Spirit helps demonstrates picking up food from the Seawolf Food Cache in the Student Health and Counseling Center in Rasmuson Hall. Photo by Justin Cox.
When TNL decided to write a group project on what’s available to eat on and around campus, my thought was to write about bringing your own lunch to work. Lunch is easy to order, but it gets expensive.
As I started writing, one of my old articles came up in my files about the food pantry at UAA and I remembered that a lot of Seawolves are struggling with hunger and food insecurity.
I spoke with Amanda Walch at the UAA Seawolf Food Pantry, located in the Professional Studies Building ,and made arrangements to drop by. First though I stopped the UAA Emergency Food Cache.
In my previous article, I advised readers to get a bag of food if they needed it, and this time I wanted to see what it was like to get it myself. Having experienced food insecurity before, I also wondered if anyone would notice why I was there.
From my observation, no one was the wiser.
It was easy to go to the UAA Student Health and Counseling Center in room 120 at Rasmuson Hall and get the emergency food bag. It was just as easy to run over to Professional Studies Building 212 during their open hours to sign in and get some groceries at the pantry.
I spoke to Breeayne Dinius at the pantry about how to create lunches from what I got and she said that the food available is so varied every time that it is hard to make a generalization based on what I had been given — as I did not need the food, it went back into the program.
I was intrigued by the pains the programs took to let students be discreet. I was given food at the cache in a reusable shopping bag, the kind that if you are looking, you will see people carrying everywhere on campus and around town. The shopping bag was the perfect size for the emergency food for one person for three days. At the pantry, had I done a pick up, I would have been given another bag, with the contents being covered up.
I asked Breeayne if students were embarrassed about using the food pantry and she said that there is a stigma attached to food insecurity. Whether it is because people are embarrassed or they just don’t want to advertise their plight, she couldn’t say.
I was impressed by the pantry because in the small space of maybe 10’ x 8’, it was well organized, with cabinets and drawers, and signs telling patrons how many of the items they could put in their bags depending on the size of their household. There was also a drawer with period protection – Breeyane said that period poverty is when people don’t have the money to pay for menstrual products..
I was told that if students cannot make it within the hours of the pantry being open that they can email uaa_seawolfpantry@alaska.edu and that they would try to make accommodations.
I am glad to see some groups at UAA noticing the food struggles of students and filling a need as best as they can. As college costs increase and inflation continues to rise, particularly hitting the gas pump, utilities, and grocery stores, it is getting harder to budget. Prices for utilities, gas, and college classes are independent variables that are unavoidable.
The food cache and the pantry can help Seawolves make ends come closer together. Everyone involved with making these services possible care very much, and hope students utilize them.
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