Supplied - Health BustersWith finals coming up, the temptation to munch on fast-food options instead of affordable home-cooked food is strong, especially if students don’t have a vehicle or the time to decipher ETS routes.
But Health Busters, a free grocery store transportation service, is helping students in University of Alberta residencies from having to trade physical well-being for unhealthy, time-saving fast-food options. Health Buster team members Paridhi Ghai, Harman Khinda, Simmy Gill and Peter Nguyen founded the simple initiative, which buses students in residence to a grocery store to stock up on foods that are significantly more expensive if bought near campus.
Accessing the grocery bus is straightforward: Health Buster users bring their housing keys, OneCard and grocery bags. The bus picks residences up in the HUB bus loop at 10:45 a.m. on a scheduled Sunday, drives them to the Calgary Trail Superstore, lets them shop for an hour and returns them to campus by 1 p.m.
“(The students) just hop on and get off. We manage everything else,” Health Busters team member Paridhi said. “Even if you do go to Subway or CAB or ETLC for food, you don’t really get healthy food.”
With the rising cost of food, the service is especially important, the team said. The best deals tend to be the furthest from campus, but the time spent traveling from campus to the grocery store and back again could be enough for students to decide on fast food instead. To complicate this situation, final exam season is factoring into time management.
The service could also be helpful for international students living on campus, who not only have to figure out academic life, but Edmontonian life in general, Gill said.
“(International students are) moving to a new country where they might not speak the language,” Gill said. “Providing this bus service to a grocery store (helps because) they don’t have to figure out bus routes.”
Health Busters was first proposed in the Heroes for Health contest, a Wellness Services competition which grants students the funding to realize their own ideas for improving health on campus. Of 27 competitors, Health Busters placed in the top three. The group was then granted the funding required to run the grocery bus in November 2013. After months of paperwork, the bus made its first trip earlier this month, on March 1 — just in time for finals.
The grocery bus will continue to run once a month in the Spring and Summer semesters. With more funding, the team of four students say they hoping to continue Health Busters into the next academic year.
Students looking to use Health Busters can find their next departure on the service’s Facebook page, facebook.com/healthbusters. Health Busters can also be contacted over email at [email protected].
