Nestled behind the kitchen on the first floor of the University of Idaho Bruce M. Pitman Center lies a small cellar lined with shelves of non-perishables.
The three rows of shelves are sparsely filled from the floor to the ceiling with food items such as canned food, bags of pasta and jars of tomato sauce.
“If the apocalypse happens, that’s where we’re headed,” said Megan Miller, food pantry coordinator for the UI Center for Volunteerism and Social Action, which manages the pantries.
The cellar, holding the stock used to fill Vandal Food Pantry locations, is somewhat of an allegory for the system which aims to be discrete, anonymous and private, with five different pantries across campus.
Some pantry systems on college campuses only have one large cellar where people are allowed to choose food items. But the Vandal Food Pantry organizers instead fill the network of pantries each week from the food stock in the cellar to maintain anonymity for its patrons.
People who want to use the pantries do not have to show proof of identification or anything before grabbing non-perishables. There are five pantry locations across campus, according to the UI website, including ones in student support services, student media, the diversity center, the Women’s Center, the Counseling and Testing Center, the Student Recreation Center and the Native American Student Center.
Most of the cellar is filled with food the pantry received through donations. But some of it is also the product of a $5,000 grant the pantry was awarded earlier this year from Sodexo, the food service company that serves UI. As part of that grant, Miller or Allie Pastras, the other pantry coordinator, are taken grocery shopping once a month by a Sodexo representative to buy extra items, including items they don’t typically receive through donations, such as canned chili or peanut butter.
With the grant, Miller said the pantries are able to keep a variety of foods in stock across campus, a change from the typical donations of ramen noodles and other non-perishables.
“We get a lot of ramen, which is nice, but it’s not very sustainable,” she said. “Ramen’s fairly cheap and it doesn’t have a lot of nutritional value. So, when we get to choose what we stock the pantry with, we do so with things that have more nutritional value.”
Megan Miller and Allie Pastras fill bags for distribution to the Vandal Food Pantry.
Kyle Pfannenstiel | Argonaut
The Sodexo grant is among a slew of changes the pantry is undergoing, all aimed at better combatting hunger on campus.
Pastras said another recent change was an upgrade to a larger pantry inside the UI Recreation Center, one of the locations on the edge of campus. Pastras said she believes that location, and another in Forney Hall near the Counseling and Testing Center, are used by adults and families because they stock parenting items.
The pantry has also partnered with Vandal Health Education, offering grocery store tours and cooking classes. Although the partnership is relatively recent, the two have worked together to create the Moscow Food Feed, a blog about food education.
“Food insecurity is not only the lack of money to be able to afford food, but also the knowledge, the resources and the supplies … to be able to be sufficient,” Miller said.
Kyle Pfannenstiel can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter: @pfannyyy
Larry Lass
Looks like the University needs to buy a few gallons of paint.