One table over, Solina Beringer sat at a table set with flowers. She was eating pasta and salad catered from FARM Bloomington and drank sparkling juice out of a glass cup.
White said she couldn’t help but compare the two meals.
“I know I’m not going to physically feel as good later from eating that processed food,” she said.
For the next hour, though, White couldn’t do anything to change her dinner options.
White and Beringer were eating dinner at Oxfam Club’s Hunger Banquet, designed to serve as a metaphor for the American food system. The event was co-sponsored by the Bee Keeping Club at IU and Sprouts, the campus gardening club.
As guests entered the event, they selected at random a card that assigned them to lower-class, middle-class or upper-class tables.
Oxfam member Wasay Rasool, responsible for much of the event’s organization, said the random assignment is meant to demonstrate how place in the class system is largely the result of circumstance, as opposed to the question of work ethic.
“As each of us walked into the room tonight, we were assigned our place in life, at random,” Rasool said to guests at the start of the event.
One of the six tables at the banquet was reserved for high-income guests, who were served a catered meal from FARM Bloomington.
Middle-class guests took up five tables, ?representing the middle 60 percent of American society. The guests at these tables helped themselves to a piece of vegetable pizza from ?Lennie’s and a bowl of salad.
The final table was reserved for low-income guests, who received an apple each and picked from a box of packaged snacks like crackers and potato chips. Rasool said the low-income table was meant to represent Americans living around or below the poverty line.
“Fifteen percent of American residents — more than 46 million people — live below the poverty line, and 14.7 percent of American households are food insecure,” he said. “In Monroe County, Indiana, that figure is even higher: 17.5 percent of households don’t have consistent access to the amount of food that keeps us healthy.”
In the middle of the meal, Bee Keeping Club at IU President Ellie Symes called for attention and announced that the recent collapse of several bee colonies led to high produce prices, resulting in the apples being taken away from the low-income table.
“Currently, honeybees are responsible for pollinating $15 billion of crops each year and are seen as the building blocks of the environment,” Symes said. “However, for the past 10 years, beekeepers have lost about 30 percent of their hives each year, which is above the 19 percent loss rate that is sustainable.”
Sympes explained that farmers rent bees from beekeepers to pollinate their crops, so a rise in honeybee rental fees leads to higher food prices.
“When bee populations die, the lower-income people are the ones who suffer the most,” she said.
The dinner was followed by a room-wide discussion where guests shared how they felt during the meal and their thoughts on why hunger exists even in a nation like America.
Beringer, a high-income guest, said she felt especially bad when the low-income table had their apples taken away.
“Food has such a big impact on your health, and that trickles down into higher medical bills and so many other problems,” she said.
Middle-income guest Stone Irr shared that his group briefly discussed giving up some of their food to the low-income table, but ended up not doing so.
“You get entrapped in your personal setting,” he said. “I wanted my food.”
Oxfam board member Aamina Khan said she was pleased by the wide range of issues brought up during the discussion.
The event was meant to address how various factors like poverty traps, policy and a culture of inequality causes hunger in America.
Khan said Oxfam had a similar event last semester to simulate the injustices and poor distribution in the global food system, but wanted an event that would be more relatable for students.
This semester’s event also provided students with information on how they can feel like they’re making an impact on the food system, a component Lauren Martin felt was lacking from last ?semester’s event.
Martin, the vice president of Sprouts, spoke to the group about community gardening as an alternate to the food production system.
“We’re a solution,” she said. “It’s something that all of us can do now.”
