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Keeping it real: Food co-op provides real food on campus

Molly Taylor |

Last Updated:4/7/09 Section: News
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Excluded from campus: RealFood Williamsburg Community Cooperative meets off-campus because it has not been recognized as a student organization
Excluded from campus: RealFood Williamsburg Community Cooperative meets off-campus because it has not been recognized as a student organization
Just after 2 pm on Saturday, March 28, a group of William and Mary undergrads, graduate students, and Williamsburg community members gathered around a plate of deviled local, free-range chicken eggs. Although this range of people together is uncommon, all members were united by a shared interest: the RealFood Williamsburg Community Cooperative. RealFood is an up-and-coming local organization bringing the local food movement into your neighborhood and right to your kitchen table, an idea that has been four years in the making.

According to legend, Williamsburg's co-op initiative began in 2005, when William and Mary student Abigail Adams ('05) founded a food co-op based on natural and organic dry goods -pastas, chips, juices, and canned food. The co-op faded upon her graduation, but the idea behind it remained, and activists reunited in the Spring of 2007 during adjunct professor Charlie Maloney's Sustainability and Agriculture course as part of a final project that was meant to be "something real." When Lea Brumfield ('08), Josh Wayland ('08), and Jimmy McDonough ('07) got together, they took this suggestion literally, and the RealFood Williamsburg Food Cooperative was born.
With a focus on local, organic, and small-farm food, RealFood's three-fold goal is to reconnect members with what they eat through buying local and naturally-grown food, to provide sustainable agriculture education, and to provide opportunities for participation in the production and preparation of food. From the time of its inception to the meeting on March 28, RealFood has continued to blossom. Its Spring 2009 listserv reaches 350 members, and is currently growing by about 2-3 members per week.

For a semesterly membership fee of $10, or $7 plus 2.5 hours of volunteer work for the co-op, members can purchase wholesale-priced local produce, fruit "butters" and cider, and local and grass-fed meat from Full Quiver Farm in Suffolk. RealFood's ability to provide most of its produce is made possible through its partnership with Dave and Dee Scherr, mushroom growers in Sedley and operators of their own food delivery business. The co-op also offers educational workshops and literature on sustainable food, teaching members to can, preserve, and grow their own food.
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