s practically a pandemic: At Western Oregon University, 59% of the student body is food insecure [...] 39.2% of the [CUNY's] quarter of a million undergraduates had experienced food insecurity at some time in the past year.

Lack of adequate and steady food is a rampant problem both domestically and internationally. A recent National Geographic article analyzed the problem of food scarcity in the US across the last fifty years. Traditionally concerned with "hunger," since 2006 researchers at the USDA have shifted focus to "food insecurity," a term that refers more to a generalized state of precarity. This is to say, in recent years, the issue has less to do with people being hungry all the time and more with people who can't count on not going hungry in the future. That this condition encompasses such a large percentage of college students is a frightening indictment of both the values and mechanics of the US economic system and its social programs.

A "food desert" is an area where consistent access to nutritious food is difficult to obtain. Many architects and socially-concerned individuals and groups are working towards ameliorating conditions in such places. Mogro – or mobile grocery – is a project th...

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Hunger Crisis in American Universities