Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: vegetarian & vegan, common meals

[Stuart Staniford-Chen (stanifor]

Matthew Woodbury writes:

>         Does anyone out there deal with a cohousing group that is part
> vegan or even just vegetarian? How does this work with shared meals.  My
> wife and our 2 year old and I want very much to go into cohousing NOW and
> also want to maintain our high-test fuel consumption. 

At N Street we have roughly a third of the adults who are vegetarian or almost 
so (will occasionally eat meat to avoid social embarrassment but don't choose 
it at home).  We have two vegans.  For a long time there has been a policy that 
there has to be a vegetarian option at dinner.  There may or may not be an 
option with meat.

For the most part this has worked fairly well - typically meat-eating cooks 
make two pans - one with whatever they wanted to make, and one with tofu in 
instead.  Vegetarian cooks often don't offer a meat option (though some do).
Recently, we had a debate because a couple of folks wanted to be able to have 
an occasional all-meat meal.  The compromise that was agreed on was that they 
could do this (for a trial period), but they had to state on the calendar at 
the beginning of the month that it was a no-veggie meal.  This restriction 
seems to be a harsh one, however, as nobody has tried to exercise this new 
freedom yet.

Our vegans get a much poorer deal.  They have no regulatory protection (so to 
speak), and depend on the good-will of the cooks to be able to eat community 
meal.  Often folks try to put the cheese on the side or such like to accomodate 
them, but there is no doubt that they are not able to eat all the meals.  There 
are also a variety of folks with food allergies and extreme dislikes of one 
sort and another.  We have an information sheet up in the dining room where 
these are detailed - but what notice cooks take of it is entirely up to them.

Stuart.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Stuart Staniford-Chen
stanifor [at] cs.ucdavis.edu
N Street Cohousing, Davis, CA
---------------------------------------------------------------------