The number of students who depend on the University of Ottawa’s (UOttawa) food bank has been continually increasing every year, according to the food bank’s service co-ordinator Chris Hynes.

The food bank, which was frequented by 3,300 UOttawa students in 2011, was developed in 2006 after students voted in favour of paying a levy to support a food bank, Hynes said.

The need for a food bank arose when tuition and living costs began to increase dramatically, according to Hynes.

Most of the food bank’s users return regularly and are international students who have difficulty finding resources. Students with dependent family also frequent the food bank, according to Hynes.

“University should be hard, but students shouldn’t have to struggle to survive. They shouldn’t have to choose between buying books and buying food,” Hynes said.

At the University of Ottawa’s food bank, students and alumni in need are given an emergency food hamper that contains three days’ worth of perishable and non-perishable food items.

The food bank is a member agency of the Ottawa Food Bank. The university receives most of its food from regular deliveries from the Ottawa Food Bank. Student organizations also run food drives to support it.

The food bank also hired a public outreach supervisor to promote the bank in the community to deal with the increased demand for food.

“People underestimate the need for a food bank because we assume that because we can afford to attend university, we can afford to purchase and prepare food,” Hynes said.

Even students themselves are surprised by how much a food bank is needed.

“I’m shocked by these statistics. It really shows that some students are barely getting by and have to sacrifice a lot just to earn a university degree,” said Brent Bell, a first-year political science student at UOttawa.

Although these facts come as a surprise, Bell, like many other students living on their own, understands the struggle.

“I rely a lot on financial aid such as scholarships and OSAP,” Bell said. “More needs to be done to help students. A post-secondary education shouldn’t be a privilege, it should be a right.”

However, not all students feel this way. Emma Larson, a first-year law major at Carleton University, said tuition and costly living are not to blame for the increase.

“Students need to learn to budget [their money] properly,” Larson said. “If students carefully considered all the costs that they have to cover and planned accordingly, students wouldn’t find themselves turning to food banks.”

Carleton has a food bank that offers a similar service which has also seen a steady increase in use. Carleton’s Food Centre is an initiative run by the Carleton University Students’ Association, according to programming co-ordinator Sarah McCue. The Carleton Emergency Food Centre has been offering students in need hampers of food since 1997.

“Students are using it because students are poor,” McCue said.

The increase in usage is a systemic issue and isn’t about money management on behalf of students, McCue said.

“This is a stigmatized issue that needs to be discussed so that we can find a lasting solution for it,” she said.

Even though food bank usage by university students has been steadily increasing across Canada, although it varies from campus to campus, according Sarah Jayne King, communications chairperson at the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS).

“This issue is definitely a systemic one. Since 2006, tuition prices have increased up to 71 per cent,” King said.

King said campus food banks and similar services have existed on university campuses for a long time, but the increase of usage speaks to increased financial pressures on Canadian students.

“The reality is, more and more students are forced to use the food bank because they have to make tough choices between buying books and paying the rent or buying [food].”

On a warm and sunny October afternoon, a couple of volunteers and I walked across campus carrying buckets full of cherry tomatoes, a few carrots, and a handful of pole beans. Our knees were green from kneeling in tomato patches, and our hands were stained from the rich living soil that we had built in the past year.

We arrived at Carleton’s Food Centre and we were received with the beaming smile of the service centre co-ordinator who was excited to give out the fresh, organic, local, and sustainably produced produce for people requiring food bank baskets.

Few things in life are as pure and just as growing food and sharing it with your community. Maybe it is this profoundly simple idea that appears so incomprehensible to those who think that pushing hastily built, overpriced, and for-profit concrete boxes on top of a community-built garden is the best use of campus space.

At the Kitigànensag Graduate Students’ Association (GSA) Carleton Community Garden we have managed to accomplish a great deal since our beginning in the spring of 2012.

We designed and implemented the garden in 10 months using cutting edge techniques of ecological agriculture, and hundreds of hours of volunteer labour.

A large portion of the garden was built using recycled materials found on campus such as wood pallets, and wood chips from felled trees. We converted hard-packed dead dirt into rich living soil—probably the richest, healthiest soil on campus now.

Our garden is mostly watered from rain collected from our shed roof, despite a minor drought in July. Forty people used the 25 allotment plots to grow their own food. We were able to supplement the Food Centre’s food bank baskets with fresh and healthy produce.

Monthly workshops on different aspects of organic gardening were held. We planted an edible forest garden that will be producing apples, elderberries, serviceberries, blueberries, raspberries, rhubarb, and many herbs—if the garden is not destroyed.

Volunteers constructed a 100 foot-long wood-composting berm that host fungus capable of breaking down the oil and gas that leaches off parking lot six into the Ottawa watershed. On top of this berm we will be planting a pollinator garden that will attract native bee species and honey bees to help prevent the hive collapse epidemic that is sweeping North America.

A garden was created for First Nations students on campus to practice, honour, and teach traditional agricultural practices.

At our naming ceremony earlier this month we had elders come and lead us through a harvest ceremony in order to honour and recognize that the garden is on stolen Algonquin land.

Realistically, we are not going to feed everyone on campus, and maybe then we are “just a small garden.” But what we are successful in doing is even more important than our size.

Our garden has introduced hundreds of people to the idea of producing their own food, and provided them the skills necessary to do it.

Simultaneously, we are healing the environmental destruction caused by our university, and testing the agricultural techniques that will allow us to mitigate and endure the environmental changes of the future.

Though we may not own much, you will never find people who are more generous than gardeners. There will always be space at our table—and we will do our very best to feed you—even if you don’t see the value of the garden.

Respecting nature and the efforts of the community are the first steps to showing leadership at Carleton. Unfortunately, these are lessons that are still needed at the top.