Trick Or Eat hopes to have another successful Halloween
Trick Or Eat, a national food drive initiative supported by the University of Guelph’s Meal Exchange chapter, will be taking place on Oct. 31 from 4:45 p.m. until 7:45 p.m.
This is the 17th year that the Meal Exchange group in Guelph has run the event. Meal Exchange is operated on campus in partnership with the Central Student Association (CSA). They run events that donate food and resources to 19 local food banks and breakfast programs.
Students and community members who sign up are sent out into the Guelph community to trick-or-treat. The difference is, instead of asking for treats, they ask for food donations. This event addresses the lack of food security that some students experience daily.
“…instead of asking for treats, they ask for food donations.”
In an email, Meghan Wing, the academic and university affairs commissioner at the CSA, said, “the Meal Exchange team has set a goal of recruiting 1000 volunteers this year! It would be great if we could all come together and help them meet this goal.”
To address the potential concern about timing conflicts, Wing added that the event will be finished by 8:00 p.m. and added, “It is a great cause and it will be a super fun night.”
Trick Or Eat takes place all across Canada. The self-titled “Trick-or-Eaters” go door to door collecting food to donate to local community organizations. The Guelph event, run from campus, donates a portion of the food they collect to the on-campus CSA FoodBank.
According to Guelph’s event page on the Trick Or Eat website, “Since 2012, the on campus food bank […] has witnessed their number of users double.” The increase of food bank users is attributed to an increased tuition price and a spike in the general cost of living in the city.
“…the Guelph chapter was able to collect 44,000 pounds of food…”
In 2014, the site says, the Guelph chapter was able to collect 44,000 pounds of food and this year they are hoping to equal or surpass that number.
Since Trick Or Eat is a youth-run program, much of the food they collect goes straight back to the communities with strong youth populations to run the event, like university and college towns.
According to a 2012 report on household food insecurity in Canada, one in eight Canadian households do not have access to enough food every month to maintain a healthy diet; that is about 1.7 million households across the country. 2014 statistics from Food Banks Canada show that almost 850,000 Canadians receive food from a food bank every month and more than a third of those people are children.
Photo by Mariah Bridgeman.