Berkeley Students Fight for Healthy Campus Food

University campuses have historically been a powerful conduit for students fighting for their rights, from fighting racial discrimination in schools to protesting during wartime. One issue students are now rallying around is food. At UC Berkeley, a school known for its history of student radicalism, the Berkeley Student Food Collective (BSFC), is fighting for the right to healthy, sustainable food options on campus.

In 2008, UC Berkeley proposed to bring Panda Express, a fast food chain restaurant, to the campus only to be met by a handful of student advocates who swiftly launched an “Anti-Panda” campaign and the beginnings of a movement. There were protests in front of current Panda Express locations and formal demands that if the chain were to open on campus, that it provide strictly “real food,” determined by the Real Food Challenge guidelines as being “local, fair, humane, and ecologically sound.” The Real Food Challenge is a national network of student food activists using the power of youth to shift university budgets away from supporting industrial farms and junk food towards sustainable alternatives.

Youth hold the power to catalyze change in the food system on the international, domestic, regional, and local levels.

As the “Anti-Panda” campaign made calls for action in classrooms, record numbers of students began showing up to meetings of the UC Store Operations Board, the campus committee that handles campus food contracts. These students presented well-researched arguments that the food sold from the chain is unhealthy and unsustainable, that the money generated would not support the local community; and it would prohibit a more student-led, sustainable food outlet from serving the student community.

The students won the fight and Panda Express was denied the contract to open on campus. The Berkeley Student Food Collective has grown to 120 active members and has created an alternative to Panda Express by opening Berkeley’s first cooperative grocery store in a narrow slice of building across from the Cal campus. The storefront is an outlet for “real food” as well as educational, hands-on classes about nutrition, food systems, and cooking. BSFC is advancing the Real Food Challenge goal of changing university systems to provide to sustainable, healthy options for their students.

“In the future, we hope to have a bigger storefront located on campus so that we can grow and have an even bigger presence on campus,” says Ilana Nevins, the fundraising coordinator for the BSFC, in reference to securing a spot in the UC Berkeley plans for remodeling a section of the campus in the next few years.

Down the road, we may look back at these student activists as we do the civil rights or anti-war student movements. Youth hold the power to catalyze change in the food system on the international, domestic, regional, and local levels. Indeed, student organizations like BFSC are at the forefront a nationwide movement to create equal access to nutritious, sustainable and local for communities for generations to come.

The Berkeley Student Food Collective will lead a Food Justice Tour of the UC Berkeley campus on Friday, November 4th from 2-6pm to discuss how past student mobilizations inform current struggles. The tour will make stops at the BSFC store and Student Organic Gardens. Participants will learn how students are working to build a sustainable and student-owned campus food system.

See: “Roots of Radicalism: Students fighting for (food) justice” Nov. 4, 2011.