Jamie Aguilar works part-time in outpatient care when she’s not in class. The hourly wage is decent money — more than most college students make, Aguilar says. She rents an off-campus apartment with three roommates, cuts back on restaurant dining and often chooses store generics instead of name brands at the grocery.
Still, Aguilar struggles to make ends meet.
“Twenty dollars just doesn’t stretch as much as it used to before,” said Aguilar, a junior nursing major.
Many college communities see moneylessness and malnutrition as no less normal than an all-night study session. But students interviewed by The Temple News now say meals have never felt less affordable.
The numbers back them up: Average egg prices reached an all-time high of $4.95 per dozen in January, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics; a February 25 USDA report placed the cost of some cartons at $8.95. A pound of ground beef sells for an average of $5.55, nearing last September’s record of $5.67.
Fifty-two percent of students in an undated survey on the website for the on-campus free food storehouse, Cherry Pantry, reported experiencing food insecurity, housing insecurity or even homelessness within a 30-day span.
Yes, regulators and politicians often pledge to lower prices. But egg farmers and producers blame the current spike on an outbreak of “bird flu” that has so far killed 162 million chickens.
“What we saw in 2021, where everything is going up in price, that’s largely gonna be the job of the Federal Reserve to react to that in a timely manner,” said assistant economics professor Josh Mask, who teaches about inflation in his macroeconomics courses.
Trouble within a single industry — agriculture — requires farmers, regulators and lawmakers to work together to provide individual solutions, Mask said.
Inflation puts all of society in a kind of enormous vice grip: The wealthiest Americans may still live well and buy what they want. But middle-class families choose to forgo certain extravagances when prices rise, Mask said.
Those with largely unchanging incomes, straddling the picket fence of sustenance, can no longer keep pace with even Baloo from The Jungle Book: They’re going without the bare necessities of life.
Recent college students and grads “got the full brunt of inflation — no wage increases,” Mask said. Then, when the Fed raised interest rates to stabilize prices, those alumni suddenly struggled to find work commensurate with their education.
“So, it’s incredibly unfair for that particular cohort,” Mask said.
For some students, practical solutions to the cost crunch lie at hand: Junior film and media arts major Adam Horsky scours circulars and discount sites for deals and peppers promo codes onto food delivery apps like DoorDash, he said.
Junior nursing student Magalie Huertero, Aguilar’s roommate, often forgoes shopping at traditional food chains. Instead, the whole unit carpools to Costco — where customers buy by the pallet, not the bag.
“It comes out so much cheaper than going two or three times a week at the grocery store,” she said.
For others, improvising and cost-cutting alone still leaves them going hungry for long stretches of time. They might often find themselves relying on Temple’s Cherry Pantry — a storehouse stocking rations of canned goods on the Howard Gittis Student Center’s second floor.
The Cherry Pantry’s staff doesn’t work alone, however. It also draws contributions from students, faculty and colleagues in other departments.
When Geography and Urban Studies professor Fletcher Chmara-Huff began visiting catered events at Temple, the sight of free, unclaimed food being thrown away troubled him. So, at a colleague’s urging, he joined the Slack channel for the Cherry Pantry’s FoodShare program.
It’s the only reason he downloaded the workflow chatroom app. And that’s all he uses it for, to this day.
“There’s almost a cultural expectation that college students should be hungry,” Chmara-Huff said. “And I’ve come over the last few years to think that’s just an unacceptable attitude.”
United Nations Committee for Food Safety chairman Gabriel Ferrero said in a 2022 interview that “we produce enough food to feed 1.5 times the world’s population.” Yet the UN’s 2024 State of Food Security and Nutrition report estimated more than 700 million people deal consistently with hunger; more than 2 billion human beings face “moderate to severe food insecurity”; and 3.1 billion can’t afford a nutritious diet.
In other words, hunger isn’t an inevitability. Chmara-Huff believes it’s a choice — a failure of society to care for its most vulnerable.
From the Great Depression to earlier this year, many Americans relied on partnerships between service organizations and the government to feed those mired in penury — not communities. But a drastic, likely illegal cost-cutting push from newly-installed federal officials might forever diminish the public sector’s role in feeding the hungry.
Still, a variety of student organizations and campus institutions offer food at free or reduced rates alongside the Pantry: For example, Temple’s Newman Center for Catholic Life on Broad Street near Diamond, offers a free spaghetti dinner on Thursday nights at 6 p.m. Farming cooperatives across the state and the St. Christopher’s Foundation partnered with the university to deliver fresh produce to North Philadelphia.
“Cherry Pantry is a start,” Chmara-Huff said. “But I think we need to think about how to feed each other on campus.”
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