Weary of dining halls, students start their own co-ops

Most meals on Temple University's main campus are served by a huge, multinational food-services company, Sodexo.

But in a sunny room tucked away in one academic building, students at the Rad Dish Cafe are cooking up something different: salads made with produce from the Lancaster Farm Fresh Cooperative and local-food distributor Common Market, sandwiches on bread baked at Philadelphia's Wild Flour Bakery, coffee from local fair-trade roaster Greenstreet, and juices from Neuron Nectars, a Temple graduate's company.

This modest cafe represents a big idea. Members say it's the only student-run food cooperative in the city.

Such organizations - serving local, organic, and typically vegetarian fare made by and for students - have been springing up at colleges around the country.

It's not a new concept: The Maryland Food Collective, a worker-owned cooperative on the University of Maryland campus, has been around since 1975. But the movement has been attracting renewed interest, particularly since the nationwide launch in 2010 of a nonprofit, CoFED, that helps students around the country get food cooperatives up and running.

That was how students at the University of Delaware in Newark got the idea to turn their regular potluck dinner into the Down to Earth Food Coop, a nonprofit whose members do work trade with local farms to earn produce for twice-weekly vegetarian dinners, as well as monthly community dinners that are open to all.

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