campus dining venues and safely “repurpose” it into meals for hungry people all over Lee County. Last year, the organization also began a partnership with Greek Life to claim leftover food from fraternity houses. Currently, the food received as part of Campus Kitchens is already cooked and simply repackaged into individual, nutritionally balanced meals, Ahmed says. The meals are then served at the Auburn United Methodist Church food pantry; His Place, a recovery center for men 18 and older who suffer from addiction; and potentially one or two more locations around the county, depending on demand and food supply. Sev216 eral dozen students work hard to keep Campus Kitchens in service, picking up leftover food and repacking, delivering, and serving it. “Hunger in Lee County is a huge and growing problem—currently, 1 in 5 people in Lee County go to bed every night hungry or not knowing where their next meal is coming from,” Ahmed says. Campus Kitchens also benefits AU students—as hard as it may be for many other students to believe, hunger is a problem on campus as well, he adds. Ahmed and other student volunteers work with the AU Center for Community Service to provide meals for those students who need food assistance.
In addition to the Committee of 19 and Campus Kitchens, Ahmed has been involved in numerous other campus activities—as vice president of the Honors College, as a student worker in the provost’s office, and as an undergraduate research assistant in the College of Liberal Arts, to name a few. In 2011, he received a fellowship award from OUR CLA—Opportunities in Undergraduate Research in the College of Liberal Arts—which supported his summer internship in Cairo with the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), with which Auburn’s College of Human Sciences has an active partnership. (See related stories in this volume.) Ahmed’s internship involved helping fortify Egypt’s rice supply, since about 60 million of the country’s 80 million people consume rice on a daily basis. Ahmed worked with a WFP nutrition specialist and local rice expert to develop a way to fortify the rice with vitamins and minerals such as Vitamin A, Vitamin B, and zinc. Then he and the rice expert traveled to about 60 rice mills to convince processors of the nutritional benefits of fortification and to show them how to do it. All the rice mills agreed to the new process, though they had to visit some of the mills an extra time or two. “Many of them (rice processors) worried about the appearance and shape of the rice—‘would it
look different or taste different?’—but the rice we used, you couldn’t tell it was altered,” Ahmed says. “We had to show them how to fortify the rice, convince them it was safe, and help them do hours of rigorous paperwork to complete the process.” By the end of the summer, Ahmed had convinced processors to fortify a total of about 250,000 tons of rice. “It was exciting to know that I did help about 15 million people have access to better food—especially as a 19-year-old,” he