Montreal Gazette - Big cause on campus; Food-security movements grow as students raise awareness and work toward increasing access to organic products
Every Montreal campus you stroll through these days, from the concrete spaces of the Universite du Quebec a Montreal (UQAM) to the green expanses of Concordia's Loyola campus, boasts a productive vegetable patch.
Student union bulletin boards yield notices for campus soup kitchens, worm-composting kits, canning workshops and calls for garden volunteers. Talk with some of the student organizers, and their drive and enthusiasm proves infectious.
Four local university campuses have groups devoted to urban agriculture, from McGill's Campus Crops, whose herbs and vegetables are used by the pay-what-you-can vegan lunch services of Midnight Kitchen, to the RealiTEA project at Concordia, which grows a dozen types of tea and some other produce.
CRAPAUD, the urban planning and agriculture research group at UQAM, is taking their mission beyond the university confines. Jonathan Glencross, a 23-year-old honours student at McGill's School of the Environment, is also taking campus food-security initiatives to another level.
"Jonathan is rocking the movement there," states Stiff, who regularly consults Glencross for advice regarding Concordia's Food Systems Project.
