Re: Contribute to cooking common meals | <– Date –> <– Thread –> |
From: Eris Weaver (eriswsonic.net) | |
Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2006 10:33:15 -0800 (PST) |
Tree said: > Make a policy ASAP that everyone will contribute to cooking > common meals. To which Chris ScottHanson replied: > In my opinion this is not necessary...<snip> > My suggestion is that meals be considered voluntary....<snip> > If you have grass and it needs to be mown, you don't want > everyone to > participate in mowing the grass. Same for boiler maintenance, or > gutter repair. Why should meals be any different? Eris talking now: I have to respectfully disagree with Chris. Meals are a big component of the glue that holds our community together. Every one of our members cooks dinner once a month. That means we have meals FOUR times a week. This was one of the things that we consensed upon WAY in the beginning, before we even had land. We have HIGH attendance at meals, 40-50 people (in a community of 30 households). Our meals are social, served family-style, and an opportunity to hang out, see what's up with each other, etc. Many folks here would mention our common meals as one of the best things about living in community. Our community has a reputation for being particularly close-knit, and part of what contributes to this is that we have always engineered in these kinds of social opportunities. While doing maintenance and landscaping work together can indeed be community building, it's true it doesn't matter if everyone takes a turn mowing the lawn. If cooking was voluntary, and only the people who loved to cook did it, we'd have WAY fewer meals and WAY fewer opportunities to connect and bond with each other in this way. (Earlier this year, Miss Manners did a column in which she proffered HER definition of a family. "A family, by Miss Manners's standards, is a group of people that takes nightly and weekend meals together. It is then and there, asking one another to pass the beans, arbitrating who gets the drumstick and pretending to be interested in each one's adventures of the day, that families are forged." By this definition, FrogSong is more of a family than the one I grew up in! http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/25/AR200602 2500109.html) ******************************************* Eris Weaver Facilitation & Group Process Consultant phone/fax 707-795-2157 erisw [at] sonic.net
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