Gift Economy Grilled Cheese Sandwiches!

Guest Post by Nipun Mehta

In 2004, on the campus of University of Texas, five students felt that they had stumbled into a solution to solve world hunger — grilled cheese! Their idea was to setup a booth, distribute sandwiches in return for a whatever-you-wish-to-donate offering to The Hunger Project. Gift economy grilled cheese, you can say.

They called it "Feel Good," well, because it made them feel good.  From their 2005 annual report:

In the beginning, we had just one George Foreman grill, one selection of bread, the most inexpensive cheese, and a whole lot of smiles. We sang and shouted our declaration that it was time to end world hunger. We gave away grilled cheese sandwiches and we happily took student donations. We were "ending world hunger one grilled cheese at a time". "Cool" was the general response and by the third day we had raised over $160. So we kept going. We applied for a food permit, woke up early to pick up bread from the loading dock of local grocery stores, packed our tent, cooler, and table in a car (all of which we acquired from a sports store in exchange for bartering our own personal items), drove to campus where we would set up, get excited, make grilled cheese, collect donations and spread the word that it is possible to end world hunger.

Within six months, FeelGood raised over $10,000 for The Hunger Project and served over 3,500 sandwiches on campus. Since then, they have raised more than $750K, via 21 college chapters involving more than 50K youth.

I don't know if grilled cheese will solve world hunger, but one of those 50 thousand youth might.