Got meals?: Sharing meal swipes to tackle food insecurity

Meal swiping is mindless for many of us. We swipe in and out of the dining halls day after day without giving it a second thought. This is especially true for first-years, who aren’t given a choice about the amount of meals they pay for over the course of the year. Under Tufts' premium meal plan, which is required for first-years, students are provided with an unlimited number of visits to Carmichael and Dewick during any given meal period. And while swiping in with reckless abandon whenever you want a cookie or a snack seems like one of Tufts' greatest perks, for the vast majority of students, unlimited dining is undeniably excessive. Even when upperclassmen get to select their preferred meal plan, swipes still go unused. At the end of each semester, swipes are wiped from accounts and thousands of cumulative dollars go to waste.

The thing is, while some students have the opportunity to access as much food as they want as often as they'd like, there are still students going hungry, even at private, elite institutions like Tufts. A survey of 4,419 students at Cornell University found that over one in five students had skipped meals due to financial constraints in the past year. The University of California found that 25 percent of its 150,000 students have skipped meals for financial reasons. And the City University of New York estimates that 40 percent of its 274,000 students have experienced food insecurity in one way or another. So while we may joke about cash-strapped college students settling for cheap ramen, the reality is that many — even at Tufts — find themselves struggling to pay for meals.

Universities across the country are coming up with solutions to the problem of disappearing swipes alongside hungry students. Jon Chin, a graduate student at New York University (NYU), responded to this dilemma by creating the website Share Meals in 2013. Share Meals matches NYU students who have extra meal swipes with those who are in need of food. At Columbia University, the Columbia First-Generation, Low-Income Partnership (FLIP) created a Facebook group called CU Meal Share. Through the program, students with extra meal swipes can post their information in the group, and students in need of a meal can contact them to meet up for a swipe. In addition to sharing meal swipes, students also use the forum to share information about cooking meals and publicize free food events.

Sharing meal swipes is a simple and costless solution for financially-strained students in need of extra meals, but it's a niche that has yet to be truly filled at Tufts. That's not to say that Tufts Dining hasn’t taken initiative to fight food insecurity. The Tufts Food Rescue Collaborative works with Tufts Dining to coordinate opportunities for students to sign up to package surplus food from Dewick and Carmichael Dining Halls. The food is then donated to Food for Free, a local NGO that redistributes the meals to people in the surrounding area. In recent years, Tufts Dining and Tufts Community Union (TCU) have also hosted biannual Cause Dinners, which give students the opportunity to donate money or meal swipes to selected organizations, such as the Justice for Janitors Community Fund and Tufts Timmy Global Health. As great as these efforts are, they could be expanded upon if swipes were also redistributed to students in need; there is undoubtedly a multitude of students whose unused swipes could not only go to benefiting local communities but to more financially constrained students as well.

Both Tufts' administration and student body can change the culture by implementing a system in which students can share surplus meal swipes with those in need of meals. It doesn’t need to be expensive or complicated; it could even start with a Facebook group. Not only would such a system help students for whom meals are harder to come by financially, but it would also improve community ties within our university as a whole. Sharing meals would engender a collective for students helping students, encouraging compassion for our peers while also reducing food insecurity due to financial constraints.

At Tufts, we have coders, social justice activists and communicators. We have a community filled with generous, compassionate, change-driven individuals. We have far too many untapped resources and meal swipes galore. Let's put all of this to good use.