SNAC Partners With Islamic Relief USA, Bear River Association of Governments to Fight Food Insecurity

When Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset during the holy lunar month of Ramadan, they do so with the understanding that they can still eat at night. But for Muslim students who depend on a campus meal plan that’s largely available only during the day, that poses a serious challenge: how do you fast for that long with little to no access to food at night?

Thanks to a grant from Islamic Relief USA, Utah State University’s Student Nutrition Access Center (SNAC) offers boxes of shelf-stable halal foods to Muslim students looking to both practice their faith and maintain the sort of healthy diet needed to perform at their academic best. These boxes are paid for, packaged and delivered by Islamic Relief USA before being distributed by SNAC at no cost to Utah State.

Jonathon Walters, the SNAC program coordinator, explained that the boxes are a natural extension of the center’s mission to provide students with the nutritious foods they need to thrive in college.

“We’ve received requests for halal options, and we try to accommodate students with restricted diets, whether due to gluten, dairy, cultural or religious reasons,” Walters said. “While meeting every request may not be possible, we’re committed to exploring what options are available.”

Walters noted that the 112 food boxes were championed by Emily Van Duren, a student in Utah State’s Department of Social Work. She spent the fall semester sourcing halal food from suppliers as well as potential grants, including the one SNAC applied for from Islamic Relief USA and was awarded in mid-January.

The partnership is just one of many in which SNAC has worked with outside organizations to fight food insecurity, added Walters, with another recent example being the annual point-in-time count of individuals experiencing homelessness. From midnight to 2 a.m. on several nights at the end of January, over 150 volunteers, including many Aggie students and their professors, participated in the local segment of a national census of these people while providing them information on available services along with bags of food and hygiene supplies. The bags were thanks in part to Tiffany Nielsen, a USU master of public health student in the Department of Nutrition, Dietetics and Food Sciences.

“We connected her with the Utah Food Bank and Cache County Humanitarian Center,” Walters said. “The Utah Food Bank plays a vital role for SNAC by supplying some of our food, while the Cache County Humanitarian Center regularly donates hygiene items, which they provided for this project. We then contacted USU Admissions, and they generously supplied all the bags. SNAC also provided the space and volunteers to assemble the bags. The packed bags were delivered to the Bear River Association of Governments that organized the local count.”

Providing students with the chance to apply classroom knowledge through hands-on learning is a central part of SNAC’s mission, Walters said.

“The Ramadan food boxes and point-in-time count are just two examples of the many projects where SNAC collaborates with students,” he said. “We strive to facilitate experiential learning opportunities in addition to our primary responsibility of being the campus food pantry. SNAC also manages food recovery on campus, collecting surplus food daily by partnering with USU Dining Services and several local restaurants. When they have leftover food that’s still good but cannot be sold, SNAC retrieves it, repackages it and distributes it from the pantry. This gives us more options in the pantry and prevents perfectly good food from ending up in landfills.”