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I'm Joan Gross and I'm a professor
of Anthropology at OSU.
1999 Oregon came out as
last in hunger, food insecurity with hunger.
And it was pretty shocking because,
you know, you walk around Oregon and you see this
and you see apples piling up under trees
and all this, and you think "how can people be hungry".
So Nancy Rosenburger and I began doing interviews
at the behest of the Benton County Task Force
on hunger and food insecurity.
A few years after that we began holding
some classes, service learning classes,
called The Culture of Food, Poverty, and Hunger
in which we talked about
especially national problems with hunger,
and had students volunteer at the
Linn-Benton Food Share, and we shared
our interview material, and they did interviews too.
One of the things that came out,
since a lot of students end up interviewing students,
is how, how many students are food insecure
and end up finishing their months living on Top Ramen.
So I think that's when the idea was born
that we really should have a food pantry on campus,
an emergency food pantry.
So when we had a PhD student, Sarah Cunningham,
who was interested in these issues,
and encouraged her to start a student group.
Which then is sponsored by
Ten Rivers Food Web to put together the
OSU Food Pantry.
Its opening hours are tailored to a student's schedule,
so that it's at the end of the month, but also and the beginning of the term,
before financial aid kicks in.
And she's seen a steady rise in customers
since it opened a couple months ago.