Ramen, ramen and more ramen. That’s the stereotypical college diet — but CU Boulder’s Basic Needs Center is working to ensure that isn’t the norm.
“The sort of entrenched trope around college students and their eating is that they are expected to eat less nutritionally dense types of foods, something cheap, easy to make,” said Hannah Wilks, interim assistant dean of students. “Part of the reason why we started some of these food resources is [because] that’s persistent and pervasive within our culture.”
The Buff Pantry, part of the Basic Needs Center, offers fresh, shelf-stable and frozen foods along with personal care items. Students can visit once a week.
Last year, a survey of more than 8,000 graduate and undergraduate students at CU Boulder found that 25% of students were food insecure, according to Wilks, which the center defines as “a lack of access to affordable, nutritious and culturally relevant food in a quantity that supports the active and healthy lifestyle students need to be successful.”
Since Wilks started the pantry in 2020, more and more students have been making use of it. The current space in the basement of University Memorial Center has seen a 370% increase in visitation since the 2020-21 academic year, with more than 11,439 visits total in 2023-24. On average, the pantry serves over 400 students each week, Wilks said.
Now, the pantry is set to move to the Center for Community (C4C) next year, where it will have more space and refrigeration capacity to serve more students.
“There’s a reality in which we don’t have the capacity to serve, right now, every student,” she said. “If 25% of the student population that has food insecurity came to us, we would not have enough resources to provide that currently.”
But not all students who may need the resources are using them, likely in part due to attitudes around seeking assistance.
“There’s still stigma in seeking services,” she said. “We hear often, ‘Well, yeah, I need that, but if other people need it more than me, then they should get it,’” she said. “We want students to know that there is no judgment from us about coming to get these types of services.”
The pantry is open to all students, regardless of need — something Wilks and her colleagues at the Basic Needs Center hope destigmatizes seeking the services. Wilks said about 10% of the students visiting the pantry “don’t have a problem obtaining food from a financial perspective.”
“Convenience wise, this is an easier place for them to get food,” she said. “So if our numbers continue to grow, that is where we will shift some of our eligibility, is that you have to demonstrate some level of food insecurity to be able to access it.”
Wilks said the center is “close to reaching that threshold” in the current pantry, but she hopes the bigger space allows for continuing to serve any student.
The move to the C4C building will also allow for a colocation of different resources Wilks says they often refer students to and vice versa, such as counseling services.
“As they’re dealing with students who might be in crisis, for them to be able to send someone down to the pantry, or if they know that food insecurity is the major issue, or a thing that’s preventing a student from something, then they will be able to have that access more immediately as well,” she said. “So yeah, good symbiotic relationship.”
‘Societal misperception’
The pantry isn’t the only resource the Basic Needs Center offers to fight food insecurity on campus. There are also mobile food pantries open to faculty, staff and members of the broader community; nutrition workshops and a donation program for meal swipes, which are loaded onto student IDs and are good at campus dining centers and grab-and-go locations.
The center also offers SNAP enrollment assistance in partnership with Hunger Free Colorado, a statewide nonprofit. SNAP, often referred to as food stamps, is a federal program administered through the county that provides financial assistance for food.
But SNAP has its own challenges.
In 2022, an estimated 37% of low-income people in Boulder County accessed SNAP benefits — the lowest of any of Colorado’s 10 biggest counties — according to a 2024 report from Hunger Free Colorado.
“In Boulder, there’s a lot of students who might meet the income criteria for SNAP but because of these federal restrictions on student eligibility, might not be out front,” said Carmen Mooradian, a senior public policy manager from Hunger Free Colorado. “That might make it seem as though there’s a high percentage of folks who are low income and aren’t accessing the program, but it might just be due to federal eligibility criteria.”
Fewer than two in five food insecure students nationally meet the eligibility requirements for the federal food assistance program, according to a 2024 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Even fewer — an estimated 41% of eligible students — receive the benefit.
To qualify, most students must work 20 hours a week on top of being a full-time student — though there are other ways to qualify based on childcare responsibilities or disability status.
When Mooradian spoke with Boulder Weekly last year, she advocated for expanding those eligibility requirements so more students can qualify. But now, cuts to SNAP are on the table that could make it harder for students to qualify through more stringent work requirements.
“We have this big societal misperception about who college students are thinking of them as extremely privileged people who might just temporarily have reduced access to economic resources, but who are ultimately benefiting from a lot of privilege,” she said. “The truth is that our student population doesn’t actually look like that. We now have a significant percentage of first-generation students, students of color, non-traditional students who might also be working or have families.”
With such a wide range of situations and needs facing students, Wilks said the goal isn’t to just expand the pantry. Within the next year and a half, Wilks said the center hopes to launch a food recovery program and expand its meal swipe donation program.
“It’s growing and finding some innovative ways that we can address food insecurity that don’t rely on a pantry system,” she said. “It’s not the best way to impact food insecurity for a student. So we need some other ways, like increasing SNAP enrollment and applications. Hopefully we can maintain that program and the funding from our partner and that program also doesn’t get significant cuts at the federal level this year.”
Between that uncertainty, stigma around accessing resources and entrenched norms around how college students eat, the work of combating hunger on campus is difficult but worthwhile.
“The fact is that hunger is not normal. We shouldn’t be normalizing people’s experiences of food insecurity,” Mooradian said. “Ultimately, everyone deserves to eat, and students who are working to better their lives and secure economically stable futures should have the support they need to do that without having to worry about where their next meal is going to come from.”
The Buff Pantry is open Mondays and Wednesdays 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., Tuesdays noon to 2:30 p.m. and 3-5 p.m., and Fridays noon to 2:30 p.m. and 3-5 p.m. Make an appointment at bit.ly/StudentHungerBW.