Doughnuts are great; they’re even better when they’re free. Finding free food around campus is easier than you may think thanks to nourishmeforfree.com (NMFF). Clubs and organizations love promoting their events by giving out free food, and NMFF provides daily tips on where to find free food on or near campus. It usually announces two or three locations where students can get their free food fix.
NMFF was established by Johns Hopkins alumnus Will Shepherdson in December of 2011. NMFF initially operated exclusively at Johns Hopkins but has since expanded to U of T.
“Nothing revolutionary here,” stated one of NMFF’s main organizers, who did not wish to disclose their name. “Quite a number of people have thought about the ‘free food information’ aggregation concept. This is not surprising. We know that college kids love to party, sleep in, and score free food.”
When asked about possible expansion of the program to other universities, they replied, “Right now, we’d love to keep the underground nature of NMFF by staying small and serving our subscriber base at these two universities. However, some students from other universities have expressed interest in having an NMFF page for their school. We’re tallying these requests and it will inform our decision when we start thinking of expansion.”
One website that influenced NMFF is Food-Bot. Food-Bot was founded by Carnegie Mellon computer science alumnus Greg Woloschyn in early 2010. By creating an algorithm which searched for keywords such as “food” and “pizza,” he was able to program an app which notified students of current events giving away free food. It also rates them in terms of food quality and awkwardness.
Food-Bot has since been introduced to 19 other universities, U of T is not among them.
An unfortunate bug in Food-Bot’s algorithm once caused mayhem when an email stated; “Pet a baby chinchilla feed a hamster its favorite food and catch a fish with a big green net,” and Food-Bot mistook this as an invitation for free food, because of the keywords food and fish.
Student groups often give away free food to promote an event. On Wednesday October 30, the Polish Students Association (PSA) distributed jelly donuts and hot chocolate on the UTSU front lawn. The PSA’s November 23 wine and cheese dance party has been promoted on the website. “I have heard about it, but I had no idea we were on the page,” said Charles Robert, a member of PSA.
Get Crafty — held every Thursday at Hart House from 11:oo am to 1:oo pm in the Reading Room — provides a space for everyone to catch up as well as have some cookies and tea. “I think it’s great that they are giving students this opportunity,” said Sarah, a Get Crafty organizer who had also heard about NMFF. “If they come for tea and cookies and meet people, that would be cool.”
