For students living on university campuses and without a personal vehicle, getting to a grocery store for nutritious food can be a struggle.
Christopher Drew is a senior at UNC Greensboro living on campus. He doesn’t have a car so he walks half a mile from his dormitory to Bestway Marketplace, a full-service grocery store where students can pay with their meal plan.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture categorizes urban areas where a significant number or share of residents is at least half a mile from the nearest supermarket as a low food access area. This rings true for students across the state.
It’s about 40 degrees out, cloudy, and starting to drizzle as Drew cuts through a parking deck and tunnel, a shortcut to the store he knows well. Although UNCG has an on-campus shuttle service, he typically walks to the store and back with as many bags as he can carry—usually four.
“We do have the Spartan Chariot, but I consider it to be very crowded and normally it’s never on time,” he says.
Jessica Soldavini is a professor at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. One of her research focuses is food insecurity among college students.
“Depending on the school that you go to, you’re limited in what public transportation you have access to,” Soldavini says. “Many students don’t have access to a car or personal vehicle, and so that can be really challenging for them to get from campus to a grocery store if it’s not nearby.”
Drew isn’t sure if the Bestway Marketplace will be open until he arrives. A paper listing the store’s limited hours for Thanksgiving is taped to the door. It’s the first day back open after being closed for three days.
“There’s this situation where the Bestway closes at odd hours sometimes, and there’s no central point where they make students aware of when they’re closing,” Drew says.
Drew primarily relies on the dining hall for his meals. However, students with allergies like Raine Holiday, a junior at UNC-Chapel Hill, can’t rely on the dining hall as a safe and convenient option. She’s allergic to peanuts, tree nuts, soy and gluten.
Two years ago, Holiday had a severe allergic reaction to ice cream in the top of Lenoir Dining Hall that landed her in the hospital.
“When I went over and asked, they were just like, yeah, there’s no nuts in it,” Holiday says about the staff who were working at the ice cream station. “I started having extreme abdominal cramps and my throat started itching and swelling.”
At the time, the closest grocery store was a small Target more than a mile away from Ehringhaus Residence Hall where she lived. First-year students at UNC-CH are required to live in one of 14 housing options, of which only one is less than half a mile from the grocery store.
Additionally, UNC-CH prohibits first-year students from purchasing parking passes. Chapel Hill Transit offers a free public bus system to students, but Holiday says it’s still inconvenient to get to farther grocery stores like Trader Joes or Harris Teeter a few miles away.
“It’s really time consuming. Sometimes the bus would be late or delayed or sometimes I would be stuck and looking at my phone and miss the stop or something,” she says. “So it just felt like another extra step just to get food.”
Now Holiday lives off-campus with her car near a Harris Teeter and cooks her meals to ensure her dietary needs are met.
Similar to UNC-CH, North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University only allows students with at least 30 credit hours to buy parking passes.
“If I would, let’s say, need to go to Walmart, I would have to wait for a friend of mine who’s also going to Walmart with a car,” Gary Jarvis, a second semester first-year student from New York, says. He lives on N.C. A&T’s campus without a car.
Jarvis says students in their first semester have the hardest time accessing food.
“They kind of have to get used to Greensboro if they’re not from here,” he says. “Obviously, they don’t have cars because they don’t have enough credits. It’s probably just them trying to figure it out on their own.”
Nowadays, Jarvis relies on friends to get to the store. But last semester he walked 30 minutes to Food Lion, including stretches with no buffer between the sidewalk and busy road. N.C. A&T provides a free shuttle that students can take to Walmart, but it only ran on three Saturdays throughout this semester.
“New York is a very walkable city. Greensboro is not,” he says. “Most places you have to go, you have to get on the highway. I’m not used to that.”
Even if Greensboro were more walkable, Soldavini says there’s still an extra barrier that comes with not having a car.
“That one time that I went to Food Lion, I took as much as I could carry in my book bag, and that was pretty much the only time,” Jarvis says.
