Justice and equity approaches to college and university student food (in)security: Introduction to the special section

Abstract

According to myriad studies, college and university student food insecurity is a pervasive and systemic problem. Most show that nearly half of college and university students experience food insecurity (Breuning et al., 2017; Broton, 2020; Nazmi, 2019). As defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), food insecurity is the “limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate and safe foods, or limited or uncertain ability to acquire acceptable foods in socially acceptable ways” (USDA Economic Research Service, 2022, para. 3). The experience of food insecurity, however, manifests in various ways for students, including the actuality of being hungry, not having enough food, consuming poor-quality food, rationing, embarrassment and stigma, and consistent worry and fear about accessing their next meal (Henry, 2020). . . .