California is an agricultural Eden — sunlit orchards, strawberry fields and busy farmers’ markets form a state that grows half of America’s produce. Yet beneath this landscape of abundance, nearly one in five Californians experiences food insecurity.

Food insecurity is often perceived as a condition confined to visible hardship, such as homelessness or unemployment. While these experiences are real and warrant urgent attention, food insecurity also exists in less visible contexts: including among the very students training to diagnose malnutrition, counsel patients and care for vulnerable communities.

Health profession students occupy a uniquely overlooked position in the food insecurity conversation. They are not yet earning professional salaries, but the assumption that they will one day earn high incomes can eclipse present financial strain. As such, they are not always treated as ordinary low-income adults. In one survey of 1,834 medical students across eight U.S. medical schools, 21.2% reported food insecurity, with disproportionate rates among students demonstrating financial need. Similar patterns have appeared among non-physician practitioner trainees, including one study where more than half of the physician assistant interns surveyed met criteria for food insecurity. Lack of consistent nutritious meal access is associated with poorer mental and physical health, lower academic performance and higher rates of chronic health conditions that ultimately increase healthcare costs for the state.

CalFresh, California’s version of SNAP, has the potential to be a powerful, frontline answer to this crisis. For eligible students, it provides monthly grocery assistance. Yet beyond its well-documented administrative hurdles, the program’s promise is tainted by the way student eligibility realistically work. Calfresh explains that people classified as students are eligible only if they meet one of several additional exemptions, such as working 20 hours per week, participating in federal or state work-study or being enrolled in an approved employment or training program. In other words, low income by itself is not enough to receive assitance. 

For medical, PA and nursing students, these requirements are poorly matched to the structure of our training. We are enrolled in demanding, full-time programs that prepare us directly for licensure and entry into the healthcare workforce. The rigor of that training is part of what makes it so meaningful, but students should not be punished under state policy for committing themselves to it. Requiring students to separately work 20 hours per week on top of coursework, clinical activities and research obligations risks creating a perverse system. Those training to serve the public are denied food assistance unless they take on additional work that may directly undermine their ability to professionally succeed. The work-study exemption does not fully solve this problem, either. Though CalFresh rules do not require students to work a minimum number of work-study hours once qualified through that exemption, access to work-study is uneven. Some institutions implement it inconsistently, while others may not offer it at all for certain programs. As a result, eligibility can depend less on a student’s actual financial need or professional trajectory than on the administrative choices of their institution, leaving students with vastly different access to food benefits.

The solution? Make CalFresh eligibility fit graduate health professions training. If students must show that they are working or preparing for employment, then community or free clinic shifts, unpaid clinical research and other service-oriented activities should count toward the 20-hour-per-week requirement. In medical and PA training, these avenues are central to clinical competency, community engagement and increasingly, competitiveness for residency or future employment. A second reform would be to create a clear need-based exemption for students below a defined percentage of the federal poverty line or who can demonstrate significant unmet financial need from their schools. 

I am fortunate to attend a medical institution with unusually strong graduate support. Its aid packages explicitly consider food, housing and other living expenses, and both administrative and student legislative bodies fund initiatives from food pantry pop-ups to a community fridge. But if even well-resourced institutions need to build food support into financial aid and campus basic-needs programs, students at less-resourced programs deserve public support rather than being left to absorb the gap themselves. Likewise, I want to be clear that charity and mutual aid supplement, but do not grant, the dignity of reliable food access that comes with upstream policy work. 

That gap is especially concerning as some health professions now face new political pressures. PA and nursing programs are particularly at risk under the Big Beautiful Bill, which declassifies them as professional degrees and caps their Grad PLUS loans, pushing students toward predatory private loans. For financially struggling students, food becomes, dangerously, one of the easiest expenses to cut.

SB 961, the CalFresh for Students Act, introduced in early 2026 by Senate Majority Leader Angelique Ashby, provides hope. The bill would streamline CalFresh student eligibility by automatically recognizing California public higher education programs, including community colleges, state universities and UC programs from associate through doctoral degrees, as qualifying employability pathways. In doing so, SB 961 reduces bureaucratic barriers that prevent eligible students from accessing food assistance and acknowledges that higher education can itself be a direct path to employment. I propose that this recognition, however, also be automatically extended to all California institutions offering MD, PA and nursing programs, including private institutions such as Stanford that serve significant numbers of low-income and first-generation students.

Food is one of the oldest languages of care. Long before medicine had white coats or stethoscopes, communities fed one another as a way of saying: you belong here, your health matters and your survival is our shared responsibility. Expanding CalFresh access for health professions students benefits local life, as well. By incentivizing students to purchase groceries, we directly invest in businesses and build stronger ties between students and the communities they are training to serve. We are all familiar with the image of medical, PA and nursing students studying late into the night — running on caffeine and skipping meals. That image should not be romanticized as resilience, nor accepted as the cost of wanting to do good. 

California must recognize that the health of medical trainees is inseparable from the health of the state. Let’s start by feeding them.