After paying tuition, textbook costs and class fees, spending money on food may be the last thing students think of.
Food assistance in Iowa comes in many different forms. On the Iowa State campus, The SHOP (Students Helping Our Peers) Food Pantry provides food for students and staff in need. Open Wednesdays, Tuesdays and Thursdays the SHOP, located in the Food Science building allows access to non-perishable food items.
Iowa State extension and outreach provides healthy eating and low-cost educational programs through ‘Spend Smart. Eat Smart.’ and ‘Buy. Eat. Live Healthy.’
Many churches throughout Ames also provide food assistance for community members through food banks and free community meals.
Kelly Verburgt, president of the SHOP and senior in dietetics, aims to provide Iowa State members with free healthy food.
Since becoming president at the end of the fall 2016 semester, Verburgt has introduced healthy food options into meal bags that are given away at promotional events.
In the past the Mobile SHOP, a campus outreach effort that visits Frederiksen Court and Schilletter-University Village, has provided students with candy and snacks. That changed with Verburgt as president.
“I tried to make those healthier," Verburgt said. "I opted to do little bags of nuts or things of applesauce."
The SHOP has recently started making meal bags for their on-campus food pantry location too.
To provide any easy meal for students and staff, the meals bags come with all the ingredients and a recipe for making a nutritious meal.
“Food is such an easy thing to skip, that kids will often skip meals to save money here and there,” Verburgt said.
Buy. Eat. Live Healthy, a nutrition and wellness program through the Iowa State extension and outreach department, provides pregnant teens and families with young children nutrition education lessons that teach them how to stretch their dollars while eating healthy food.
Jody Gatewood, assistant coordinator of Buy. Eat. Live Healthy, said the program is aimed at providing valuable resources to families in Iowa.
“[The goal is] to help people lead healthier lives. We’re really trying to educate them so that they can make better choices for healthier living for them and their children,” Gatewood said.
Christine Hradek, coordinator for Buy. Eat. Live Healthy, said that the program serves Iowans whose income is at or below 185 percent of the federal poverty line, meaning people who fall well under the normal poverty rate decided by federal government.
“The vast majority of them are employed. Some working multiple jobs. A lot of it is that there is a lot of jobs that even when you work full time you don’t make enough money to take care of a family,” Hradek said.
For the people that participate in Buy. Eat. Live Healthy, at least one of the parental figures works full time or more.
Hunger in Iowa is related to insufficient income. For people in poverty, it can be hard to find a stable place to live which makes it difficult for them to get a job that pays well. Even if someone is working for the minimum wage or slightly above for many hours, it can still be hard to make enough money to support a family, according to Hradek.
“One important pieces of data to share is about 1 in 8 Iowans struggle with food insecurity. It’s a lot higher number than a lot of people might think, it’s a really significant problem in our state. There’s a lot of prosperity in our state but there’s also a lot of poverty in our state,” Hradek said.
When recalling a gratifying experience she had with Buy. Eat. Live Healthy, Hradek spoke of a lesson on fruits and vegetables that she observed.
One of the nutrition educators from Buy. Eat. Live Healthy was going to be teaching a lesson on fruits and vegetables that day. They were educating a woman with three daughters, living in “a very small one bedroom apartment” in Fort Dodge. When they stepped into the woman’s small kitchen they noticed the lack of kitchen equipment and food in the fridge, but they also noticed “two really big grocery store bags full of zucchini” sitting on the kitchen floor.
Aware that this woman may be struggling to provide for her family, her neighbor had been leaving zucchini grown from her garden on her front porch.
“She didn’t know how to cook zucchini. She didn’t know how to prepare it in a way her daughters would like, so she always threw it away. All this food that she was getting she just threw it away,” Hradek said.
Scrapping the planned lesson on fruits and vegetables, the members from Buy. Eat. Live Healthy focused on teaching the woman how to sauté, roast and grate the zucchini for bread and muffins.
After the lesson the woman was “dazed” that her kids ate everything made with zucchini that day.
“It was just that little bit of practice with a friendly person that was willing to sit down and work with you on it that really made a huge difference for her. What she learned not only applied to zucchini but any vegetable that [neighbor] gives her,” Hradek said.
384,830 Iowans live at or below the poverty level qualifying for many food assistance programs, according to the Food Bank of Iowa.
With participating members including The SHOP food pantry, the Ames CROP Hunger Walk is held in the fall.
“CROP Hunger Walks support the Church World Service ministry and their efforts to help eradicate global and local hunger. They provide food, water, and resources such as agricultural tools, seeds, and more in order to empower individuals to grow a multitude of crops,” according to the Crop Hunger Walk website.
Ron Orth, Ames CROP Hunger Walk co-chair, said that during last year’s hunger walk around $37,000 was raised.
“25 percent of it stays local to fight hunger here. We provide part of that money for seven different agencies in [Iowa],” Orth said.
The rest of the money goes overseas to fight hunger in impoverished areas.
The CROP Hunger Walk is meant to represent the many miles that hungry people in developing countries walk everyday to get food, water, and fuel to take their goods to market, according to a CROP Hunger Walk pamphlet.
Having been a part of the CROP Hunger Walk for over 30 years Orth remembers during one of the walks there was a bad rainstorm yet people still participated.
“We organized it so they could go into the gym on campus and walk but very few people did that. The dedication of other people that are helping to alleviate hunger is very touching,” Orth said.
The CROP Hunger Walks help support the overall ministry of Church World Service, a faith-based organization helping communities around the globe with hunger, poverty, displacement and disaster.
Similarly, Food at First, a Christian faith-based program consisting of a free meal program and perishable food pantry, works to provide hungry people in Ames with food.
Meals are served to the public everyday at the First Christian Church in Ames.
The food provided during these meals is donated by local ISU Dining, Walmart, Hy-Vee and more.
Food that would otherwise be thrown away because of a close expiration date or ugly appearance is used by Food at First to makes hundreds of meals every week for those experiencing hunger in Ames.
The food pantry or “free market” consists of the abundance of food left over from meals served during the week. While the free market isn’t daily people are encouraged to come take the perishable food that they need for free regardless of their income.
Ed Gillott, volunteer coordinator for St. John’s by the Campus, says that people can come and eat meals and take all the food that they need “no questions asked”.
The Food at First programs see people from all walks of life. Elderly, people with disabilities and young families come to the meals and free market.
“We’ve got young families that may be transitioning through town for a period of time that just need to stretch their budgets. There not necessarily hungry but this allows them to stretch their budget, they can come in get a good hot meal, take some food home with them, that will provide them for a couple days,” Gillott said.
Gillott has been volunteering with Food at First for ten years now, because he likes giving back to the community and building relationships with the regulars that attend meals.
“There’s one gal down there that’s one of the regulars and she’s an elderly individual that comes in. I think she lives by herself out in the country. She just really appreciates the fact that we’re down there, we’re giving up a Saturday morning basically to come down and serve a meal,” Gillott said. “She calls me St. John’s so I’ll be walking through the room and she’s like ‘Hey St. John’s’ so that’s kind of nice. That’s at least a connection that we have as a church community with at least one individual.”