Schools
In Time Of Plenty, Students On Colorado Campuses Are Hungry
College food pantries are now common, as skyrocketing rents and tuition force many kids to skip meals.
ACROSS COLORADO – By Forest Wilson| Rachel Lorenz for The Colorado Independent. Nell Roach was hungry. Again. It hit her like this often. She hadn’t been able to get enough to eat the day before, and around 2 p.m. her body started demanding food. Her stomach hurt. She couldn’t concentrate in her classes at Metro State University.
Maybe there would be a school event she could breeze through and grab some cookies. In more desperate times, she and her roommate would go to a grocery store at the end of the night, and if they timed it right, grab the food discarded in the Dumpster. Roach, a 28-year-old anthropology student, is solemn when she mentions this. It works if you can get to the Dumpster in time, she said.
MSU has a food pantry, too. It opened in 2012 in the Tivoli building and Roach has gone there a few times to grab a can of tuna, a box of pasta, or, if they have it, a piece of fruit.
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She said she used to be a vegetarian, but she had to make exceptions to meet her nutritional needs. Canned tuna gave her the protein she needed. She’s had to be resourceful, frugal and self-disciplined.
“Sometimes it’s skipping meals on one day, so you can have a full lunch on the other,” Roach said.
Roach is far from alone. Numerous Colorado colleges and universities are grappling with student hunger. At least eight campuses have opened food pantries, four of them in the last five years. (The Colorado Independent reached out to 10 universities in various parts of the state. The two that do not have brick-and-mortar food pantries, Colorado State University-Fort Collins and the University of Colorado-Boulder have other food assistance programs for their students, including a mobile food pantry.)
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Just last week, Regis University held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for its new pantry. Father Mark McGregor spoke to a circle of people gathered in Regis’s Dayton Memorial Library. Immediately after the ceremony, a student was welcomed into the pantry, a room in the library lined with shelves of canned vegetables, peanut butter, noodles and hygiene products.
READ MORE in The Colorado Independent.
Image: Bryan Saenz and Jesus Robledo, assistants at Community College of Denver’s student life office, work at the school's food pantry on Wednesday, Nov. 14, 2018. (Photo by Rachel Lorenz for The Colorado Independent)