Illustration by J.E. Paeth

Spoonful Food Pantry is listed as a resource on Residence Life bulletin boards, Campus Life emails, and on every School of the Art Institute of Chicago syllabus. But what actually is it? How helpful can it be? And how discrete is the service?

According to the SAIC website, “SAIC’s Food Pantry is available to current SAIC students who are experiencing difficulty accessing food because of a financial emergency or ongoing constraints.” This includes full-time, part-time, undergraduate, and graduate students. The Spoonful Pantry has different food kits depending on students’ diets, including non-vegetarian, dairy-free, gluten-free, vegetarian, and vegan. They try to accommodate any allergies/dietary restrictions a student may list on the application form.

The form to apply for assistance can be found by scrolling down at saic.edu/supporting-students.

According to the Office of Student Affairs, Spoonful was developed by three students. Madison Neel (BFA 2021), Kat Pitre (BFA 2021), and Alicia Morgan (MFA 2020) started the pantry with funds from the 2018-19 and 2019-20 Compassion and Belonging grants. The students worked to highlight food insecurity on all college campuses, including at SAIC. Working with the Office of Student Affairs, the three developed SAIC’s Food Pantry in the fall of 2020.

Because of the pandemic, a contactless pick-up system was established. The system also works to ensure complete student privacy — the pantry is supervised and managed by only one staff member in the Student Affairs office, the only person who sees the names of students receiving support from the pantry. Prepared food kits are placed in lockers and students receive the combination for the locker in an email when they are ready to pick up their food.

Students ordered 847 food kits — serving a total of 311 students — from Sept. 2023 to Aug. 2024, according to the Office of Student Affairs. I was one of them.

At some point last year, my freshman year, I found myself in a bind. A paycheck hadn’t come when I needed it to, or it wasn’t the amount that I needed it to be. I was stressed with classes and work, and I didn’t have time to go to Aldi anyway.

So I turned to Spoonful.

Applying is not difficult — there is no screening process for receiving a kit through the pantry, and students are not turned away from receiving a kit. Once you fill out the form on the SAIC website, you’ll receive an email asking what the best time to pick up your bag of food is. Once you reply, the next email will tell you where the pantry’s pickup location is and how to pick it up. Grab it and go! You even get to keep the tote bag; I still use mine for sewing supplies.

The funding for the pantry comes out of the Office of Student Affairs’ annual budget. Food items mostly come from nearby grocery stores like Target, Jewel Osco, and Mariano’s.

The food in my bag was not a beautiful cornucopia assortment. Most of it was Good & Gather food, Target’s generic brand, and all of it was shelf stable. I was ecstatic to receive canned chicken — in trying to keep my grocery budget low, I had accidentally become vegetarian — alongside the more-expected tomato sauce and boxes of noodles and rice.

The bag of food was a grocery trip and a half for me, and it helped me out of a crisis.

I encourage my fellow students to use it whenever you even feel like you might need it. All current degree-seeking SAIC students are eligible to pick up a food kit once a week. The amount of weeks you pick up a bag is up to you. There are students who only order once and there are students who order multiple times throughout the year.

The Office of Student Affairs stated that maintaining Spoonful is a priority, and that they continually seek resources to help students with food insecurity. Remember, if you don’t use a resource, the resource will go away.

Students who feel the pantry isn’t for them should check out SAIC’s Getting & Giving Help page, which lists off-campus resources for anyone, student or not, facing food insecurity.

For direct links to the form on the SAIC website, check out the web version of this article on fnewsmagazine.com.

If students have questions, they can be directed to the Office of Student Affairs, at studenthelp@saic.edu or 312.629.6800.