Use of food pantries growing at Iowa’s universities

IOWA CITY — What once used to be stigmatized — kept in closets in hard-to-find spaces across Iowa’s sprawling universities — are now so popular they’re featured prominently in high-traffic campus hangouts, attracting lines of students eager to step inside.

Food pantries on each of Iowa’s public universities have seen huge usage spikes of late — coinciding with rising tuition rates, soaring food prices and shifting demographics in a state seeing more first-generation, low-income and minority high school graduates headed to college.

Iowa State University, for example, reported 13,016 visits and 147,716 pounds of food distributed in the 2022-23 school year, about nine times the 1,429 visits and 18,009 pounds distributed in 2020-21.

University of Northern Iowa saw its total visits jump to 2,926 in the last academic year from 1,674 the year before — serving 545 students in the 2022-23 school year, compared with 350 the year before.

And, when assessing the months of August and September at the University of Iowa, food pantry usage has more than doubled since 2020 — with visits for those two months jumping from 864 that year to 1,788 this year.

From the 16,089 pounds of food the UI pantry distributed in those months in 2020, the UI pantry this year distributed 19,862 pounds of food in August and September.

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“This past August we got a brand-new space, which looks like a grocery store,” UI Basic Needs Coordinator Steph Beecher told The Gazette. “It’s so awesome, so people don’t feel stigmatized. That human dignity piece is so important to us. … And now we’re seeing like two times the amount of people come through our pantry.”

The issue of food insecurity among college students isn’t new, Beecher said.

“It’s always been there,” she said. “But now we’re giving them access and destigmatizing things and just being like, ‘Hey, it’s OK.’ ”

Or better yet, “Please come.”

‘A perfect option’

Just before 2 p.m. Tuesday, the usage spike was on display in the form of a winding line outside the shiny new UI Food Pantry, now the first thing students see when they trot down the stairs to the ground floor of the Iowa Memorial Union — which still houses the traditional food court, Iowa Hawk Shop and expansive study spaces.

UI doctoral student Oriette D’Angelo, 33, was near the front of the line — waiting for the gate to lift on the lifeline she’s come to rely on.

“I’ve been using it for about one year,” said D’Angelo, an international student from Venezuela, indicating the financial support she receives as a graduate student is spread too thin. “Sometimes the stipend that we get is not enough to cover for groceries for the month. So this is a perfect option.”

D’Angelo lives off campus, by herself, and does a lot of cooking — relying on fruit, vegetables, eggs and some of the more ethnic and diverse options at the pantry to make it happen.

“I think it's very important what they do in terms of variety,” she said.

Given 48 percent of the UI Food Pantry’s users are international students, organizers say cuisine diversity is important and one way the campus can improve its culture and climate.

“For example, there was one day that I found a curry paste to make chicken,” D’Angelo said. “I found that it's helping with the multiculturality of the university.”

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'Like a godsend’

Improving and diversifying the options was among UI senior Yunseo Ki’s passions when she started using and volunteering at the food pantry as a freshman in fall 2020 — a story reflective of realities facing many pursuing higher education.

“When I was a freshman, I actually lost my job during the pandemic, and there was just a lot going on, so I started coming to the food pantry for a little bit of extra help,” Ki said.

She was a server at Village Inn in her hometown of Cedar Falls, hoping to accrue savings over the summer.

“But they were not putting servers out on the floor during the pandemic, so I did not make any money,” she said. “So I worked multiple jobs my first year. … I worked overnights at the hospital.

“And it was really like a godsend to be able to go to a food pantry and grab a couple of things that I needed.”

She pretty quickly started volunteering at the food pantry.

“As situations kind of stabilized, I realized that this was probably one of the best ways to be directly helpful to other people,” Ki said. “And I wanted to help people in a way that I wanted to be helped as well.”

Food is not only nourishing, it’s comforting, communal, nostalgic, and dignifying.

“Food is so near and dear to everybody's heart,” Ki said. “I think the impact of being able to go home and make a meal after a really rough day, after working 12 hours and then going to classes and having overnight shifts — just like a lot of other students on campus — was really impactful.”

Ki started volunteering toward the end of her first semester, immediately noticing a gap in the UI pantry’s services.

