Food Co-op For Thought

If you pass by the SU Atrium on a Tuesday, you’ll find a colourful stall with a variety of foods, a pile of books, and cheerful people ready to serve you and just have a nice chat. That’s what the Warwick Uni Food Co-op is all about: good food and a good spirit! So who are we?

It all started with a group of students from the People & Planet Society wanting to promote environmentally-friendly consumption and create an alternative space where people can buy food and engage in discussions. Let’s face it: the current food system is in a bad state, and it’s time to change it. According to a recent study, up to half of the world’s food is left to waste, while 870 million people suffer from hunger.

Reasons for this contradiction are the unsustainable, consumerist culture of our societies, economic and social inequalities, and unfair global market mechanisms. The list of problems goes on. If we just focus on the environment, we are faced with problems ranging from deforestation to land and water pollution; and all this because of the ways the food is produced, processed, traded, and eaten.

The question is: what can we, as individuals, do to help change the food system in which we are caught? Well, the first step is to avoid doing all our shopping in supermarkets. In his thought-provoking book Stuffed and Starved, Raj Patel highlights the characteristics of supermarkets: “the narrow abundance of the aisles, the apparently low prices at the checkout and the almost constant availability of foods… We are dissuaded from asking hard questions, not only about how our individual tastes and preferences are manipulated, but about how our choices at the checkout take away the choices of those who grow our food.”

Because the main supermarkets control much of the food chain, they have the power to disempower both producers and consumers, and they use it constantly. So, as consumers, we have to make better choices about the food that we eat. And that’s where the co-op comes into play!
A co-operative is, by definition, owned and run by its own members, all of whom thus have a say in the decision-making process. In the case of the Warwick Uni Food Co-op, we decide collectively who our suppliers are, how the food is produced and what we are going to sell.

Our main objective is to provide cheap, healthy, organic and (mainly) local food. And, as a non-profit, eco-minded group, we’ve achieved this. We sell fruit and vegetable boxes that are delivered from the Earlsdon-based organic shop Down to Earth. If you want to order a veg box, you can ask for only local/seasonal fruits and vegetables.

We also have a wide selection of dried goods: couscous, mixed nuts, lentils, pasta, raisins, soya milk… One kilo of brown rice costs only £1.20, one can of mixed beans is only 67p – amazing, huh? Last week, a student came to the stall and bought more than a kilo of mixed seeds. His friend asked, bewildered: “Why are you buying this stuff?” The other replied “It’s healthy, man!” As if it wasn’t obvious enough…

Our project also goes beyond simply selling good food. We also want to promote debates and knowledge-sharing. We’ve started a people’s library, where you can lend and/or borrow books that deal with a whole range of issues, from food politics to activism, from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil to Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent. We also created a blog (http://warwickfoodcoop.wordpress.com/) to stimulate discussions on contentious food-related issues.

Is organic agriculture a viable, ‘ethical’ alternative to modern industrial food production? Should we still buy quinoa if poor people in Bolivia and Peru can’t afford it anymore? If you want to express your opinion or put forward other issues, you can write comments or email us at warwickunifoodcoop@gmail.com and we’ll post your thoughts. And if you’d like to experiment new recipes – perhaps using the weird ingredients you bought at the food co-op stall – you can find some on the blog: root vegetable stew, Mexican hot chocolate cupcakes, vegan tomato soup, and many more to come!

We believe that we can change things if we get together and start acting. The voice in our head keeps whispering, “Just Do It!”

Do what you think is best, for you, for others and for our planet. So, whether you want to get
involved and volunteer in an exciting project or whether you just want to buy some cheap and ethically-sourced food, the Warwick Uni Food Co-op is there for you! We have a stall every Tuesday, from 12 to 5pm, in the Atrium by the stairs. Come along to check out our products and meet interesting, cheery people. If you want to get involved in the decision-making, have the cheapest prices possible, volunteer, and receive a weekly newsletter, you can become a member – it costs only £5, and we’ll offer you a nice, personalised membership card. And please bring your own bags and containers, it will help save the environment!