Fed-up college kids take food buying into their own hands

“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.

Around a year later, a team of stu­dent lead­ers are cre­at­ing orga­niz­ing hubs in six key areas — Northern California (Baker’s juris­dic­tion), Southern California, New Mexico, Massachusetts, Philadelphia, and Maryland. Each leader is work­ing with stu­dents from 10-20 schools.

When stu­dents con­tact CoFed orga­niz­ers about orga­niz­ing a co-op on their cam­pus, they’re given a con­crete list of tasks to under­take. “We tell peo­ple the first step is to orga­nize a core team of stu­dents. From there we pro­vide them with a lot of resources,” says Baker. CoFed also gath­ers stu­dents together for work­shops and strategy-sharing. In June they’re plan­ning to host six simul­ta­ne­ous retreats, inten­sive expe­ri­ences that will arm dozens of stu­dents with the abil­ity to write a busi­ness plan, do book­keep­ing, orga­nize other stu­dents, and build a power map of their own campus.

Why exactly is the idea of the coop­er­a­tive busi­ness, a con­cep­tual cen­ter­piece of an ear­lier time, mak­ing such a come­back? Baker believes the stakes have been upped. “When the co-ops in the early ’70s were get­ting started,” he says, “There was some knowl­edge about the early impacts of the green rev­o­lu­tion, but [indus­trial food] was still rel­a­tively young. Our gen­er­a­tion has born wit­ness to what’s hap­pened since, and the sit­u­a­tion is much more dire.”

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle on Grist.org.