“We didn't really offer a lot of international foods,” she said.

Having started as a student organization in 2016 in tighter spaces within the Iowa Memorial Union and Iowa Hotel, the UI Food Pantry didn’t always have space for new products and variety.

“It used to be me, in our van, driving to Walmart, driving to different international grocery stores so that I could expand our diverse inventory,” Ki said. “And that took hours.”

The Food Pantry at Iowa today remains a student organization, but with broader institutional support. The UI Division of Student Life got more involved in 2020, fostering campus collaborations, establishing food-donor partnerships and moving into the more prominent space Aug. 16.

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ISU ‘really grown a lot’

Iowa State’s food pantry — called The Shop, for “students helping our peers” — also moved to a larger, more prominent space in the 2020-21 academic year.

Having starting in 2011 as a student organization in a “closet-sized room” in the Food Sciences Building, the upgrade a decade later to a more prominent space in Beyer Hall — across from State Gym — has helped both destigmatize and increase traffic.

“When we moved over, we were able to get grant money, and we did some external fundraising and stuff to be able to get cold storage units like refrigerators and freezers,” ISU Student Wellness Director Brian Vanderheyden told The Gazette. “We've partnered with the Food Bank of Iowa, and we are starting to receive a lot more fresh and frozen products, too.”

Products they can now house and distribute, given the new space.

“Over the last couple years, it’s really grown a lot,” he said. “And we actually are going to be expanding. We're actually in the middle of a project right now.”

In addition to staff advisers, Iowa State’s pantry is run by a student executive team that manages The Shop’s finances, fundraising, inventory and volunteers. The pool of volunteer student workers hovers around 100.

UNI’s Panther Pantry, which debuted in 2019, is fully staffed by students — including volunteers and three employees.

The UI Food Pantry has a staff of six — including paid students — and a small army of volunteers. It also has an executive team, who are paid hourly.

“I worked with a lot of selfless people,” UI senior Ki said. “We took very small pay in order to keep the pantry funded. So now being institutionalized, and working toward more equitable pay, I think has been a big thing for us.”

Pantry operations, differences

Each of the pantries works a little differently — with the UI Food Pantry open to all students, faculty, and staff, while those at Iowa State and UNI restricting access to currently enrolled students. All three pantries collect data via an intake form.

But that information doesn’t determine access.

“We don't ask qualifying questions,” UI Basic Needs Coordinator Beecher said. “If you have a student ID, a staff ID, a faculty ID — if you have a university ID, you're in. We just collect data for us.”

That is the data allowing Beecher to report that 48 percent of its users are international students; 32 percent are first-generation students; 61 percent are graduate or professional students; and 21 percent are undergrads.

UNI doesn’t limit the amount of food a person can take, but the UI Food Pantry has some guardrails — primarily to ensure benefits for more people. The limitations depend on what’s in stock — meaning shoppers might be limited to one carton of eggs or one onion each.

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“Onions go insanely well,” Beecher said, pointing to that product’s importance in international cuisine.

And the UI pantry only lets five shoppers in at a time, hence the line, in an attempt to discourage competition for certain popular items — like onions, which already were down to two each just minutes after the shop opened Tuesday.

They all offer different hours and are open for four days per week — to allow time and resources to restock, largely from donations from community partners, including area food banks and businesses like Kwik Star, Sam’s Club and Starbucks.

Iowa State in the last budget year received $32,363 in monetary donations and grants and more than 29,000 pounds of donated food. ISU additionally provided $74,100 as part of its 2024 strategic plan project funding “to expand the pantry’s infrastructure.”

Iowa State reports an estimated 31 percent of its students are food insecure, according to a ISU Student Wellness assessment. UNI has found 16 percent of its students have some form of food insecurity. And the UI is around the national average of 30 percent.

“It's something we’re definitely keeping our eye on, what are the trends,” Beecher said. “Because that's a benchmark for us in how we're fighting food insecurity. But, also, food pantries are Band-Aid.”

They might help a lot of people. But they won’t solve the problem, she said.

“So I think it’s really important to keep in mind, systemically, we’ve got to approach this from a community standpoint.”

Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com

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