Special to the Ryersonian

Imagine a group of students getting together every lunch hour to prepare a healthy, vegan meal with locally grown, organic ingredients and sharing it with their fellow students. It’s a simple concept that a group of students at Concordia University brought to life seven years ago when they started what is perhaps the country’s most successful university-based food collective.

The People’s Potato started with a pot of soup in a church basement and has evolved into a large operation that feeds more than 500 students and Concordia community members a day. The meals are prepared and served by the collective’s 13 staff and 80 volunteers who dish out about 2,500 meals a week. Startup funds came from the Quebec Public Interest Research Group, and within a year the popular collective had secured funding from the undergraduate student population. That, plus monetary donations collected at daily servings keeps the Potato cooking. At Ryerson, similar ideas are stewing, but nothing’s being served yet.

While Ryerson has a lot in common with Concordia – both schools are known for hands-on, skills-based programs and strive to be central figures in their urban, downtown neighbourhoods – Ryerson’s response to dismal food choices on campus does not compare to Concordia’s.

Several groups intent on starting an on-campus food collective have formed and dissolved over the last few years. The most recent is the Ryerson Initiative for Sustainability and the Environment, or RISE, which wanted to promote a more sustainable campus life. With an emphasis on environmental issues, the group started a few shortlived campaigns, but as the main organizers graduated and left Ryerson, so did the energy behind the group and it soon died out.

Now, plans to start a food collective modelled after the People’sPotato are back to being an idealistic idea rather than a work-inprogress. But it’s an idea Carlos Flores still hopes will be realized at Ryerson.

The urban planning student was a member of RISE and has been involved in food policy initiatives at Ryerson for several years.

“We’re trying to mobilize the community around the area of food because it is so central to ourlives,” he says. “I think we can make food accessible to students and affordable to students and at the same time be holistic in that approach.”

Cecilia Rocha is the director for the Centre for Studies in Food Security and an associate professor at Ryerson’s school of nutrition. She says a food collective would be a good way to foster a sense of community, but a challenge to start up and maintain.

“I don’t think anyone can go against better foods and healthy foods and a sense of community,” she says. “But it depends on volunteer time and interest, especially from students.”

So far at Ryerson, there has not been a long-lasting commitment. But other universities have had better luck.

At McGill University, two community-based food programs exist. The Midnight Kitchen andthe Yellow Door both operate out of the university’s downtown campus. Both are community wide initiatives – for students and for people who live in the neighbourhood. The Food Co-operative at Melbourne University in Australia has been operating formore than 30 years. Run by volunteers who get a 20 per cent discount on the price of bulk goods and prepared food, the co-op offers MU students a daily serving of affordable, organic, vegetarian food.

Also dating back to 1975 is the food collective at the University of Maryland in the U.S. The Maryland Food Collective operates on a volunteer-for-food basis with a simple, overarching mandate: Food for people, not for profit. It’s a mission statement that might not be found in the company profiles of most university food service providers, such as Aramark, the company with which Ryerson has an exclusivity contract.

It’s an inevitable element that adds complexity to this simple idea. But groups at other Canadian universities with similar food deals have brought alternative food options to their campuses anyway. Still, it’s not always easy.

Radical Roots operated out of U of T for five years, but last summerthe university refused to renew its contract. The not-forprofit vegan café that made healthy, local food accessible to students for cheap was forced to close.

Research at the University of Saskatchewan in 2004 found that collective kitchens can improve budgeting, nutrition and social support in low-income communities, an income group that includes many OSAP-plagued Ryerson students. This makes the challenge of finding affordable, healthy food even tougher. At Pitman Hall cafeteria, a slice of pizza and a can of pop go for about $6, says firstyear graphic communications management student and Pitman Hall resident Brittani Wilcox.

Wilcox has only $20 left on her meal card for this semester. She says she knows that few of the dollars she’s dished out have gone to healthy, well-balanced meals.

“I was a vegetarian when I first got here and I was getting really unhealthy because there are hardly any vegetarian options,” she says. Her friend and fellow GCM student, Meredith Cunningham, says a food collective would be a good solution to a frustrating problem.

She says current food options on campus lack nutritious qualities. “The vegetables that are there are not recognizable as vegetables,” Cunningham says. She lives off-campus and eats her mom’s home-cooked food, an option many Ryerson students don’t have. A food collective could change that by offering affordable food.