At the kitchen door of St. Thomas University’s Holy Cross House, hungry students are met with the smell of provençale soup au pistou bubbling in the two large slow cookers and three freshly baked focaccia made with herbs from STU’s edible garden. The hearty soup, filled with potatoes, pasta, string beans and beans, is more than just a meal; it contains lessons on how to cook on a tight student budget.
STU students volunteer in the Holy Cross House kitchen every Thursday morning. The Hearty STU initiative kicked off on Sept. 26 with Claire Morrison leading the team of volunteers to cook delicious food for the community. While cooking students learn to create meals using cheap and hearty ingredients.
The first Hearty STU meal attracted around 50 students.
“As far as sustainability and food security goes, knowing how to cook is key,” said Claire Morrison, STU’s campus minister. “If you know how to deal with dried beans, the chances of you going hungry have decreased significantly,”
Every contribution in the Hearty STU kitchen is essential. One student was busy washing dishes as other students completed other tasks. No matter what each student was doing, they were learning the importance of being able to cook meals for themselves — a task that Morrison said is an important counter to food insecurity.
Morrison recognized making nutritious meals on a tight budget can be challenging for students, which is why she encourages them to learn to cook. She said that in a campus survey done last year, around 30 per cent of students reported they struggled to buy groceries.
“I know that the people who are drawn to those sorts of surveys are the ones who have a message to say ‘I’m struggling,’ and so they’re more likely to fill out the survey,” she said.
Anna Jackson, a registered dietitian with the UNB Student Health Centre, said that with the cost of food today, it is increasingly harder for students to eat healthy, especially considering how busy they are.
She said the key to counteracting food insecurity is budgeting, buying more satiating ingredients for cheaper, and beans.
“It’s very important that students learn at least some basic culinary skills as students,” said Jackson.
Like Morrison, Jackson also emphasized the value of fibre and beans for students that are hungry. She said she encourages students to do meatless Mondays. During her sessions with students she tries to dispel the myth that canned and frozen goods are not healthy options.
“It is helpful for the planet and for your wallet,” said Jackson. “It makes me happy, and I think it makes the students life easier, too.”
Making a students life easier while giving them skills that will last a lifetime is exactly what Morrison hopes the Hearty lunches on Thursdays will achieve. Morrison said the goal of Hearty STU is to make sure students aren’t afraid to cook at home while facilitating a community of learning.
At this past Hearty Lunch, first-year volunteer Kaitlyn Hamming prepared her first pesto — a fragrant blend of tomato, basil, oregano, chives, garlic, parmesan cheese, vegetable oil and parsley.
Hamming said her favourite part of the event was trying new things, as she comes from a busy home where meals are typically already made before she gets a chance to help out.
“I like being able to learn all of this stuff and feed other people,” she said.
However, this isn’t the first time that Hamming has learned new cooking skills at the instruction of Morrison. During Hearty Lunch training day, the minister taught the volunteers to make sushi, as well as basic knife handling skills like “curling your fingers so that you don’t chop them off.”
“[She] learned how to make sushi like a boss … then she went and shared her skills with her family, which is amazing,” said Morrison.
Helping students gain a passion for cooking or even just an interest in it for their own benefit, is what drives the Hearty STU lunches and Morrison’s work to decrease student insecurity in students.
For those on a tight budget, Morrison encourages them to get cooking with Hearty STU lunches and try something new.
“In our heartiest meals, the chances of you eating something that you’ve never had before are really high,” said Morrison.
