The starving student living on ramen noodles and Kraft dinner is a well-worn cliché. But is it a symptom of something more serious?
Public Health student Merryn Maynard thinks so. Merryn became interested in food insecurity while volunteering at a local food bank in her native Hamilton. On coming to Waterloo for graduate studies, she decided to focus her research on food insecurity in post-secondary populations. Her thesis project investigates the issue in UWaterloo’s undergraduate population.
Merryn’s findings, while preliminary, indicate a very real problem for some students. “Many are regularly running short of money for food, particularly around the end of semester when OSAP grants are running out,” she says. These students then experience increased anxiety and worry, which can affect academic performance, and both physical and mental health.
Merryn sees the issue as a symptom of something deeper — a chronic underfunding of post-secondary education. She also says general work on defining food insecurity at a national level has now given us a yardstick by which to measure the problem in student populations.
“Now that we have recognized parameters of what constitutes food insecurity, we can no longer ignore the fact that some young people are literally going hungry to finance their education.”
