Although Wednesday is the last day of classes, it doesn’t seem long ago we were beginning the Fall semester and kicking off the school year. It may be time for students to say goodbye to a lot, but at least there is one thing we can all look forward to leaving behind: on-campus dining.
A big problem with on-campus dining is something called “Fall-Spring commitment,” in which students must have a meal plan in Spring if they had one the previous Fall. So even if students realize on-campus dining isn’t for them for various reasons — like if they actually enjoy food — they are forced to pay thousands of dollars more for no logical reason. It seems like Aramark is just trying to take money from students, especially considering all flex bucks not used by students at the end of each semester disappear.
As more than hundreds of unused flex bucks will potentially vanish, UF’s Mitchell Kaye and Flex Philanthropy are holding their second-annual food drive to put unused flex bucks to a good cause. On Tuesday and Wednesday, students will be able to use their flex bucks to donate non-perishable goods to the Flex Philanthropy Food Drive at the Rawlings Hall P.O.D. Market.
According to its Facebook page, Flex Philanthropy’s 2015 Food Drive raised more than $400 worth of food, but there’s no reason the UF community should stop there. If more events made it accessible for students to help feed the hungry, UF could go beyond what’s currently possible to curb Gainesville’s plaguing problem that too large of a proportion of the population suffer from hunger.
There are two ways UF can become a leading university in preventing food from going to waste. One way is for students to have the ability to donate at P.O.D. Markets year-round. Yes, students could theoretically find local, off-campus food pantries to directly donate if they wanted, but keep in mind most students are on the meal plan in the first place because they live on-campus and do not have easy access to transportation. All students need is a bin at each P.O.D. Market to donate the food they buy.
There’s another way students could easily diminish hunger in Gainesville, and it pertains to the dining halls themselves. As students could theoretically use money at P.O.D. Markets to donate goods without assistance, the same could be done using dining halls as an intermediary. Students could grab a to-go box, fill it with mounds of food and head a couple of blocks from the dining hall to easily find someone hungry. And to mitigate any potential logistical issues, UF could take a page out of the playbook of organizations like the Food Recovery Network.
With more than 100 chapters across the country, the Food Recovery Network organizes students to keep uneaten campus food from dumpsters and instead facilitate getting the food to local food pantries. Since 2011, the Food Recovery Network has recovered about 1.2 million pounds of food. Efforts like these are essential when considering how college campuses collectively throw out a total of 22 million pounds of uneaten food each year, according to an article by NPR. It’s no coincidence one in seven Americans go hungry; it ties back in part to the start rates of food waste in our country. We need to act nationally and locally.
Flex Philanthropy gets the ball rolling toward solving hunger in Gainesville. Sure, some of these suggestions may be a bit difficult to pull off. However, I feel it is important that Aramark just give students a chance to put these policies in place, because people go hungry every day.
Joshua Udvardy is a UF mechanical engineering freshman. His column usually appears on Wednesdays.
