In North Carolina, one in four children don’t know where their next meal is coming from. To bring awareness to that issue, students lived off of $1.25 a day for food during an event called “Dine Below the Line.” The event was used to raise funds for organizations trying to combat the issue.
For four days, 169 UNC students lived off of prepackaged meals consisting of less than 800 calories per day. It was organized by the Carolina Microfinance Initiative, a group dedicated to poverty alleviation through small-scale financial services.
A few students expressed concerns. After receiving their food boxes, they thought that the program could be detrimental to people with sensitivities concerning food.
Samantha Croffut, a master’s student in the School of Public Health studying nutrition, participated in the program. Instead of doing the full four days of eating below the poverty line, she did two days of undernutrition and two days of overnutrition.
She experimented with overnutrition because she is training for a half-marathon and wanted to explore the opposite side of the food problem.
She worried how triggering the event could be on a college campus, because of the amount of students with eating disorders, as well as those who experience food insecurity.
“I think for special populations it can be a concern,” Croffut said.
She said the event was so focused on being hungry during the challenge that she was not herself.
