What and when their next meal will be are questions that many on the Palouse face as a day-to-day reality. Organizations like the Vandal Food Pantry and Moscow Food Pantry – St. Mary’s Parish aim to help these issues.
Feeding America found that in Latah County 4,580 people were food insecure in a 2018 report. The American College Health Association’s assessment of the University of Idaho found that 22% of students were hungry as there wasn’t enough money for food.
“Being food insecure is, ‘do you have a lack of access to healthy and nutritious options?’” Assistant Director of Fraternity & Sorority Life and Community Development Meggie Cafferty said. “Are you having to choose between paying for gas or buying food, or you’re having to choose between buying groceries or paying for other necessities in our day and age.”
Cafferty is a part of the Vandal Food Pantry that helps students, staff, faculty and the community with food assistance, collecting non-perishable food.
There are three main ways to receive and donate food. A new food pantry will be opening in Shoup Hall this spring with a larger, grocery store-style set-up. Three additional cabinets are located on campus, one at the ISUB, another at the Student Recreation Center and the last on the third floor of the Pitman center.
The Vandal Food Pantry is connected with various parts of the university to be able to aid students with more than just food.
“I just know that food insecurity can be an issue, especially among college students. But I know that there are a variety of resources available to them,” UI senior Amelia Carrillo said. “They can fill out a VandalCARE report and say that they’re food insecure and get resources from the dean’s office.
When looking at the numbers, senior Helen Wyman stated that there should be more discussion on food insecurity than what is being done now.
Cafferty said that they try to partner as much as possible and get students connected with proper outlets.
“If it’s maybe a financial issue, we can get students connected to financial aid. If it’s other mental and physical health issues that are arising, can we get students connected to student health or the Counseling and Testing Center,” Cafferty said. “A baseline place to start, of course, you can contact the food pantry, but also we highly recommend that individuals fill out a VandalCARE report.”
The Mobile Food Pantry also comes around on the first Wednesday of every month by the transit center.
“That Mobile Food Pantry is our biggest hands-on community-focused event and distribution point. We tend to serve about 50 families, and a family could be even one person,” Cafferty said. “I’ve seen families have just up to one and clear up to eight people. Or sometimes there’s maybe two or three families… all living together in the same space or next to one another. We’ve helped people who are living out of their vehicles who are living in kind of in-between housing scenarios. So we know that that is a utilized resource, and it’s needed in our community.”
Cafferty discussed that during these events, 60% of those that come to receive aid are students, with the rest being outside of the university.
“We get a lot of community members, Moscow, Troy, Deary, Julieta, Kendrick these smaller outlying towns, we get a lot of people from those areas as well,” Cafferty said. “But it is designed for student support, which is why we have it on campus at all. There are other mobile pantries that the food bank sponsors at various locations in the Moscow community.”
Another food bank helping to make change is the Moscow Food Pantry – St. Mary’s Parish. Linda Nickels is the food bank director and described an increasing population that is needing help.
“We used to have that people could only visit the food bank once a month. What we have done now is say they can come when they need food, because a lot of the prices have gotten gradually higher over the years,” Nickels said. “People only on Social Security, by the time they pay rent and buy gas for their car, they can hardly afford to eat.”
The number of people St. Mary’s Parish helps has been increasing, growing from 15 a day to around 100.
St. Mary’s Parish and the Vandal Food Pantry saw fewer people needing assistance during the pandemic as there weren’t that many students on campus. Cafferty stated that it has now gone back to pre-pandemic levels.
“For a while, it didn’t because people got stimulus checks and people’s food stamps increased and things like that,” Nickels said. “Actually, it decreased some at the beginning of the pandemic, but all of that has ended. And so we’re starting to see more of an increase.”
While the pantries directly aid individuals, the other aspect of these programs is to educate local communities on what kinds of foods are needed to be both healthy and nutritious. Annie Roe, director of Eat Smart Idaho, discussed their role in educating healthy donations.
Eat Smart Idaho is an extension program that provides nutrition education and physical activity classes to low-income food-insecure Idahoans across the state.
“We’ll work with a food pantry and see where they are getting their food from. We might work with a school to do a food drive, and we have different flyers that we can use talking about healthy donations,” Roe said. “But really, it’s just working with those community partners to get those healthy lists out there, because people do want to donate.”
Lists of what to donate can be found on the Vandal Food Pantry website. Information on healthy foods to donate can be found on Eat Smart Idaho’s website.
Daniel V. Ramirez can be reached at [email protected] or Twitter @DVR_Tweets