COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) - When MU School of Music professor Wendy Sims saw her daughter, an MU student, come home at the end of her first semester with a large box full of bags of potato chips, she had questions about how her daughter was using her meal plan.
“I asked her, ’what are you doing with those,’ and she explained to me that she had all these leftover meals that her friends and her were using to buy cheesecakes, coffees and other things they wouldn’t normally buy,” Sims said. “It seemed like these students were trying frantically to use up their meals. I thought that was a ridiculous use of the plan.”
Ensuing conversations with Arts and Science Associate Dean Theodore Tarkow, Campus Dining Services Director Julaine Kiehn and organizations on campus led to the creation of a new pilot program that allows MU students with meal plans to transfer meals to other students who may be food insecure.
The Columbia Missourian (https://bit.ly/2knaoE4 ) reports that the program is run by Tiger Pantry, an auxiliary of the Missouri Students Association that provides food assistance to students, faculty and staff at MU and aims to change the campus perspective on hunger, according to its website.
“We see that a significant portion of our clients are students,” MU senior Rachel Volmert, director of Tiger Pantry, said. “We want to give those students access to nutrition while they are on campus.”
Meals, commonly referred to as swipes by students, expire if they are unused at the end of the semester. The program was conceived to prevent those unused meals from being wasted when they could be used to feed students in need, according to Jordan Yount, a spokesman for the College of Arts and Science.
“These swipes spoil just like food spoils. It’s a waste,” Yount said.
According to the Interdisciplinary Center for Food Security at MU, 17.2 percent of Boone County residents are food insecure, meaning they are worried about where their next meal will come from. Although MU does not keep data on the number of students who are food insecure, the meal transfer program estimated the number at 20 percent, according to Yount.
Students are limited to donating 10 meals per week so as to avoid donating more than they can afford to give.
“I’m not sure a student’s parent would be okay with them donating 150 meals that the parent is paying for,” Kiehn said in a Monday news release.
Students can volunteer to donate meals by filling out a form on the Tiger Pantry website. However, students who want to receive meals from the program must become a client of Tiger Pantry and go to its office at 1400 Rock Quarry Road once a week to transfer the meals to their student account. Students who receive transfer meals will be able to use them at any all-you-care-to-eat dining location on campus without students or dining service employees knowing they received a meal from the program.
Volmert suggested students do not wait until the end of the semester to donate their meals.
“At the end of the semester, the swipes expire, so if you donate all your extra swipes in the last few weeks, there’s no guarantee that they’ll all be used,” Volmert said.
Tiger Pantry will promote the service throughout the semester via social media and tabling events and would appreciate the help of the community to raise awareness, Volmert said. If the program is successful, it will continue to be accessible campus-wide at MU, Yount said.
“The way the food service reacted to this is quite admirable,” Sims said. “This created many questions and problems for them, and yet they stepped up and showed a willingness to do this.”
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Information from: Columbia Missourian, https://www.columbiamissourian.com
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