When one thinks of a town square, many things come to mind — but maybe not a group chat with over a thousand members and the sole function of divulging the location of free food. Over the last decade, through various iterations and across multiple platforms, the Free Food Alerts group chat has become just that: a place for students at the College to, yes, shout out free food, but also to voice musings on life in general.
The premise is quite simple: If you know of any free food, whether it’s leftovers from an event or your unclaimed order from Lee Snack Bar, you can post it in the chat, usually alongside a picture of the grub up for grabs. Typically, the offering is claimed within minutes.
It all started with Valeria Pelayo ’16. Though she can’t remember the exact year, Pelayo guessed that she opened the earliest version of the Free Food Alerts chat — a Facebook group — during her sophomore year in 2014.
Pelayo, who was receiving full financial aid from the College, was automatically enrolled in the 21-meals-per-week board plan. But, she said, she had heard from a friend that it was possible to get a rebate from the school if she changed to a smaller meal plan.
“You maybe got a grand or so, which is a lot when you’re in college,” she said.
Once she switched to the new plan — only 10 swipes at the dining halls per week — she opened the Facebook group, initially populated by her close friends in the Queer Student Union and women’s rugby.
“It kind of spread from there as people added friends of friends,” Pelayo said.
Every day, Pelayo would scan Daily Messages for rumblings of free food to share with the group. “I pretty much would read those only for that information and pass it along,” she said. She learned, for instance, that there would often be grapes and cheese after music recitals — and that those leftovers would be up for grabs after the performance was over.
But Pelayo had a hard time recalling more specific instances, largely because the chat became a part of her regular routine. “I wish I remembered more, but it kind of became a background thing where I was like, ‘Let me check the chat today to see if there’s something to grab,’” she said. “It was such a day-to-day, quotidian thing.”
Paula Mejia ’20 was one of the friends Pelayo added to her original chat. Pelayo graduated in 2016, around the same time that Mejia took a few years off from the College. When Mejia returned to campus in January 2019, the Facebook group was no longer active, but she wanted to revive it. Instead of Facebook, however, she chose to restart Free Food Alerts on GroupMe, a chat platform used by other large groups on campus.
Once again, the chat quickly grew, first among Mejia’s network and any lingering members of the old Facebook group, and then throughout the rest of the campus.
“I think it’s pretty easy to get on board with free food,” Mejia said. “It has a wide appeal. I don’t think anyone was ever like, ‘No thanks.’”
Mejia estimated that the group had a few hundred members when she graduated in 2020. Now, that number is nearly 1,500.
“It’s very cool to look back and see that the chat is still going,” Mejia said. “It’s not something I’ve really thought about since I graduated, and it’s kind of funny that it’s having this whole life I didn’t know about.”
And it certainly is having a whole life: In the years that have followed, the chat has become a Wild West for free-flowing campus discourse.
“I’ve had conversations there, I’ve had arguments — I love it,” said chat member Bri Kang ’26.
On one afternoon in October, a student sent a picture of the single, half-eaten samosa that remained after another student had posted about a leftover tray of Indian food in Paresky Center earlier in the day. “I CURSE THEE WHO DOTH TAKEN A BITE OF THE LAST SAMOSA AND MOCKED US WITH IT,” they wrote. (The message received 21 likes.)
“nature continues to surprise us with the wickedness and debased constitution of some of our fellows,” another responded (also 21 likes).
It’s not uncommon for a student to capitalize on the thousands of campus eyeballs concentrated on the chat, maybe to ask if anyone has seen their missing AirPods case or to advertise an event that they’re organizing. But if you send a message that does not include free food, you should be prepared to face the wrath of angry — or perhaps hangry — members of the chat.
(Earlier in October, a student accidentally sent a message about a broken washing machine intended for their dorm’s group chat. “What part of it can I eat,” another student quickly responded, receiving 47 likes on the message.)
But even as the Free Food Alerts group has become a freewheeling space for campus communication, its core function — small-scale food redistribution — has continued.
“I think of the free food chat as both something that is utterly ridiculous that I love about Williams and is super frivolous,” said Annie Gustafson ’24, who frequently sent alerts about leftovers from her dorm’s snacks as a House Coordinator last year.
“But I also think of it as a form of solidarity and a very serious way that students acknowledge that other students have food insecurity or have true needs that other students can help acknowledge,” she continued. “I hold it in two places.”
