STARKVILLE – There was a banquet Friday afternoon at the Bost Extension Center on the Mississippi State University campus.
Ninety normally ravenous MSU students, mostly freshmen, gathered for the meal. But for once, nobody seemed to have much of an appetite.
One could probably fault the guest speakers for that.
The banquet, sponsored by the MSU Center for the Advancement of Service-Learing Excellence and the Maroon Volunteer Center, was called the MSU Hunger Banquet. Designed to simulate the disparity in access to food throughout the world and even locally, students were exposed to the often grim truth that hunger remains a major issue for millions across the globe.
Upon arriving, the students were randomly placed into four socio-economic groups — low income, low middle class, middle class and high income — and provided meals those groups would typically have under the conditions they might experience.
The students were designated to those classes proportionally to the world population. That meant those chosen for the high income group was the smallest – 10 students – and those chosen for the low income were the largest – 40 students.
Darius Newson, a freshman from Greenville, was among the favored few and dined at a table with a tablecloth, real china and silverware. He and the others in his high-income group were served their meals and dined on salad appetizers, fried catfish and chicken, sweet potato casserole, green beans, dinner rolls, and banana pudding with juice or soda as bevarage choices.
“To be honest, if they would have let me, I would have shared my food,” Newson said after listening to Delilah Schmidt, an Americorp volunteer, detail the devastating effects of food insecurity which persist in every corner of the globe.
“You don’t think about this stuff every day,” Newson said. “It’s pretty bad. I would have just as soon given my food to somebody in that other group.”
That “other group” was the large contingent of low-income students sitting on the floor nearby. Their dining experience was predictably different than Newson’s. There were no tables or chairs: They sat on the floor to eat and went through a buffet line stocked only with plastic plates, utensils and cups, with only water and mashed sweet potatoes for their meal.
The low middle-class students’ dining experience wasn’t much better – the only difference was that there were green beans added to their menu.
Alex Cross, a freshman from Bruce, sat on the floor, picking with her plastic fork at a small serving of mashed sweet potatoes.
It wasn’t the sparse food that dulled her appetite, though.
“I almost started crying when [Schmidt] started talking about how bad things are for so many people,” Cross said. “I’ve never been in this situation, but back home I did see some people that you knew didn’t have enough to eat. For them, the only real food they got was at school. It’s so sad.”
Alarming statistics
Schmidt’s talk – based heavily on statistics for world, U.S. And Mississippi hunger – told a troubling story.
“Worldwide, one in six people at some point will not have enough food to last the week,” she told the students. “And it’s not just in foreign countries, either. Here in the U.S., 24 percent of the population is food insecure. That means 30 million Americans don’t get enough to eat and one in seven households in our country struggle to put food on the table.”
In Mississippi, Schmidt said, 56 percent of senior citizens rely on food pantries for a portion of their food supply, and 45 percent of households with at least one wage-earner still have need of food pantries. Twenty-seven percent of children face hunger on a regular basis.
After the largely uneaten meal had ended, students helped pack meals to be distributed by the Stop Hunger Now program. Students assembled 10,152 meals – soybean/rice based dried soups that, when mixed with water, could be eaten hot or cold.
“We don’t really now yet where these meals will be sent,” said Meggan Franks of the Maroon Volunteer Center. “It could be anywhere in the world. Last year, the food we packed went to Uganda.”
The entire experience, said MSU graduate student Alexis Hampton, was designed to raise awareness and encourage students to take an active role in their communities in the fight against hunger.
“I think for a lot of us, it’s a reality check,” she said. “You don’t understand it until it happens to you.”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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