Nathan Alleman

Growing up in southern Michigan in a Mennonite family where frugality and community support were implicit values meant long summer mornings and brisk fall Saturday afternoons working in our quarter acre organic garden. Eating the food that was in season, canning fruit and vegetables for the winter, and making the rounds to the neighbors with extra sweet corn, cucumbers, or squash was simply a pattern of life, though one I recognized set us apart from those around us. Still, as the child of educators whose modest incomes likely also motivated our agriculturally intensive lifestyle, the life of the mind and the toil of our hands were never far apart.

 

In the summers when many of my friends were headed to the shore or other vacation destinations, our family spent weeks in Pennsylvania visiting relatives, including to my mother’s parents’ small-scale subsistence dairy farm. There, I learned to value the rhythms of agricultural life, from walking with my grandpa and cousin up the lane in the pre-dawn mist to retrieve the dairy cows put out to pasture for the night, to the odd jobs of fence-mending, wood chopping, and straw spreading in the barn, to the nightly ritual of pouring still-warm milk in a long iron trough for the many farm cats that came running from all corners of the barnyard. As romantic as many aspects of that life were, the hard labor, hard luck, and hard-won joys of living close to the land shaped my understanding of the opportunity costs of food production.

 

My professional journey began in residence life at several small liberal arts colleges where the services umbrella of housing and meal plan required of most students largely masked students’ differences in basic needs access before college. Relocating to the College of William and Mary to pursue a doctorate, the price of the retirement/tourist destination of Williamsburg, Virginia was an unexpected financial challenge due to the high cost of living. The largely residential undergraduate campus again veiled the true cost of attendance for most students. The fusion of Colonial Williamsburg and the College projected historical significance and prestige, though for off-campus students the challenge of affordable housing meant a long commute or swallowing additional debt to keep up appearances.

 

My dissertation at William and Mary was a socio-historical case study of how faculty related to their employing religious institution and how that changed over time. This project had nothing to do with food or basic needs directly, yet an emergent theme of faculty solidarity and cohesion was gatherings around lunches, in the snack shop, or over meals together in homes. The realization of the links between food access and social inclusion was still years off for me, but the importance of engagement in food-related faculty rituals highlighted the mechanisms by which individuals come to belong in higher education.

 

After completing a Ph.D. in Policy, Planning, and Leadership with a concentration in higher education in 2008, I spent two years as a visiting assistant in that program, gathering teaching and research experience. Serendipitously, I was invited onto a federal grant which in turn begot a study of ways that small rural communities supported college-going among low-income populations. Schools, as hubs of community connectedness, were often also sources of multiple meals per day, as high percentages of students qualified – and relied upon – the Federal Free and Reduced Lunch program. I began to recognize the complex intertwining of educational systems and basic needs resources, buttressed by community food banks, church food pantries, and weekend “backpack buddies” supplementary resources.

 

All of these loose and tangential interests in organizational sociology, social connectedness, and educational outcomes came to a head with two nearly simultaneous events: in the spring of 2016 a young doctoral student (now Dr. Cara Cliburn Allen, co-author) and I began to notice increased conversations around food insecurity in the press and at professional conferences. We decided to seek permission to launch a limited survey at our own selective research university to see if the patterns seen at community colleges and regional state universities might be present here as well. Soon after, a local pastor who had been a student at Baylor came to us with an unusual offer: a truckload of 45,000 lbs of food to give to students that he suspected might struggle with the cost of food as he had. As it turns out, Pastor Ruben and the Family of Faith Church had developed an extensive food distribution network in the community already. Needing the advice and collaboration of colleagues, we formed the unofficial Baylor Food Insecurity Working Group – exactly the sort of ad-hoc response that occurs at so many colleges where employees become aware of students needs and are motivated to action. From that group was born the first Baylor Free Farmers Market on a rainy November day, and the beginning of our efforts to institutionalize food support systems on our own campus.

 

The following year, we combined students who had volunteered to talk about their experiences on our institutional survey with a qualitative research methods class, to gather data for what became our first publication on the topic A Private Struggle at a Private Institution (Journal of College Student Development, 2019). For years, this was the only published study of food insecurity at a selective university. From our activism and research we received an internal grant for a larger study, one that would become the inquiry upon which Starving the Dream is based.