The OSAP diet forces students to give up Starbucks tea

The OSAP diet forces students to give up Starbucks tea

As part of a protest against the province’s student aid program, five Ontario undergraduate students are entering the annals of martyrdom by budgeting just $7.50 a day for food—apparently this is what the Ontario Student Assistance Plan (OSAP) allows them. The students will be stringently frugal for three weeks in the name of the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance’s Food for Thought campaign, intended to highlight the fact that OSAP doesn’t provide enough income for students. “OSAP assumes students should live below the poverty line, and that’s not good,” one student told the Star.

The soon-to-be-starving students are pledging to give up their Starbucks and Subway, with one student—gasp—deciding to crack open a cookbook: “I guess I’ll start trying out recipes.” Despite such preparations, and since success on the budgeting front would spell disaster for the campaign, we’re left wondering if it makes sense for students with an agenda to participate in such an undertaking.

$7.50 a day is all you get on the student OSAP diet [Toronto Star]