What's 4 Dinner, UVIC Sustainable Food, UVIC Anniversary of Guerilla Gardening, Campus Community Garden, CUAC

March 24, 2011

I discovered I live only a couple of blocks away from an innovative food-related business in Victoria: What's 4 Dinner (http://www.whats4dinner.ca/ ).What's 4 Dinner is a new concept in food services which helps people to prepare affordable family-sizing meals by providing a menu of meals each month that customers can select from, and schedule a time to come to the What's 4 Dinner and use the ready-to-use fresh ingredients to make the two meals (12 serving), leaving the dishes for the staff to deal with. It's just an interesting new split between public-private, profit-low-cost kind of cooking, which the website says results in meals that cost $4-6 per servicing.

I walked through the UVIC cafeteria today and noticed a big sign up that spoke about the amount of locally grown food UVIC uses, the food waste it composts,etc. I thought it was interesting to see how much work has been done on campus around food security issues while I wasn't looking (http://web.uvic.ca/sustainability/Food.htm ).

This day last year, some students at UVIC decided to dirt up the lawn in front of the library and create a grassroots, volunteer-made food garden. The initiative drew in hundreds of students, but was very
controversial and resulting in warnings and legal action by the campus administration against some of the students involved. This year, as in today, there was supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek "Guard-In!" of those same lawns outfront of the library, to commemortate the guerilla gardening that had happened (without arousing a backlash this time. I showed up at noon by the fountain for this event, but very little seemed to be happening. It seems there is also a Symposium scheduled for March 25 noon outside the SUB, and a memorial for the garden on March 31 noon at the fountain.

There is already a community garden on campus which has about 40 small plots that individual students can be waitlisted for, and it is located to the Northwest of the busloop ( http://web.uvic.ca/~ccgarden/ ). I think it is a fairly nice spot to spend a free afternoon, or attent a Friday workparty or a periodic workshop. But the garden is a small step and a far cry from having a serious local sustainable agriculture on campus that may be needed in the food-insecure times ahead.The Campus Urban Agriculture Collective (CUAC, part of the UVSP) would like to see more local food production (http://uvsp.uvic.ca/get-involved/cuac-action-now-campus-urban-agriculture/ ). I hope to bring my camera tomorrow so I can take the pictures I meant to get for today.