The New Food Revolution in Colleges

The sus­tain­able food move­ment has come to col­lege cam­puses in earnest, and one shin­ing exam­ple is the Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive (CoFed). CoFed is a train­ing pro­gram and research insti­tute that enables stu­dents to cre­ate eth­i­cally sourced, community-run cafés and mar­kets on col­lege cam­puses. The orga­ni­za­tion trains, sup­ports and empow­ers future food move­ment lead­ers and inspires a new aware­ness in all uni­ver­sity eaters.

CoFed is the brain­child of co-founder and direc­tor Yoni Landau who, prior to the found­ing of CoFed, had a suc­cess­ful back­ground in camp coun­sel­ing. “After col­lege I had the expe­ri­ence of being able to pre­vent a fast-food chain from com­ing to the UC Berkeley cam­pus,” Yoni told Organic Connections. “Instead, we put in an alter­na­tive model that is a stu­dent run, demo­c­ra­t­i­cally con­trolled, local food organic café and mar­ket. We helped stop the fast-food chain and raised about $140,000 for this alter­na­tive; so after that suc­cess I fig­ured I would put my camp coun­sel­ing back­ground to use and cre­ate a boot camp where stu­dent teams could con­geal around this vision.”

CoFed is already achiev­ing suc­cess, hav­ing now trained about 100 stu­dents through their boot camp retreats. These stu­dents will then be cat­a­lysts in their own schools. “We launched our first boot camp last year and trained six teams from across the West Coast,” Yoni said. “Two of those six, within a year, have already secured sig­nif­i­cant fund­ing and have been given the go-ahead to move into spaces on their campuses.”

One recent CoFed boot camp grad­u­ate is UCLA stu­dent Shadanay Urbani, who, like a grow­ing num­ber of oth­ers, has enthu­si­as­ti­cally taken to the program.

“I had been involved with food on my cam­pus because I started, with a few of my friends, the Slow Food Club at UCLA,” Shadanay told Organic Connections. “I was really excited when I met the south­ern regional direc­tor for CoFed and he told me about the coop­er­a­tive model as a way to engage stu­dents that we weren’t already reach­ing out to, and cre­at­ing a struc­ture where stu­dents were actu­ally empow­ered to make changes in their food sys­tem and had own­er­ship over the food that they had access to. After meet­ing the regional direc­tor, I told my friends about the idea of set­ting up a student-run food coop­er­a­tive for UCLA, and peo­ple got excited. We brought up a team to the last sum­mer retreat, and it just went from there.

The CoFed café model is one in which stu­dents work, learn, and con­nect to a bet­ter food sys­tem. “The model looks like an edi­ble class­room of sorts,” Yoni said. “It has murals on the walls describ­ing the local food sys­tem, and has a lot of infor­ma­tion about what’s actu­ally humane, what’s eco­log­i­cally sound, and what’s fair. Some of the mod­els run on vol­un­teer labor from stu­dents, and oth­ers have a strong enough busi­ness model that they’re pay­ing the stu­dents. But the crux of it is that stu­dents have con­trol and own­er­ship over the busi­ness, get to make man­age­ment deci­sions and learn how to actu­ally oper­ate this kind of sus­tain­able food edu­ca­tion cen­ter and business.”

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“Our café project started only this June,” Shadanay con­tin­ued. “Since then it’s been really excit­ing, and we’ve made a lot of progress just in the last month. We have a core team, we are fin­ish­ing up our mar­ket research tem­plates to see what exactly the food-related needs are at UCLA, and we are start­ing to think about a pilot bulk-buying foods pro­gram for when we get back in fall and begin our outreach.

“We’re tak­ing it one step at a time. A project like this can be over­whelm­ing, because we’re just col­lege stu­dents and it’s like try­ing to start your own busi­ness. But we are really excited and pas­sion­ate and have got a diverse team going, and CoFed is amaz­ing for pro­vid­ing the resources, con­sult­ing and sup­port that they do.”

Yoni has found that many stu­dents have no real clue as to how the indus­trial agri­cul­ture food sys­tem works, and why it must be changed. “There’s a lot of edu­ca­tion that needs to be done,” he explained. “People don’t gen­er­ally under­stand how deeply entrenched we are in the indus­trial food sys­tem. Fortunately we do have a chance to con­nect them more directly with a less indus­tri­al­ized, more down-to-earth model through this.

“And we’re lucky because food is a very inti­mate, per­sonal thing; you put food in your body three times a day. So when you start talk­ing to peo­ple about food as a polit­i­cal cul­tural issue, it trans­fers into a lot of other behav­iors. People really iden­tify with the food they eat. It con­nects you with your com­mu­nity; it con­nects you with your con­sump­tion gen­er­ally. So if you can get peo­ple under­stand­ing that three times a day they can have the choice to be a kind of con­sumer that is unsus­tain­able and cre­ates a less socially just world, or three times a day they can par­tic­i­pate in cre­at­ing the world they want to see, that’s a really pow­er­ful edu­ca­tional model.”

As Yoni will tell you, this is only the beginning—but it is a great begin­ning. “We’re def­i­nitely tak­ing off,” said Yoni. “We had early suc­cesses, and then we went national, and now we’re plan­ning out how we’re going to be a sus­tain­able orga­ni­za­tion for the next five years. We are get­ting a lot of sup­port, and there’s a lot of work to be done.”

“I think the work we’re doing with CoFed is the most impor­tant work there is in trans­form­ing the food sys­tem,” Shadanay con­cluded. “Change starts with students—young peo­ple and their visions. I think one of the great things about CoFed is that they’re empow­er­ing stu­dents to take those visions and trans­late them into not only viable busi­nesses on their cam­puses but also strong com­mu­ni­ties in their areas. I think that is how all move­ments start.”

For more infor­ma­tion and news on CoFed, visit www.cofed.org.