ARTICLE:

By Mira Galperin

                 It is a quarter past eleven on a Friday morning and there are already people lining up past the door at Sprouts café, eagerly waiting as the clock strikes the half past mark and free, organic food will be made available to sate their growling stomachs.

Tucked away in the corner of the Student Union Building basement at UBC, this is a typical Friday lunch hour at the highly popular weekly event Sprouts calls Community Eats.

100% volunteer run, Sprouts opened its doors in 2004 under the initiative of the UBC Natural Food Coop and functioned mainly as a student run grocery store. After undergoing renovation, however, it reopened in 2008 and welcomed students to enjoy hot lunches and baked goods, all the while remaining a grocery store in which students could purchase organic and local produce at their convenience.

Sprouts prides itself in serving the student body healthy, organic food and promoting sustainable living amongst the community. Their food is local, as they get their eggs, fruits, and vegetables directly from the UBC Farm and the rest of their produce from farms across BC and Washington. Things they cannot attain locally, like coffee and tea, are guaranteed to be fair trade. Moreover, their coffee is the cheapest place on campus to get your daily dose of java, selling for only 75 cents a cup.

Through Community Eats, Sprouts offers free hot lunches every Friday from 11:30 am – 1:30 pm. How can a non-profit café give out healthy hot lunches to 200 people every Friday? Even though this sounds too good to be true, Sprouts manages to achieve this by collecting food from grocers and distributers that would have otherwise been thrown out due to cosmetic imperfections, such as bruising, but is otherwise perfectly edible. Through this initiative, they decrease the amount of edible food that goes to waste and are able to create healthy, delicious lunches for UBC’s students.

Serving food such as spinach salad, quinoa, rosemary fries, vegetable stew, fruit, bread, and eggplant spread, Community Eats proves itself to be delicious, healthy, and good for the environment and students’ pockets all at the same time. Their food is vegetarian and vegan friendly and can be enjoyed by all people as they offer a wide variety.

Claire Young, a third year arts student, recently decided to attend Community Eats for the first time after she heard about it from a friend. She said “it’s great to see such good food not go to waste,” and that she will be coming back in the upcoming weeks. Like many of the other students attending, she was excited that healthy, organic food is available for free since money always factors into her food choices. “Organic food is always so much more expensive than say, McDonalds,” she added.  Community Eats gives students a chance to include healthy food in their diets that they would not otherwise be able to afford.

Further trying to increase awareness about sustainability, Sprouts asks that everyone bring their own reusable containers to Community Eats in an effort to decrease the amount of waste caused by disposable containers. Additionally, by implementing this, they hope that students will make it a habit to bring reusable containers everywhere they go and therefore decrease the amount of waste caused by plastic plates and utensils around campus.

Looking at the long line of people eagerly waiting to get sustainable, organic food, it is clear to see that Sprouts is succeeding in promoting more sustainable living through the hungry stomachs of UBC’s students.