When Hunger Shows Up on a College Campus

When I think of hunger, I hardly ever picture a college student.

I recently saw a News Channel 5 story about students at Middle Tennessee State University that made me realize how incomplete that picture is.

College is supposed to be a season of possibility. You worry about classes, grades, friendships, what comes next. You don’t imagine whether someone has enough food, or whether they can afford something as basic as bed sheets.

Staff there described students making choices between things like a textbook and a set of bed sheets, after tuition, housing and a meal plan were already paid.

There’s a food pantry on campus. Between 400 and 600 students use it every month during the school year. The same office distributes donated household goods and served more than 400 students that way last year.

And donations are down.

Hunger doesn’t organize itself around who we expect it to affect. It shows up wherever the math stops working.

For some college students, the big expenses are covered. They got in. They found the tuition. They signed the housing paperwork.

And then there’s still an entire semester to live through.

Groceries. Toiletries. Laundry detergent. A textbook.

Bed sheets.I keep coming back to the specificity of bed sheets.

It’s not a dramatic detail. Nobody thinks of bed sheets when we talk about hunger. They’re just something you need to be a person living in an apartment or dorm.

We see a version of that at The Store, too. We stock household items and hygiene supplies alongside our food because food insecurity rarely arrives by itself. When the grocery budget stops working, chances are there are other things being stretched, postponed or simply going without.

Sometimes hunger looks exactly like we expect it to.

And sometimes it looks like a nineteen-year-old standing in a campus pantry, trying to make the rest of the semester work.