Here’s some food for thought: The largest cross-campus study to date has discovered that nearly 40 per cent of Canadian students are food “insecure.”

The report, called Hungry for Knowledge, was released last week by Meal Exchange, a national charitable organization. It surveyed 4,500 students across five Canadian campuses over the course of 16 months to fill the gap in data on the issue.

“This needed to surface, to bring attention to a problem that’s hidden on campuses,” said Anita Abraham, executive director at Meal Exchange. “(This research has) affirmed what we thought we knew.”

Meal Exchange can now point out that 39 per cent of students are going without nutritious food, and that more vulnerable demographics, including Aboriginal students, students of colour and student parents, reported higher degrees of food insecurity.

The number of campus-based hunger-relief programs across Canada has doubled since 2004.

These facts do not surprise Ronnie Cruz, community services coordinator with the George Brown College Student Association. She said the number of students using the food banks at the Casa Loma Campus, St. James and Waterfront locations has increased by 30 per cent from last year, and that they’ve had 10,000 visits from students already this semester.

“This (problem) is visible on campus,” said Cruz. “Food-bank use is increasing each year because it’s getting harder for students to afford to go to school.”

The food-insecure students who were surveyed in the study indicated that the cost of food, tuition fees and housing costs were the most common contributors to their situation.

One of the biggest takeaways from the report is that “food insecurity is actually about students’ financial need,” said Drew Silverthorn, a master’s student in social work at Ryerson University, who was the primary researcher in the study.

“There are a lot of assumptions and rhetoric about who students are,” Silverthorn continued. “This data will hopefully help to reflect what the actual student experience is.

“The costs of living and tuition has risen dramatically, making university a very different experience than it was 15 or 20 years ago.”

Tuition fees are outpacing inflation. The study pointed out that the average cost of tuition per semester for an undergraduate degree in 1993 was $3,192, compared to $6,191 in 2015.

Hungry for Knowledge found that 46.2 per cent of the students surveyed were employed during the school year, but almost all (96 per cent) were working a low-skill, low-income service sector job.

Tori Maas is a fourth year student at OCAD University who has spent her entire education living below the poverty line. Despite working for the student union and three other jobs, she’s just getting by, Maas said.

“I’ve been in situations where I haven’t been able to afford groceries,” said Maas. “I’ve personally accessed (OCAD’s) student pantry and had to make decisions about purchasing food versus other necessities.”

Maas says she’s not alone. “It’s become the norm for students to talk about how broke they are all the time . . . . I would say it’s not so much the cost of food, but the cost of everything else.”

She also says students, especially in art programs, must pay for extra materials for their projects and “a lot of unfortunate stereotypes like we’re starving or tortured or entitled.”

This “dismissive attitude” about student life takes away from a “bigger picture of asking for funding and tuition reform,” she said.

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The reality is that students don’t have money, so they have to choose between food, housing and textbooks, said Abraham.

“To get to the systemic roots of this problem (would be to) provide access to better jobs, financial aid and tuition help.”

Facts about food insecurity on campus

Hungry for Knowledge, the largest cross-campus study on student food insecurity in Canada, found that:

39 per cent: Nearly two in five of students surveyed experienced some form of food insecurity across Canada

23.7 per cent: Percentage of food-insecure students who reported that their physical health was affected

20.1 per cent: Percentage of food-insecure students who reported that their mental health was affected

49.5 per cent: Percentage of surveyed students who reported that they had to sacrifice buying healthy food to pay for expenses such as rent, tuition and textbooks

75.3 per cent: Percentage of African students found to experience some form of food insecurity

56.4 per cent: Percentage of Aboriginal students who experienced food insecurity

53.3 per cent: Percentage of Caribbean students surveyed who experienced food insecurity

104: Number of campus-based hunger relief programs across Canada in 2016. (n 2004, there were 51 campus-based hunger relief programs.)