For students from low income or marginalized communities entering college (often the first in their family to do so) can be a source of pride and expanded opportunity, but for those who don’t have the finances to pay for increasing tuition and high housing and food costs, it can be, according to Tim Galarneau, “a gauntlet and a crisis rather that a rite of passage.” One critical way that students suffer from lack of funds is going without meals or eating cheap, empty-calorie, junk food. Food insecurity among college students is alarmingly high even at some of the most prestigious universities. At its worst in some community colleges, it can be as astronomical—as high as 70%.
Lack of resources leading to hunger can result in feelings of shame and social stigma making some students reluctant to seek assistance. Tim Galarneau, when he was a student at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), was an activist working for equity, justice and sustainability within the university food purchasing system. He now serves as a Specialist with the Center for Agroecology and serves as the Co-Director for Education and Training at the Center for Economic Justice and Action. When student hunger was brought to his attention some ten years ago, he helped set up an informal crisis response on one campus to help mitigate the problem, and since then he has been at the center of creating structural change to feed food insecure students without stigma, an effort that has grown in scope to include over 100 campuses of public universities and community colleges throughout California. Tim was interviewed by Arty Mangan of Bioneers.
ARTY MANGAN: You are one of the chief architects and champions of the University of California’s (UC) sustainable food movement, which you’ve been active in since you were a student. Your work in the food system space around issues of food justice, local food procurement and hunger and housing has helped students and the university as an institution understand how local and organic food, health, wellness, justice, and sustainability are all connected. Could you talk about some of the initiatives you have been involved in over time that have led to your current work providing essential needs to students?
TIM GALARNEAU: The energy of students in an institution pushes the growth edge of the moral compass of that institution. When I was a student, there was a lot of emergent food movement work around re-envisioning food and farm policies that put a focus on people. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers and their Fair Food campaign elevated the voices and agency of farm workers who have been historically vulnerable and marginalized. Students joined in through the Student Farmworker Alliance and learned how to align with those farm workers to help try to shape markets.
There was also growing student engagement in the international fair-trade movement around chocolate, sugar, and coffee with United Students for Fair Trade, and Greenpeace had begun leveraging student activism through the California Student Sustainability Coalition, and there was also a lot of student activism happening around the state concerning green building and green energy, so, for me, coming to UC Santa Cruz around 2002 was a very exciting time.
While there are a lot of broken things about how the food system is operating, it’s working really well for concentration and agribusiness, but not for communities, workers, producers and smaller enterprises. Efforts such as the emergence of the National Organic Program did build greater validity for developing an “ecosystem adaptive” approach to agriculture in order to steward land and the health of those working on it and eating from it. It was a time where issues of GMOs were also a significant topic for activists and organizers. While alternatives to conventional agriculture grew with market connections and consumer awareness around issues uplifting sustainable food and agriculture, student activists wanted to build on that clarity
and build momentum. We started to think about the role of the institution we were part of and how we could build a commitment by the university with key third party certifications and policy pillars that would operationalize purchasing commitments and a value chain in the food system that would uplift sustainability, equity and justice.
All this was at a time when Al Gore produced the film The Inconvenient Truth about climate change, but he left the food system out of the equation. Even so, climate and food began to get connected. For me it was a really exciting time to work on these issues first on the UCSC campus and then at the UC system-wide level by organizing with the California Community College and the California State University systems. From there, we elevated it to a national conversation helping to launch the national Real Food Challenge with partners across the country from The Food Project in Boston and the Community Food Security Coalition to our team in the California Student Sustainability Coalition.
Within four-and-a-half years, we went from a campus to a segment of the UC to statewide, and then to a national framework that brought on 400 colleges and universities, and student groups planning strategic convergences, and leveraging other gatherings, such as Eco Farm, and the Kellogg Food & Society Conferences, to think about how to mobilize young people. We even brought it to Bioneers, around 2008, with Michael Pollan curating a youth food movement panel. And then, in 2008, as far as Terra Madre with the International Slow Food Conference, where we had, I believe, over 1100 youth. That was a gathering which had people from 113 countries who were starting to share tools and models internationally.
ARTY: It’s interesting how an issue rises and spreads into public consciousness, in this case the responsibility of the university to contribute to a healthy and just food system. It’s not surprising that students played a role in elevating that issue. You certainly have been in the midst of the action. 10 to 15 years ago, Mother Jones magazine called you “the Alice Waters of a burgeoning movement of campus foodies.” What’s your impression of that characterization?
TIM: Alice is a legendary and iconic chef, entrepreneur, and movement voice. At that time for student organizers and myself the association around the term foodies didn’t entirely rub me the right way. The journalist had been interviewing folks around Slow Food Nation and had just interviewed Alice Waters. Then he wanted to include a higher-ed food piece, but in the Real Food Challenge, we were driving a little bit deeper than just the seasonal, beautiful aesthetic and pleasure of food. We were drilling down to the core essentials of justice, of ecological stability, and challenging concentrated corporate food business structures. We were trying to help lift student voices across the country and reshape supply chains that were dysfunctional in regards to justice and economic resiliency for small farmers and enterprises here and abroad. We were trying to make a healthy food system accessible and affordable by re-envisioning how it can function.
