To Young People, Justice is a Key Ingredient in Good Food

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from OnTheCommons.org:



To Young People, Justice is a Key Ingredient in Good Food
Cooperative restaurants sprout on many campuses

By Yoni Landau


Young food movement activists may be idealistic but we are not flower children. We are process and results-oriented; we may criticize, but also we learn from successful business models. We’re comfortable with money, know how to network and are handy with a spreadsheet.

Three years ago, I was organizing protests at UC Berkeley. Now I’m at my laptop, speaking with Camilla Bustamante, a Northern New Mexico College Dean. She’s enthusiastically telling me about a student-run, local foods cafe that has just opened at her campus.

In January 2010, Jeff Ethan Genauer, a student at Northern New Mexico College, learned about cooperative restaurants at a Training the Trainers retreat hosted by CoFED (The Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive). For 10 days, he and a group of 5 other organizers huddled together around a wood stove and wifi router in a farmhouse in Sebastopol, California and learned the basics of how to open a cooperative food business on college campuses. Since then, he’s been hard at work doing financial planning and market research and now, with the help of his campus, he’s successfully opened a student-run cafe. And he even taped the only-slightly-awkward ribbon-cutting.

La Tiendita (“The little store”) sells healthy, local breakfast and lunch for many and provides meaningful employment to 5 students. It is currently run “collaboratively”, according to Bustamante, but there is interest in transitioning it to more of a formal student cooperative, though it’s unclear whether students, or workers, or both, would be the cooperative’s members. The produce for the Tiendita is either grown onsite at the Sostenga farm or purchased from local farmers. This is an unusual project for a college that is rural, known mainly for its athletics and is not filled with affluent foodie types. ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://onthecommons.org/young-people-justice-key-ingredient-good-food

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