Students at Slippery Rock University sit on the floor and eat their dinner Monday night at the fourth annual Student Nonprofit Alliance Hunger Banquet. Attendees were randomly split into different groups with varying access to food to simulate the problem of food insecurity.

SLIPPERY ROCK TWP — On Monday night, Slippery Rock University senior Spencer Knafek sat on the floor of the Smith Student Center eating a soft taco out of a bowl — it was all he could afford with the meager six food tickets he had received earlier that evening.

For Knafek, a philosophy and psychology major from Beaver County, it isn't a way of life. It was an exercise meant to put him in the shoes of people who struggle with hunger every day.

“It's tough trying to empathize with people in abject poverty,” Knafek said, eating his tacos and shifting about on the hardwood floor, trying to get comfortable. “It does ultimately seem academic and abstract.”

The fourth annual Hunger Banquet at Slippery Rock on Monday tried to bring it a little closer to home.

Knafek and other students unlucky enough to be randomly selected had to eat their dinners on the floor Monday as test subjects in a social science experiment. They got very few meal tickets that could be used to purchase food from the event's buffet, while other randomly-selected groups of people got nicer accommodations (like actual tables and silverware) and the ability to purchase more food.

Would the more well-to-do help Knafek and the students like him? Would they even notice him? Some did and some didn't — a point assistant professor Linda Del Vecchio made mention over during a round table discussion about the social dynamics of hunger.

“At this level, it depends on what environment you get put in — maybe you're just lucky,” to not be struggling with hunger, Del Vecchio said.

Students who worked to organize the event say they want to push people in the community and throughout the county to confront hunger and food insecurity locally.

“We're trying to represent inequality in the world,” said Christina Leonard, the president of SRU's Student Nonprofit Alliance, which hosted the event. “People generally think hunger is a foreign problem. They don't realize hunger is at home too.”

From the floor on Monday, some students said they were starting to see the point.

I guess this puts it into perspective,” said Teresa Wheeler, a sophomore business management major sitting across from Knafek on the floor.

After awhile, Del Vecchio called the students from the floor group and told them they could eat their fill and sit at the remaining open seats in the banquet hall. Attendees lucky enough to get seats and silverware from the beginning shared their thoughts on what it means to be randomly separated into different classes based on nothing but chance.

“I didn't really even notice them sitting there,” said one man seated at the high-end table, where people received glassware and 75 food tickets.

Del Vecchio said one of the biggest hurdles facing anti-hunger advocates in places like Butler County is the prevailing opinion that hunger and “food insecurity” — when families or individuals aren't sure if they have enough food to get by day-to-day or week-to-week — is a problem for other people and “elsewhere.”

Del Vecchio said that 28 percent of people in Butler County are food insecure and about 1,000 people are homeless.

The leftover food from Monday's event would be taken to the winter warming shelter in Butler, Del Vecchio said. The point is to try and make every little bit count. The event was expected to raise about $600, which will benefit Slippery Rock School District's Backpack Program, which provides weekend meals to children in the district dealing with food insecurity.

“It's important to arouse awareness in people,” she said. “If everybody does a little bit, maybe nobody has to do it all.”

That's what student organizers like MacKenzie King, a sports management and nonprofit management double major from Flint, Mich., want to focus on — not only letting people know that hunger is an issue locally, but that there are organizations and efforts they can participate in to help combat the problem.

“I think a lot of people think they can't help because it's not their community that has this issue,” King said. “But it is, and there are outlets for you to help.”