The journalist noted his stories for the issue are based on individuals versus groups so in that sense it lacked the “we” in the work. We did want to celebrate beauty and seasonality, but we were very focused on elements of justice and transformative possibility. To that extent, Alice Waters has now extended her vision to include almost all the issues we’ve worked on since we were students and perhaps the season is upon us where we are more deeply aligned in doing the collective work together.
ARTY: Let’s talk about your present work with the Basic Needs program. You’re up against a lot of structural problems. In a paper you authored there was a quote from Peter Hinrichs, a Senior Research Economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. He said that back in the 1960s and 70s, a student could work 10 hours a week during the school year and 35 hours a week during summer and earn enough to pay tuition and room and board at the average public university, but today, due to increased costs and lower minimum wages (in inflation adjusted terms), all that work would only cover about 1/3 of those costs. What are some of the other structural conditions that lead to student hunger?
TIM: Around 2010, 2011, financial aid officers on our campus at UCSC came to me and said: “Tim, we know you work for the farm on campus. We have students that don’t have meal plans and don’t have enough money to eat or pay their rent. Is there any way we could get some free, organic food from the farm?” So, we informally set up 80 small student farm boxes that went to the undocumented student services program and partners from financial aid. These informal relationships addressed the hard experiences students were facing. It wasn’t a structural response, but we tried to connect the dots because our hearts were so connected to the issues.
That began to raise questions about the many students who, after their first year, opt out of the dining meal plan and are suddenly trying to navigate living off campus, putting down a huge security deposit and managing their expenses as young adults and decision makers that they didn’t have experience doing. There are no home economics or financial literacy requirements in secondary education and high school, so, for too many students, entering college becomes a gauntlet, not a celebration and a rite of passage.
In a 2013, the UC Undergraduate Experience Survey (UCUES) found that 48% of the undergraduates responded that they were frequently skipping meals because they couldn’t afford to eat three meals a day, but it was an anecdotal question. In 2014, we began to look more critically and thoughtfully into the issue. My colleague Dr. Suzanna Martinez from UCSF co-led a study with the Nutrition Policy Institute releasing a survey in the UC system called “Got Food?” to a random sampling of about 7,000 students. We cross-referenced the results with USDA and other research and confirmed that between 43 and 49% of students were indeed food insecure, categorized as “low” and “very low” food secure. Very low is when you can’t get enough calories each day. Low is poor nutritional quality of the food, eating cheaper empty calories because that’s all they can afford. The very low group was over 17% of students on any one campus. That was the largest survey at that time for four-year institutions, and it indicated that student food insecurity rates were more than double the national family averages based on USDA data.
That affirmed the magnitude of the issue. The idea that students can get by on Ramen noodles doesn’t work. We’re diversifying higher education and celebrating that, as UC is this year, having the most diverse class of accepted students in history. The landscape of who’s coming to college—first generation, non-traditional, undocumented, international students, a range of cross-sections of identities, former foster youth, underground scholars—is changing. To assume that they all come in with financial literacy and an understanding of nutrition with an ability to navigate multiple complex systems and to take care of themselves is not reasonable.
Our Basic Needs movement came about to move forward structurally to destigmatize the invisible suffering of a substantial number of students and to indicate that this was not an individual issue.With the emergent movement passion and energy and the hearts of student advocates, professional staff, and aligned partners, we thought about how to build a framework to address the problem. We held focus groups around the state, meeting on campuses with students, staff, professionals and administrators to have them better understand the scope of the issue and to hear what their ideas were. We also had to challenge the denial that students are hungry by many with privileged positions in the institution. There are assumptions that students are just making bad choices, buying a nice pair of shoes or a big TV with their financial aid check, but the funny thing about being human is that we’re not perfect. All humans make mistakes in their choices, and this issue wasn’t about individual bad choices, it was structural and systemic. Rather than blaming people, we need to figure out how we collectively can support impacted students across our
institution.
Our Basic Needs program started as a grassroots movement advocating within the UC system and then at the state level as well as establishing federal engagement in Washington D.C. to build awareness around these issues. To date, we have established funding across all three segments in California from the state legislature. The California Community College system went from no funding to about a hundred million dollars plus thirty million their first year of ongoing funding to jump start Basic Needs across the state. UC got $18.5 million for housing and food, and the California State Universities got $23.5 million and some additional funding to account for staffing and costs going up. This was all prior to the pandemic we didn’t know was right around the corner.
