The Resource Center (RC) announced its Community Fridge would be available for student use again in an all-campus email sent on Wednesday, March 2. The Community Fridge, which opened in fall 2021, is open every day except Saturdays and aims to serve low-income, food-insecure students. The fridge is restocked every Wednesday night with donations from the Local Food Cooperative (Co-op), which students can stop by and pick up.

The Community Fridge was started to serve the nutritional needs of the student body that are not met by on-campus dining options. The fridge places an emphasis on providing fresh and local food in the form of both ingredients and prepared meals. While the Resource Center has provided free food to students since its creation in 2017, RC Intern and creator of the Community Fridge Shirmai Chung ’22 wanted to ensure that the offerings were healthy and sustainable for the student body.

“These foods are not only unsustainable in feeding the student population, but it is also extremely unhealthy,” Chung wrote in an email to The Argus. “To see this playing out on a college campus with a huge endowment and $80,000 tuition just completely blew my mind, and I wanted to do something about it.”

Chung was also motivated by the lack of variety in food sources on campus, highlighting that the limited number of dining options exacerbates students’ dietary and financial constraints.

“The closest supermarket we have is a drive away, and with the limited WesPoints I had, I could not afford to buy fresh produce and meats at WeShop every day,” Chung wrote. “I recall not eating much during my first semester here because 1) my body could not adjust to the amount of dairy in the foods provided by Bon Appetite and 2) I was rationing my meal plan as it does not provide students with three meals a day for the entire semester.”

From the very beginning, Chung wanted to promote food sustainability while giving students access to healthier food alternatives. She found a partner in the Local Food Co-op, a student-run group that brings local, sustainable food to the University community. The fridge is stocked solely by donations from the Co-op.

“I noticed that the Food Co-op program on campus often ends up with produce and fresh food items that did not end up getting picked up by students,” Chung wrote. “As these are perishable items, I assume that, if not donated, they will end up as food waste…. So I linked two and two together and reached out…to ask if we could work on a partnership where we collect their leftovers and divert them to the resource center.”

Some of the most popular items in the Community Fridge include bread, lettuce, eggs, and cheese. While these foods are quickly picked up by students, certain fresh vegetables like potatoes are less popular. To ensure no donated products went to waste, Chung incorporated less popular produce into meals.

“For the first few weeks of the program, we got a lot of root vegetables from Co-op, and people didn’t really take them because, I assume, people don’t know what to do with them,” Chung wrote. “So I…[decided] to turn these root vegetables into tasty dishes, and distributed them at the Resource Center in packaged boxes!”

RC Director Demetrius Colvin hopes Chung’s efforts to make use of the leftover food in the Community Fridge will inspire students to cook meals of their own. He sees the project as an opportunity to encourage students to rethink how they view food preparation, consumption, and waste.

“The vast majority of people in America are not eating to live,” Colvin said. “[Food] is pure commodity. I think particularly on a college campus, it’s in some ways more exacerbated because of the transient nature of the population…. I think more can be done with this as part of an education campaign about food waste to encourage more of a cooking culture.”

Chung found inspiration for the RC’s Community Fridge in a similar student-organized initiative, the Middletown Community Fridge. Run by the North End Action Team and Middletown Mutual Aid, the fridge supplies to both students and nearby residents. 

“I was definitely inspired by the Middletown Community Fridge initiative and how it addressed multiple things at once: community building, diverting food waste…[and tackling] environmental justice,” Chung wrote.

Colvin commented on the differences between the two projects, explaining that the RC’s Community Fridge is intended for Wesleyan students specifically. 

“[Our project] is way more narrow,” Colvin said. “This is specifically for the Wesleyan community and in particular, first-generation, low-income students, which have a priority in many of the Resource Center’s programs and initiatives.”

The smaller size of the Community Fridge has proved a challenge to the RC’s mission to assist students on campus.

“If we had a bigger fridge we might potentially offer [food] to our community,” Colvin said. “But looking at how we don’t have to throw that much food away, I feel like we’re good where we’re at right now.”

Chung shared Colvin’s optimistic sentiment about the future of the RC’s Community Fridge and noted that she has already witnessed the benefits her work has brought to the student body. 

“More people frequent the Resource Center aside from printing, events, and book borrowing,” Chung wrote. “More students now visit the food pantry (where the fridge is located) and the snacks table to see if we have some fresh breads, coffee beans, and produce available for them to take home!”

Aaron Goldberg can be reached at apgoldberg@wesleyan.edu.