Executive board members of Anabel’s Grocery hosted a panel Tuesday in Goldwin Smith Hall in an attempt to eliminate doubt about the existence of food insecurity on Cornell campus and to validate the recently approved grocery project. Lizzi Gorman ’18 opened the discussion by defining food insecurity as “not having financial and physical means to reach your nutritional needs at any given time.”
Gorman said Anabel’s Grocery is striving to make food insecurity, a potentially stigmatizing topic among students from different socioeconomic backgrounds, an open discussion. According to the 2015 Perception of Undergraduate Life and Student Experiences survey, 8.4 percent of 4,419 students surveyed have skipped meals due to financial constraint either “often” or “very often” in the past year. “Students harbor a lot of shame about being food insecure and without a structured conversation we can’t talk about it,” said Nicholas Karavolias ’18, a member of Anabel’s Grocery’s executive board. Karavolias said he hopes the opening of Anabel’s Grocery in February will facilitate constructive conversation by making the availability of convenient and affordable food for all students a recognized priority.