If we hadn’t had the organization around rapidly responding to food and housing crises and creating support and care structures before the pandemic hit, it would have been so much worse for our students. I’m really grateful that we had been able to build programs years ahead of that pandemic so that we were ready to respond. Our Basic Needs staff were frontline responders, digitally and on campuses for those students—international students, former foster youth, etc.— who didn’t have homes to go back to. Basic Needs staff were there to support them while they were trying to navigate the most difficult, unexpected period in their lives.
ARTY: As you said, the number of food-insecure students at UC campuses is, alarmingly, in the 40 % range, but the problem exists on college campuses throughout the country. A report on the NIH webpage refers to it to it as the “dark secret” of student hunger.
TIM: Some community college campuses are as high as 70%, but activating the research and the data is fundamental to this work, because it’s not only about using the shock of the scale of the problem to attract attention, it’s about what we can actually do about it that will make a real difference. That’s where our village is really shining right now in the UC. We’re in our tenth year together as a community practice, and data from the office of the president confirmed that after several years of implementation of the Basic Needs program, interventions of students with insecurities noticeably improved their GPA, degree persistence, and completion. Graduate students, on average, completed their degrees three months earlier, so it’s really a sort of Head Start Program for higher education. If you house and feed and nourish someone and remove some of the social and emotional stress and stigma of food insecurity, it gives that person the capacity to learn and grow.
ARTY: What are some of the strategies that have been put in place to serve the needs of students?
TIM: There are distribution sites where students can get free organic produce, dried goods and culturally relevant seasonal prepared food for free. We are training students to grow organic food on the UCSC farm so that food isn’t the chronic stress point in their day or week. It doesn’t matter what’s in your pocket or what resident status you hold, we’re here for you. When we start to build a society around those kinds of values of care and connection, it looks a lot different. Last year, we serviced over 79,000 students across UC campuses’ Basic Needs centers.
We have a range of brick-and-mortar and satellite distribution facilities on campus to meet students where they’re at. We partner with the California Association of Food Banks, local vendors, and even the dining contractors. I’ve worked with dining on the farm-to-college Real Food work so that in the contracts with Sysco and produce companies there are clauses concerning food recovery and food diversion, so that instead of wasting food, they can distribute palettes of food into the Basic Needs channels on campuses. We have redirected food diversion and food waste into food recovery to supply our Basic Needs sites.
The federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in California is CalFresh, and we do outreach and enrollment work to help qualify eligible students for that program. We’ve advocated at both the state and federal levels and backed over seven different bills that have been passed and signed by the governor to create access and ease for CalFresh benefits for students in higher ed. To date, we’ve enrolled over four million students in CalFresh. Something like $2.1 billion has come to the state through EBT and CalFresh because of our movement work in higher ed. That money then circulates through local food economies. For undocumented and international students, we have CalFresh equivalent support services. We can provide financial awards directly into their accounts for those students who don’t qualify for CalFresh, so they can have supplemental food assistance and be able to shop and get the food they need.
Along those lines, there’s been a movement with Swipe Out Hunger, founded in UCLA by Rachel Sumekh and her team. Swipe Out works with dining halls. It enables students to donate their extra meals to a food meal swipe bank, and then we can redistribute those to students who don’t have meal plans, and it shows up right on their student ID card, so they’re not stigmatized with a different voucher, and they can swipe as if they have a meal plan and get some prepared meals. At UCSC, it’s called “Swipe for Slugs,” and currently I think we have over 7,000 meals in our bank that our case managers can distribute up to ten at a time to students.
And, also at UCSC, at our non-transactional café, Cowell Coffee Shop, we’re serving close to 7800 visits and over 3,000 unique students during the academic year. Students can come into the café, order a cup of fair-trade coffee, get a plate of food, and it’s all free. They just have to swipe their ID. The smile on their faces and the joy that they were just given something they didn’t have to pay for transforms the moment. We’re building the idea of the gift as a transformative act within market capitalism to change the experience of humans in the system. It’s pretty profound when you actually see it in motion. You can sit with someone and eat together, and it’s not just for students in need. This is how we address food insecurity without a stigma. We want to make it accessible so anyone can sit down with anyone else and have a meal together, regardless of what’s in their wallet.
If you look at the intersectionality of student identities such as LGBTQ+ folks, various students of color, undocumented students, underground scholars, all these students are coming into these systems that weren’t designed to hold them. Basic Needs re-envisions how the institution operates with new structures that can be responsive to all these non-traditional students. Students are afraid to take out loans. Their parents are often under water, and they don’t want to add more stress, so they’ll choose to skip meals; they’ll choose to not be on a lease; they’ll choose to sleep in an attic just because they care so much about not wanting to be a burden. We need to remove that mindset and structurally alleviate that sort of suffering. Many people are hurting, and we want to be intentional about what we are designing, so it can be a container that can transform that suffering into genuine opportunity.
The post The Dark Secret of Student Hunger: An Interview of Tim Galarneau of the University of California appeared first on Bioneers.