More Than a Meal: How Students Led UCalgary’s Food Security Movement

Apr 11, 2025

When Shaziah Jinnah Morsette first joined the University of Calgary Students’ Union, she knew students were struggling — but she didn’t realize just how many were going hungry.

“I’ve lived in that gray area — not food insecure enough to use the food bank, but struggling to afford food,” says Jinnah Morsette, BA’24 (Communications and Media Studies), BA’24 (Multidisciplinary). “Many students feel the same. We skip meals, trade lunch for parking and quietly compromise. Food becomes the first thing to go when life gets hard — it’s invisible.

That quiet struggle sparked something bigger.

What began as a modest food cupboard tucked away on campus eventually evolved into a full-campus network of affordable groceries, subsidized meals and nutrition-focused programming. The Campus Food Hub is now the heart of UCalgary’s food security response — and one of the university’s most visible student-driven success stories.

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Video: Root Exudates, Soil Biology, and How Plants Recruit Microbes | Field Talk Friday

Field Talk Friday | Dr. John Murphy | Root Exudates, Soil Biology, and How Plants Recruit Microbes

Most of us spend our time managing what we can see above ground—plant height, leaf color, stand counts, and yield potential. But the deeper you dig into agronomy, the more you realize that some of the most important processes driving crop performance are happening just millimeters below the surface.

In this episode of Field Talk Friday, Dr. John Murphy continues the soil biology series by diving into one of the most fascinating topics in modern agronomy: root exudates and the role they play in shaping the microbial world around plant roots.

Roots are not passive structures simply pulling nutrients out of the soil. They are active participants in the underground ecosystem. Plants constantly release compounds into the soil—sugars, amino acids, organic acids, and other molecules—that act as both energy sources and signals for soil microbes.