Campus Community Conundrum

As a college professor, I’ve watched for too many years, students suffer from loneliness, poor nutrition and sleep deprivation and have felt frustrated because there has been little that I could do to help. When I returned to teaching after some time away to cope with a cancer diagnosis, this frustration turned to anger. I no longer saw students as people who passed through this relatively short stint at school and who would get back to their regular healthy habits after they graduated. Instead, I saw them as people about to step into the culture of busyness that characterizes so many adult lives and leaves little time to care for themselves, which I imagined as a Dr. Seuss-style machine that I had just been spat out of, full of learning through trauma.  I wanted to run back to the beginning, stand at the entrance to that machine and hand out some tools that might help them as they pass through it.

Our research asks if communal food programming can exist on campuses, and can it help students access nourishing food, develop food literacy, and build social connections. Our research also asks what frameworks are required and what institutional commitments are needed to build them. 

It’s also important to pay attention to these young adult years because, as elucidated in a NY Times special section on mental health (see link below) the mental health problems that young adults are experiencing reflect the problems in our culture.

“We can’t divorce our psychological state from the forces that dictate our lives.”

NY Times Health, 2022

Before the pandemic, almost half of post-secondary students reported that they sacrifice buying healthy food to pay for school and other necessities (Meal Exchange Report, 2016), while 58.8% of students reported feeling isolated or very lonely (NCHA-II report, 2019). As a result of the pandemic, students have seen their cost-of-living increase and have experienced and continue to experience isolation to compound already difficult circumstances. We must ask ourselves: what are we doing to our students? This is a cultural crisis. And our current campus food culture, which is an outcome of systemic constraints such as commodified eating spaces that don’t nurture healthy eating practices and schedules that don’t allow enough time for eating, reinforces a destructive culture, every meal of every day. We must examine the potential for a new campus culture that emphasizes collective engagement in food practices over individualism and consumerism. 

An intentional cultural shift can also create what sociologist, Ray Oldenburg, called “third places,” which are “places where people spend time between home and work [or classrooms], where we exchange ideas, have a good time, and build relationships,” which he considered important for a community’s social vitality.

These responses to our virtual and in-person communal food programming illustrate the power of “third places” to support students: 

“The cook-along was wonderful, thank you! I learned new ways to connect with food and prepare meals…Who knew turnips and a potato-based meal could be so delicious!” 

• – George Brown College student, 2021

“Loved it! Gave me something fun, healthy, and affordable to do in a stressful exam time.” 

• – Dalhousie student, 2021

“You feel like you’re part of something.” 

• – Education Co-ordinator, Concordia Food Coalition, 2022

These are phrases students living in residence used to describe their experience participating in a community kitchen initiative we launched this year, called Sundays in Residence: 

“Loved hanging out!”  “I learned something.” “The food was delicious.” “We laughed a lot.” “We had to work hard.” 

There’s an energy in these quotes that tells us about the impact that cooking with others has on one’s sense of belonging and the opportunities for joy and relevant learning that it creates, which we know contribute to well-being. 

I want to reflect on the last phrase: “we had to work hard.” Building and maintaining frameworks for a new campus food culture requires work: hard work, messy work, collective work! Sadly, by prioritizing convenience in campus food systems, we have created individualized, sanitized, and wasteful food environments. We have omitted the most important part of eating: the shared work involved in getting food to a table – this is what ultimately connects us! It requires a type of work that we’re not used to engaging in on campus, but this type of work works. Food-making activities have the power to engage and make us feel like we’re part of something, which builds those valuable temporary communities or “third places.” 

It’s important to remember that students are part of and will join workplaces and communities where they will decide how time, space, and resources are used. Considering this, we really want to think about the habits our institutions encourage; every moment, in and outside of class is a learning moment – and campus food culture is an integral part of this learning. A shift that makes room for innovative approaches to scheduling, use of resources, and communal eating practices can lead to healthier campus communities. In an article that examines how food has been a focal point of social justice activism over the centuries, Ligaya Mishan writes:

“Nourishment is a prerequisite to equity.” 

• – NY Times, August 2020

If we acknowledge that equity is at the heart of healthy communities, then we must examine more closely how all students eat their way through their days at school.

Learn more about the Communal Lunch Project