Student Association started a Saturday shuttle to the Wegmans in Dewitt, N.Y., last weekend. Those buses were filled to capacity all afternoon. For students who need specialty ingredients and a suburban wonderland of groceries, the bus is a boon for student life, but we can do more to improve eating at Syracuse University.

To rehash the platform for the alternative food movement here would be redundant — Eric Schlosser gave a great overview in his University Lecture last week. Though I find his and Michael Pollen’s arguments against the food status quo persuasive, let’s assume for the moment that the key factors in grocery shopping for SU students are convenience, price and a naïve idea of healthiness. Even with this minimal idea of what an ideal food system on campus would look like, there is space for innovation on campus, and a student-run co-op could be wonderfully interesting.

People’s Place works well on campus as a student-run, nonprofit coffee shop. The model could be expanded to a full-blown food cooperative, with the potential to completely revitalize our local food system. Various models for cooperative enterprise exist, and any one of them could work well on campus. SU could provide space in the Schine Student Center or elsewhere, and it could subsidize some initial costs through grants for greening the campus. Food Works never had affordable or particularly real food in stock — but a cooperatively run store, with the potential for volunteer labor and bulk purchases of goods, could keep prices low and quality high.

Students complaining they lack access to groceries need to rethink the standards of convenience — living on the fringe of a city is different from the suburban door-to-door car culture a lot of us grew up with. Living off campus without a car makes complete sense, but students just need to adjust to city life.

Here’s a plan for eating without a car while making no changes to the food ecosystem on campus. Tops Friendly Markets, formerly known as P&C, sits less than a mile away from South Campus and about a mile from the Euclid neighborhood. If students want cheaper food than what the South Campus grocery store has to offer, it’s more than close enough to reach on a bicycle or the South Campus bus route that extends to the store a few times each day.

If students need food fancier than Tops can offer, the Syracuse Real Food Coop is just as close — 40 minutes of walking after class and stocking up on staples at Tops and fancy items at the local co-op can adequately provision a kitchen for a few days. It only takes 15 minutes on a bike to get there. The cost comes out cheaper or about the same as Wegmans’ with the right combination. Though the SA Wegmans shuttle is nice, it’s far from necessary, even given the current food situation.

A change to the campus food situation would be better, though — making access to food at SU as easy as grocery shopping in an old-style, small town. A co-op is a drastic proposal, but there is a burgeoning movement, led by CoFed in San Francisco, to establish student food cooperatives all across the nation. The University of Maryland has had an extremely successful co-op in its student union since the ’70s.

The campus co-op would satisfy the simple conditions of convenience, price and healthiness, and it could take steps toward the kind of food system envisioned by the alternative food movement. Moreover, it could provide a laboratory for expanding small-scale cooperatives into some of Syracuse’s legitimate food deserts, fitting in nicely with Scholarship in Action. A bus to Wegmans is nice. But by dreaming a little bit bigger, we can do more to eat better in Syracuse.

Scott Collison is a senior philosophy and physics major. His column appears every Wednesday, and he can be reached at smcollis@syr.edu.