Forty-one percent of U.S. college students may be food insecure, according to a 2023 study published by Temple University. Many worry about when their next meal will be, perhaps with no breakfast or lunch, or just water all day. Many blame themselves, because not having money in college is simultaneously seen as a joke and a symbol of rugged individualism. But it’s not their fault. Universities don’t offer support, and capital owners fight solutions, while both pursue “efficiency” at the cost of our well-being. To survive, students with limited food access envision a world that the establishment can’t, where strangers meet the needs of others, and where having enough to eat is a possibility. But getting there means political action. It means insisting that food is a right.

When I was in high school, I imagined campus life as it seemed in movies. Not just having fun with your buddies and becoming an adult, but also studying what matters to you, then doing it. Being part of a community and feeling proud. But it’s hard to hold onto that picture while I watch what my peers, many of whom are dealing with the same material insecurity described in that 2023 study, are going through. Learning on an empty stomach can be a herculean feat. Limited food can challenge your pride and separate you from the community. And where is the fun in one meal a day?

The USDA’s definition of food insecurity is “the limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods.” To be food insecure is to find difficulty in meeting your body’s most basic needs. It means you have to make tough choices, or are met with no choice at all. 

One 19-year-old sophomore, whom I’ll call Taylor, chose to remain anonymous but explained to me their frustration watching people eat out while having to “live with restraints.” They live on the “Go14” dining hall plan at our college, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which is limited to two meals per day. To cover the rest, Taylor uses free meals at churches and community center Shabbat dinners. Their peers with the unlimited meal plan share dining hall meals, and friends invite them to events with meals. In that way, Taylor isn’t alone.

Andi, a 21-year-old senior, also lives on the “Go14” dining plan, with two meals per day. She has polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), which requires her to follow a restricted diet and to eat at specific times to avoid blood sugar crashes. The dining halls rarely offer meals she can safely eat. She laughs a little when she explains how the “Mediterranean station” that meets her medical needs only appears twice a week. Most dining halls close on Saturdays. The rest of the time, she lives on fries, nothing, or whatever she can pack in a lunchbox from leftovers. She goes to the student-run food pantry nearly every week, but sometimes avoids it out of guilt; “other people need it more,” she says. She doesn’t tell her family. They’re already drowning in medical bills.

It’s not very affordable to be a working-class student. A recent lawsuit accused elite universities of conspiring to increase tuition and reduce financial aid for poorer students, to the tune of $685 million. Even without such collusion, tuition has doubled over the last 30 years. Working-class students are already pinched, often needing to take out obscenely large loans, promising much of their future labor (in industries already using AI to cut down on hiring). 

Meals shouldn’t be out of reach for already-underwater students, but the economy is broken. 13.5 percent of the American population is food insecure, and that number is significantly higher among college students, with estimates ranging from 19 to 56 percent. Yet a 2023 USDA estimate found that on any given day, there were 3,900 calories of food available per person. We have enough meals to go around. But in a capitalist system, capital owners can withhold or dispose of food supplies to increase profits. During the 2008 financial crisis, investors stored grain instead of selling it, waiting for prices to spike, which led to a collapse in the global food supply. Throughout the 2020 pandemic, agriculture corporations killed their animals and disposed of millions of gallons of milk, simply because it did not make money. John Steinbeck, in his classic novel The Grapes of Wrath, wrote of this brutal dynamic:

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground[…]And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange[…] The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed.

In other words, the pursuit of wealth starves the country and its students.

For college students already struggling to afford meals, about 1.1 million collected SNAP benefits. Early in November 2025, though, their benefits cratered, as SNAP payments were withheld during the government shutdown—itself brought on by Republicans’ attempts to take away healthcare benefits. Now that the shutdown is over, they’re receiving SNAP funds again, but eligibility for the program was reduced in the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” Students like Andi were already ineligible: she can’t collect SNAP because she is not a Wisconsin resident and can’t collect in her home state while living out of state. This change may limit millions of Americans’ access to food. These kinds of cost-cutting austerity policies are, and will continue to be, a large factor behind the college students’ lack of access to meals.

Joking about not having enough to eat helps students ignore conversations around it. We internalize grandparents’ quips about college students living on ramen and share Instagram Reels about being too broke to afford BBQ sauce. We just don’t talk about it seriously enough. Not having enough meals is accepted as the way college is, if you don’t have enormous wealth. The most you’ll hear many students talk about it is as a humorous aside. But talking about it this way just pushes hungry students into the shadows. The problem becomes stigmatized, and students often blame it on their own failures and feel too embarrassed to receive aid. 

If I were generous, I would say colleges might have forgotten to feed their students. But I would really say the political and economic system is meant to neglect the poor. There are more than enough calories for every student, but universities continue to treat food as something to be bought and sold, companies mark up prices, and governments cut assistance. The issue is privatization and budget cuts. That is why low-income students don’t have the same access as others. 

