The Concordia Greenhouse Project is an initiative that uses the Henry F. Hall building rooftop greenhouse as an all-organic space, geared towards education and research, urban sustainability, food security and community-building. As an educational space, the greenhouse seeks to be an environment for workshops, projects and events that address urban sustainability issues. The greenhouse strives to implement projects in a sustainable manner, taking measures to ensure that the consumption of resources such as water, energy, and building materials are minimized in the planning and implementation of projects.

The Concordia Greenhouse is a working group of Sustainable Concordia, a student organization on campus that is funded through a student fee levy. The Greenhouse project relies on fundraising from plant sales, plant rentals, and space rentals as well as, grants from internal funding sources such as the Sustainability Action Fund and the Concordia Campus Student Life fund. However the Greenhouse project does not have a stable or guaranteed budget.

Research description:

The People's Potato is a vegan soup kitchen run out of Concordia University. The project was initiated in 1999 in order to address student poverty. The student population at Concordia is typically in debt, and has little access to nourishing organic and local foods. Our soup kitchen emphasizes serving well cooked, wholesome foods.

At the start, a group of dedicated students started cooking in a church basement and carried the food to the university. Since then, the project has expanded, and we now serve over five hundred students and community members daily from our kitchen on the 7th floor of the Hall building at Concordia.

We are committed not only to serving food to hungry students, but to broader goals of social justice and environmental sustainability.

We are a fee levy group and receive 37 cents per undergraduate credit. Throughout the academic year we also apply for different grants such as for work-study and the sustainable action fund. We also have a donation box.

Research description:


Project description:  The Midnight Kitchen is looking for someone to work on a research project about food safety and expiration dates found on food packaging. Ideally, this project would look into the market incentives behind expiration date labeling in comparison with the actual interval within which food is safe for consumption. The research could take nutritional perspective or focus more on political aspects (policy, historical trends, etc).

We're interested in this project in two ways. First, we'd like to use
this information in a larger political project on food waste. We might
turn some of this information into political posters in our serving
space, or into a zine/pamphlet to be distributed at servings. Second,
since MK uses donated surplus food that isn't always in prime
condition, it would be good to have more research on food safety.

Research Description:

The collective at frigo needs to know more about its suppliers and natural food distribution more generally. Unlike other retailers, the frigo does not purchase or sell based on price. It considers other variables in making food available to its members, such as: locality, labour standards and manners in agriculture, transformation, transportation, marketing, packaging, quality of food, accessibility, distribution of resources implied in food markets, etc. The frigo vert is, at the retail level, quite unique in its manner of distributing food and household stuffs on an anti-capitalist model.

The McGill Food Systems Project (MFSP) is a collaborative initiative between students, McGill Food and Dining Services, and the McGill Office of Sustainability, which utilizes student research to assess and improve the sustainability of the food systems at McGill.  Currently, we are developing a database of the food sourcing practices with the intention of having this database serve as a baseline against which to compare the feasibility of more sustainable alternatives. During the fall 2009 semester we will be hosting events to engage all students, administrators and staff in the ongoing improvements to our food systems at McGill.