The “Beach Pantry,” stocked with canned beans, soups, grape juice and other goods, is a new resource at Cal State Long Beach for students who find themselves unable to cover the combined costs of study and meals.
The pantry has been open since the Aug. 22 beginning of the campus’ fall term. Cal State Long Beach’s student government, with help from a Lakewood charity called Food Finders, created the stash of nonperishable foods for students enduring short- or long-term difficulties.
Food insecurity is actually a fairly widespread problem on Cal State University campuses; university officials reported in February that some 23 percent of students within the Cal State system experience food insecurity while in college.
“We do need something like a food pantry, or a model that is more sustainable for students who are food insecure,” said Logan Vournas, vice president of Associated Students, Inc., or ASI, which is the Long Beach campus’ student government.
On the Long Beach campus, the student pantry exists alongside other efforts designed for needy students, such as the Student Emergency Intervention and Wellness Program. That’s a campus administration program created to provide food and housing to students going through a personal crisis.
Food insecurity
The U.S. Department of Agriculture definitions for food insecurity describe situations where people have to reduce the quality of their diets, or, in more serious cases, the amount of food that they are able to eat.
A household enduring very low food security is one where, on multiple occasions within a year, money problems result in people cutting back on their food intake. This frequently leads to situations where people worry about eating all of their food before they have money to buy more.
Vournas experienced food insecurity while a teenager as an outcome of family conflicts involving sexual orientation and gender identity. Vournas said other students with non-traditional gender identities have experienced similar troubles.
“A lot of my friends had suffered through the same thing,” Vournas said.
ASI president Marvin Flores, who spoke of Beach Pantry while addressing a Cal State Long Beach audience during the campus’ convocation event in mid-August, began attending Cal State Long Beach in 2013 and said in an interview that during his first year of college, he tried to stretch $40 over an entire month to cover his meal costs.
“For four months straight, I would basically eat oatmeal, chicken and rice,” he said. “That was my diet.”
Stocking the pantry
ASI leaders have worked for several months to establish Beach Pantry, and the effort precedes the time when the current class of student government members took their current positions, Vournas said.
The pantry’s food items are currently on the shelves of a storeroom inside the Long Beach campus’ student union building. Although it’s currently stocked with the likes of dry goods and fruit juice — products that can be stored at room temperature — Vournas said one of ASI’s goals is to expand the pantry operation so hungry students can obtain foods that need to be refrigerated, likes meats and vegetables.
ASI also wants to build relationships with various campus organizations in order to maintain a steady stream of donations. Food Finders, which usually provides “food rescue” services by ferrying surplus edibles from the likes of grocers, restaurants or caterers to shelters and pantries, helped ASI open Beach Pantry by providing a cache of non-perishable items.
“We’re basically supporting getting it running, getting it going,” Food Finders Executive Director Patti Larson said.
“We know that there are a lot of colleges that have food insecurity,” she added.
For information on how to donate to Food Finders, call 562-283-1400.
