PODCAST: Food Insecurity in College Students, Part A

Originally published 2/26/19

Feed That Nation is available on the following platforms: Anchor, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Pocket Casts, Radio Public, Castbox, Overcast, and Stitcher. Listen and enjoy!

About Feed That Nation Episode 3A

Episode 3A: The first of two episodes exploring the topic of food insecurity in university students, and the role that food shelves can play in supporting students facing food insecurity issues. Featuring University of Minnesota Health Promotion Associate and Nutritious U Food Pantry Founder, Rebecca Leighton, MPH, RD. 

Rebecca and I discuss the details how of the Nutritious U Food Pantry at the University of Minnesota came to be, what is food insecurity, and the complexities of reaching the students who need it most.

More about UMN Nutritious U Food Pantry: https://boynton.umn.edu/food-pantry

Behind The Scenes

I had honestly been looking forward to Podcast 3A for pretty much all year! Food insecurity in college students is a topic that I’ve spent a ton of time thinking about and working with on my campus. The ability to use my podcast as a medium to open up this awesome conversation others is one of my favorite things!

I’m not exaggerating when I say that I’d been fangirling so hard over getting to meet Rebecca Leighton. Not only is she a graduate of the MPH program that I was in the process of applying for (and recently was accepted!), but she’s also super nice. We’re both knowledgeable and passionate about a lot of the same topics and ideas, so our conversation flowed easily.

I had a pretty big technical snafu when we recorded for the first time: I didn’t double-check that all my equipment was plugged in and working correctly. If I had double-checked, I would have realized that my “input” cord (connecting the microphones to the digital recorder), was actually plugged into the “output” jack. This resulted in my 60 minute audio recording being absolutely silent–no microphones were plugged in, so no sound was recorded! Oh no!

When I emailed Rebecca to explain all of this, she very kindly and generously offered to come back and rerecord with me! And I’m so grateful that she did!

Needless to say, I’ll never make that mistake again. I’ve sworn to always do a double-check of my equipment and do a sound check before recording, to be extra sure that everything is working. Lesson learned!