CoFed Builds a Web of Student Food Co-ops

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from Civil Eats:




CoFed Builds a Web of Student Food Co-ops

March 2nd, 2011
By Twilight Greenaway


Say you’re a college student ready to eschew the standard pizza-burrito-pretzels-beer diet and start eating more whole, sustainably produced foods. Say you want to take it a step further and work to make healthy and ethical food widely available on your campus–without the gourmet grocery store prices. Well, you might consider starting a co-op.

“There are so many students learning the theory behind food systems who are itching to put it into practice, and co-ops are the way to do it,” says Enosh Baker, a recent UC Davis ecology graduate and a regional organizer with the Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive (CoFed). Baker and his cohort of mainly unpaid organizers see campus co-ops as the answer for a few convincing reasons.By cutting out the middleman, using volunteer or member labor, and hooking into university resources such as subsidized rent and student entrepreneurial funds, co-ops can radically reduce overhead and offer sustainable foods at prices even students won’t scoff at. Co-ops also serve as working classrooms and events spaces, and, as the CoFed team sees it, introduce concepts of food sovereignty and food access to an audience whose adult lives are still taking shape.

CoFed started after a group of students at the University of California, Berkeley successfully organized to channel funds from a UC fee referendum into the creation of the Berkeley Student Food Collective, a new store at the edge of campus. The two groups are no longer affiliated, but the process of forming the collective spurred CoFed founder Yoni Landau to start working toward a national support network and resource-sharing model for students looking to start co-ops on campuses all around the country. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://civileats.com/2011/03/02/cofed-builds-a-web-of-student-food-co-ops/