Last year, I had a conversation with a dining hall administrator who favored increased prices and shrinking meal allowances, all in the name of efficiency and giving students the right to choose. Instead of only providing cheap unlimited meal plans, they said, creating smaller plans would give more options to students who cook often. The administration had already forced dining halls to pay entirely for themselves, so it might have seemed pragmatic to raise prices for unlimited plans. But what restricted meal plans and higher prices really mean is that those with money will opt for the unlimited meal plan, while those who are poorer have fewer choices and must settle for less. Universities seem to forget that food is not meant to make money; it’s for feeding people. 

Colleges prioritize their bottom line. My school, UW-Madison, has made hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of investments in the stock market, including in arms companies complicit in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. It recently approved a $420 million building for the engineering department, while the Chancellor is primed to make a million dollars this year and lives rent-free in a mansion. But while the university spends like it just won the lottery, its administrators have done little to address food access. The only campus food pantry is run by students and funded by mandatory fees on top of tuition. The dining halls aren’t subsidized, and the meal plans practically segregate students by income. Andi told me of the meal plans, “Unlimited is for people with money. Go10 and Go14 are for low-income students.” Go10 provides roughly one meal a day; Go14 provides two.

When I was a freshman at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, cafeteria management tried to clamp down on students without meal plans entering the cafeteria through the exits and taking food for free. In response, my friends and I, with unlimited meal plans, would ask our friends who didn’t have meal plans what they’d like to eat, and we’d grab them as many meals as we could carry. We ignored administrators’ policies and found a way to feed each other regardless. 

I see instances of everyday resistance like that everywhere. At UW-Madison, students have been running a pantry for years. Administration hasn’t given them a dime, but they have managed to exist and serve over 2500 students in September alone. Visits to the pantry have, as of late, drastically increased, and they struggle to keep up with demand solely through student fees. Our student government, of which I am a member, recently approved a resolution demanding that Madison’s administration support the pantry. This isn’t unique to my school: in the absence of administrative assistance, students have started food pantries across the country. There are food pantries at 95 percent of colleges, and many are student-led.

Students, through social connections, add another node to this network of care. When they feel embarrassed about not being able to go out to eat with friends, friends support friends by cooking for each other, sharing the little food they have, and covering each other’s meals. Club events can also be a boon for struggling students. Clubs’ provision of meals for students helps them fill up when they can’t pay, demonstrating that in scarcity, students show mutual aid, not just paternalistic philanthropy.

We might not recognize it, but these are all instances of class struggle. These students are creating a world outside capitalism. Every time one student commits a quiet act of solidarity, like simply cooking a meal or sharing groceries, they are finding ways to survive without our political economy’s support. The only way for students to survive in a society that works against them is to build a community that works for them. 

The irony is, college campuses should be ideal locations for food abundance. They have the funding, proximity, and community for a substantial social safety net. Many have social democratic qualities, supporting student access to medical care, clothing, and transit. But limited food access rates mean universities are failing. When students are left to pick up the pieces, they show us that the entire nation could stop putting profit over human needs. But that doesn’t exonerate university administrators for ranking financial gain and prestige over everything else. Their manufacturing of food insecurity and gross wrongdoing cannot be overstated.

The powerful have been doing anything they can, however, to shun and discourage a more caring politics as “impractical.” For example, look at Zohran Mamdani’s campaign promise of city-owned grocery stores. Billionaires like John Catsimatidis, a grocery CEO, crashed out over the proposal, while others contributed tens of millions to Mamdani’s opponent. But we have to recall the brutal human cost of policies that privatize food and cut welfare. If politicians have any intention of solving this problem, they should take a page out of students’ books.

What policymakers must do is simple: recognize food as a human right. The only United Nations members opposing it are Israel, which is forcefully starving Palestinians, and the United States. Food as a human right means not only providing meals to those who have nothing to eat, but also breaking up the link between profit and food. It’s an atrocity that profit is allowed to restrict basic needs. It’s grotesque that a university chancellor can make a million dollars while students resort to food pantries. On campus, dining halls and snack stores should sell below cost. Nationwide, the state should create grocery stores and distribution networks that do the same.

But students won’t wait for politicians. Helping ourselves has taught us to resist and organize. The Young Democratic Socialists of America, whose parent organization calls for an end to the exploitative commodification of public goods, has 124 chapters resisting administrative wrongdoing. (I am proud to call myself a member at my local). We can and must face head-on the politicians and administrators powering food insecurity. 

And the tide has shifted recently. Mamdani, after being laughed out of the room on city-owned grocery stores, was elected mayor of New York City. He was recently welcomed by President Trump, who agreed (however cynically) to work together to stop skyrocketing grocery prices. Even moderate top Democrats have recognized the need to address affordability. For once, grocery execs and billionaires may be on the back foot. The country could catch up to what students already practice. Let’s make it so.