Half the students at this NJ college face food insecurity. Can some hot sauce help?

Catherine Carrera | NorthJersey

Show Caption Hide Caption NJ college president raises money with hot sauce for students going hungry Rowan University President Dr. Ali Houshmand sells a line of hot sauces to raise money for students in need.

Nearly half of Rowan University undergraduate students cut their meal portions, skip meals or skip entire days of eating because they don’t have enough money to pay for food, a recent campus study found.

So university President Ali Houshmand decided to create, package, market and sell his own line of hot sauces, generating a $30,000 emergency fund in two years for students facing hunger problems.

“There is serious food insecurity on college campuses, not just at Rowan,” Houshmand said in an interview at one of three small farms near the Glassboro campus where he grows peppers for his three different hot sauces. “There are many kids who have to basically juggle between buying food or books or paying their rent. How do I make sure everybody’s fed, that they’re nutritious and healthy?”

Studies have found that students without reliable access to balanced meals or a home tend to drop classes, refrain from buying required reading material or skip class.

At Rowan, part of the state system of public universities, two out of three students who are very food insecure face the dilemma of choosing between food and books, according a study published in 2018 by the Student Hunger on Campus research team.

“One class had a $120 textbook that I just never got, because I had to stay afloat with credit card bills, rent and utilities, and groceries,” said a 23-year-old male senior student at Rowan, quoted in the study. “If I absolutely have to buy or rent a textbook, I'll usually just have sleep for dinner.”

The state of hunger at Rowan reflects what’s going on across campuses nationwide. Awareness of food insecurity has grown significantly in recent years, prompting colleges to open food pantries and student organizations to run food drives dedicated to helping fellow students facing food insecurity.

Advocacy groups like Students Against Hunger and the Hope Center have urged colleges to find creative ways to fund programs to help students going hungry, including community gardens, farmers' markets and food recovery programs, which collect unused dining hall food and repurpose it as ready-to-eat microwavable meals that are donated to pantries.

“When we become in charge of a university, yes, we are facing a lot of challenges financially,” Houshmand said, adding that state appropriations have been flatlined for years. “But if you keep on begging the state and the state doesn’t give any money — that doesn’t change anybody’s life. The only thing to do is recognize that sometimes you have to be creative and innovative, you have to be entrepreneurial, and you have to create a new source of revenue yourself.”

A new sauce of revenue

Houshmand, who was raised in Iran in a family of 10 children, didn’t experiment with hot sauces until he moved to England, where he studied mathematics and mathematical statistics at the University of Essex for his bachelor's and master’s degrees. There he met a friend from India who would use a variety of peppers to make him spicy food and opened a new world of flavor to him.

“From there I kind of got to learn about and like hot food,” Houshmand said.

After years of growing vegetables, including peppers, since moving to the United States in 1983, Houshmand began cooking up his own hot sauces. By 2012, when he was appointed president of Rowan, the sauces at home were so abundant that he began sharing his hot sauce varieties with friends.

A Rowan colleague referred to one sauce as “Ali’s nasty,” which would later be the inspiration for the name of the “original” sauce, he said.

Over the years, charitable organizations on campus asked Houshmand to jar small batches of his increasingly popular hot sauce to sell at auctions, and they would always sell out. From there, the idea was born to make larger batches to sell online to raise money for the students on campus facing hunger.

The line of sauces, “Houshmand’s Hazardous Hot Sauce,” come with three levels of spiciness: hot ("Ali's Nasty"), hotter ("Nastylicious") and hottest ("Nastyvicious"). Rutgers Food Innovation Center and about a dozen Rowan student workers assist with the production and growing process. The sauces are sold online at rowan.edu/hotsauce and the campus Barnes & Noble Bookstore.

October marked two years since the project launched. To celebrate, Bonesaw Brewing Company, a Glassboro neighbor, launched a collaborative beer made with a tinge of Ali's Nasty. Brewmaster AJ Stoll described the beer as fruity with a "tickle."

Students have been receptive to the fund-generating initiative.

“I think this makes students proud to attend Rowan,” said 20-year-old Arielle Gedeon, the Student Government Association president. "We have a president who cares so much about the students that he and his team made it so that the funds from this popular product go to support students who need it most. That’s amazing.”

In late October, Houshmand visited the largest of the three farms, at just under an acre with more than 1,000 plants producing 5 to 10 pounds of pepper each. He wore a suit and gardening gloves to pick hot peppers such as long hot, jalapeno, habanero and Carolina reaper, to name a few.

"It’s not always about tuition and fees and state money — there are ways you can really diversify your revenue source and come up with monies that can help a lot of people who desperately and deservedly need that support," Houshmand said. "I’m doing exactly my job. My job is to provide for the students and provide the resources so that they can get on with their lives and get an education."

Catherine Carrera covers Rutgers University for NorthJersey.com. For unlimited access to the most important news from New Jersey’s largest university, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.

Email: carrera@northjersey.com Twitter: @cattcarrera

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