At McDonalds on the first floor of the Student Union, students can buy a $6.49 10-piece Chicken McNuggets meal. Just around the corner they have free access to fresh fruit and canned foods from Trader Joes and the Baton Rouge Food Bank at the LSU Food Pantry.
Everything in the pantry is free to LSU students, no Paw Points or Tiger Cash necessary; the only thing they need to do is fill out an application found on Campus Life’s website.
For graduate and undergraduate students, the reliable access to fresh foods that the pantry provides is essential to putting food on the table.
Geography graduate student Jessie Parrott said she has used the service sporadically since learning of it through her involvement in student government. Through the food pantry she was given access to cereal, dry foods, pasta and spices without breaking the bank, she said.
Parrott was recommended she use the Food Pantry as a graduate student since the university doesn’t pay her enough for the work she’s doing, she said.
“I’m a graduate student and make so far below a living wage,” Parrott said. “We have to worry about other things like rent and really high rates for car insurance, so why not use the food pantry to take some of that financial stress off of [us]?”
The LSU Food Pantry was established for the purpose of helping students like Parrott that experience “situational hunger.”
Alison Paz, Associate Director of Marketing and Communications for Campus Life, cited food insecurity as a prevalent issue on college campus’ across the nation and said universities like LSU have taken the lead in addressing the issue.
“Regardless of circumstances, no student should have to choose between food and other basic needs,” Paz said.
LSU Campus Life took over management of the pantry in 2016 and has seen its usage continue to climb every year since, with 2021 seeing record usage numbers, according to Paz. The increase in usage has been attributed to factors ranging from an increased student population, COVID-19 and a greater variety of products in the 985 sq. foot space.
Despite a recent marketing push from Campus Life, the food pantry remains elusive to many students.
“There’s likely a very high number of students, graduate and undergraduate, that don’t know of its existence, especially because of the pandemic with people not going into campus as much,” Parrott said.
Student workers like finance freshman Mae Wong prepare orders from students across campus in the different time slots the pantry offers for pick up.
On the application form, students have access to items ranging from milk, eggs, fruits, vegetables and premade salads and wraps from Trader Joe’s to slices of pizza from Fat Boys Pizza, with new items constantly flowing in, Wong said.
There is a regular flow of new food coming into the pantry every week, with the aforementioned Trader Joe’s delivering on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the Baton Rouge Food Bank delivering on Wednesday and Rouses delivering new food whenever they can, she said.
“We don’t really order things but we get things [from donations] a lot,” Wong said. “Some school, after Hurricane Ida, even donated a bunch of canned good, [toiletries] and feminine hygiene products.”
Some of the items donated to the food pantry are slightly damaged items from grocery stores. Wong recalls receiving a box of six tomatoes, all of which were undamaged except for one that was “punctured and bleeding a bit.”
“All we had to do was open it up and toss the [damaged one],” she said. “They can’t do that but we can [at the pantry].”
The only limit the pantry has is a cap of two orders a week.
Popular specialty items, including “a lot of arugula,” are limited to one per order, but the food pantry allows students to take as much or as little as they need, according to Wong. Wong herself uses the service while she’s at work because she’s not able to make it to the grocery store without a car.
Parrott finds the service useful and “wonderful,” especially for those less fortunate than herself. She said she was “surprised by abundance of resources” the stocked pantry provided when she came to LSU from a smaller university with a fewer resources
Despite using it herself since the spring of 2021, she still feels morally like she shouldn’t use it knowing other students, particularly international students, are struggling to make ends meet. She said a lot of other students she talks to share her sentiment.
“The reality is that it is there. It is a resource that is available and we should be using it because we do struggle paying the bills,” Parrott said. “The university does make this problem for us by not paying a living wage so naturally we should be using the university’s resource to solve this problem until they solve the overall problem of paying us a living wage.”
The LSU Food Pantry sits in its old location in room 350 on the second floor of the Student Union on Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2020.
