Skipping meals on campus: college student food insecurity and urban mobility

ABSTRACT

College students at the City University of New York are highly mobile as they traverse the city from home to school to work and back again. Their mobility has implications for food security. This paper traces the daily food journeys of students at risk of food insecurity at the City University of New York to understand why so many of them are regularly skipping meals on campus. Their everyday food journeys highlight the limitations and insufficiencies of both public programs and campus-based efforts designed to address food security. Students’ attempts and failures to procure a decent meal for themselves expose the sedentary bias embedded within food assistance programs like SNAP and the politics of profit-making, charity, and insufficiency at work in campus food environments. Looking at college student food insecurity through the lens of urban mobility demonstrates the need to enact a “politics of adequacy” on campus and raises new questions about the impact of the sedentary bias embedded in policies and programs designed to address food insecurity in the U.S. more broadly.

KEYWORDS:

• Food insecurity
• urban mobility
• higher education
• SNAP

Acknowledgments

This project was funded by a Tufts/UConn RIDGE grant. I am grateful to the CUNY students who shared their time and experiences with us. I am also grateful to my Healthy CUNY colleagues who made this research possible, including Morgan Ames, Huihui Li, Craig Willingham, Patricia Lamberson, Rositsa Ilieva, and Nick Freudenberg.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. All student names have been changed to protect their anonymity.

2. We did not exclude the 2 food secure students from our analysis, but the data presented here is only from the 20 students categorized as at risk of food insecurity. The food secure students were also highly mobile but they did not report skipping meals, which is the focus of this paper.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Tufts/UConn RIDGE Grant .