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.

“Students couldn’t find vegan or vegetarian or organic food that fit their values [at the dining hall], so they started meeting together to share meals,” said Erica Meier, who graduated in May and remains on the co-op’s board. Three years later, about 90 members – mostly, but not all, students – have joined the co-op. In return for the meals, they pay $35 to $55 and work 15 hours per semester, farming, cooking, and cleaning.

Dinners are held in members’ homes or at the Newark Bike Project, a nearby nonprofit. They’d like to find a permanent location. At least for now, though, it won’t be on campus.

“The [university’s] contract with Aramark is pretty strict,” Meier said. “It doesn’t allow any food not provided by Aramark to be in any university spaces.”

At Temple, it’s a markedly different story: The Rad Dish Cafe was born out of classroom projects and launched with $30,000 in seed funding from the university.

Kathleen Grady, Temple’s director of sustainability and the co-op’s adviser, said students in an environmental studies class tasked with thinking up ways to green the campus first came up with the idea of a sustainable cafe – “one that they could control, so they knew that greenwashing [labeling foods green that aren’t] wasn’t happening.”

Through independent studies, they developed guiding documents and a business plan, and pitched it to administrators. The university committed to providing start-up capital and renovating the space.

The cafe in Ritter Hall, near 13th Street and Montgomery Avenue, opened in January for the spring semester, closed for the summer, and reopened in September for the fall term. It’s open to students (and the public with photo ID) weekdays from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., until classes end Dec. 7. Members who pay $25 or put in 15 hours of “sweat equity” get a 10 percent discount and voting rights in co-op decisions.

The fall menu includes coconut-curry soup, hummus grilled cheese, a beet-and-lentil burger, chia-seed pudding, and tempeh-cabbage salad.

For students like Claire Pope, a social-work major and co-head of human resources, the cafe represents a quality-of-life improvement.

“I was on a meal plan, and it was very hard for me to eat as a vegetarian,” she said. “When I learned there was a place on campus that was going to offer good vegetarian food at a reasonable price, I was really excited.”

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