0:03 Do you have classes later? Not today. 0:06 In the morning. Ok, okay. 0:15 Our facilitator one day when he walked into one of our breakout sessions, he had a bar of chewy bars on his hand and he had like a lot of them. He's just like guys, I got this from the food bank, and you get like 10 points. And it's like, you can get milk from here, you can get eggs from here. You can get a lot of true bars from there and I'm always stopping by and it's just a great resource on campus. And a lot of students were like wow, this is amazing, because it's like free food free snacks and you always need something when you're on campus. 0:48 Hey, I'm Nikhail. Welcome to Press Pass. You were just listening to Mariam Hussein a first year mathematics student talk about how she found out about Ryerson's Good Food center. Nearly two in five students said they experienced some form of food insecurity. According to a recent report released by meal exchange. It's soup for cents day at the campus food bank and Hussein has combined to check it out for the first time. 1:14 Being a first year student it's my first time moving out from home and I've actually learned that it's a lot more hectic and like harder to manage money. So it is, um, it is like you have to have a budget and you have to, it's not as easy as it is when you're at home. And when you have your parents cooking for you. You have to like make everything from scratch, which can be which can be quite hectic, especially when you're a student, you don't have that much time on your hands. And when you don't have time on your hands, you go out and you're like eating fast food 24 seven. So it's like, that's unhealthy and if you want to make the healthier choices, it's really expensive. 1:51 Hussein doesn't need to deal with the high cost of commuting because she lives 15 minutes away from campus with a roommate, but deciding who will cook dinner depends on how much time she and her roommate have. 2:06 Me or my roommate we try to like alternate on who's gonna cook on each day. So sometimes I'm the one who's gonna cook and sometimes she's the one. It just depends on who has time on their hands. And if not, we always like we keep like frozen pizza, or like frozen foods in our fridge just in case if you really are don't have much time on our hands. And that's how we basically make things work for now. 2:33 Hussein isn't currently working and hopes to use the food bank once or twice a week. 2:41 I had like frozen meat the other day and I thought it would I would be able to like make food in like 30 minutes and it took me like two hours, which was a lot of time in my day. 2:59 The Good Food Center has been providing food relief for students at Ryerson since 1993. The number of community members who visited the campus food bank between 2013 and 2015 went up by 44%. 49% of users were identified as female. I decided to head down to Pitman Hall cafe to speak with Alyssa Webster, a first year Business Management student. Webster has been living on her own for two years and spends about $200 on food a month. She has a part time job at a restaurant in Toronto, which helps her pay for tuition, textbooks, living cost and daily meals. But like Hussein, Webster is facing the challenge of juggling, studying, paying for rent and eating healthy. 3:49 Last year, there was a point where I kept having to call my parents for either grocery money, rent money and it was getting to the point where money was stressing me so out. I started doing poorly in some classes like. 4:01 First year was a lot harder than the second for Webster who switched programs. She was on Ryerson's dance team as well as the program with a heavy course schedule. Webster added that her fridge is currently empty and that it's a lot easier to grab Kraft Dinner for 99 cents from the local store. 4:21 Both my roommate and I have similar jobs. So we both come home around similar times. And a lot of the times we're just so tired and hungry, like he'll either make one of his Kraft dinners or I'll make a can of soup that I have. But it's never anything extravagant and healthy because it's like I'm already too tired from work. I'm too lazy to even think about making anything healthy. So a lot of the times I find myself eating really horrible foods just at night just because I'm hungry so I'll just make chicken fingers or anything that I can just get into my stomach 4:57 When I went back to the Good Food center and spoke to you Claire Davis, who is filling up cups with lentil soup to give away to students, she said keeping the shelves stocked is always difficult. Davis is one of four community coordinators at the food bank, which is closed during the weekends. 5:15 Even though there's four coordinators, we are all full time students, we can only be here for certain amount of time during the week the university is not open on like we're not open on weekends, which is a big time that people could probably be coming in we'll pull you aside and say thank you and like this really genuine and heartfelt way. Bye Rena. And I think doing that is honestly hard for people to say like I just want you to know that this really helps. 5:50 This was an episode of press pass. Thanks for listening, if you like what you heard, spread the word. Nikhil Sharma signing out for RSJ Radio.