Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Bringing your own dishes to meals?

[Elizabeth Magill (pastorlizm]

We have experimented with "bring your own dishes" and "bring your own
dinner". Both work.

We've never talked about making either of those ideas the common
method, rather than the rare answer.

For our memorial and labor day BBQs we use bring your own dishes, and
the challenge is that guests often haven't brought *theirs* and even
some of us *forget*. It makes me unhappy, but often as much as a
quarter of the crowd is using paper. Since the sanitizer still had to
be heated for the other dishes I'm sad we've used the paper.

For meals when there is a power outage, or just a small clean-up crew
for some reason, the people who forget their own dishes generally use
the common house dishes and then bring them home to clean. The
disadvantage to *that* is sometimes we have hardly any dishes left in
the common house. (Honestly I exaggerate--but we do have shortages
because of the stuff in folks homes.)

Liz
www.mosaic-commons.org
in Berlin, MA.


On Sun, Jun 11, 2017 at 3:36 PM, R Philip Dowds <rpdowds [at] comcast.net> 
wrote:
>
> At Cornerstone, we do not, but I know of another Massachusetts community that 
> does.  My experience is that clean-up is actually the most arduous part of 
> the community meal, and dispersing the clean-up process definitely lightens 
> the load without adding much grief to private dishwashing machines.
>
> On the other hand … in everything from shared ski houses to backpacking 
> camps, I’ve been party to trade-off workshare systems where for most meals, 
> one is the honored guest enjoying good service and uninterrupted conversation 
> with friends — all of which gets put paid during the relatively few meals 
> where one is the on-duty forager, chef and bottle-washer.  I sort of like 
> this system, and think it defines a communal reciprocity and inter-dependence 
> better than the somewhat undignified task of toting dirty dishes back and 
> forth across campus.
>
> So take your pick.
>
> Thanks,
> Philip Dowds
> Cornerstone Village Cohousing
> Cambridge, MA
>
>> On Jun 11, 2017, at 3:13 PM, Sharon Villines <sharon [at] 
>> sharonvillines.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Our sanitizer has been down for months and we are planning ot replace it 
>> with 2 residential dishwashers. We have one now but it is too small to 
>> handle all the serving dishes and meal dishes.
>>
>> So we have been having people bring their own dishes for many if not most 
>> meals.
>>
>> Now the queston is why don’t we keep doing that? The cleaners still have a 
>> lot of work to do and some people like brining their won stuff.
>>
>> How many communities doe this? Does yours?
>>
>> Sharon
>> ----
>> Sharon Villines
>> Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
>> http://www.takomavillage.org
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
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-- 
-Liz
(The Rev.) Elizabeth M. Magill
Minister to the Affiliates, Ecclesia Ministries
www.ecclesiaministriesmission.org
www.mosaic-commons.org
508-450-0431