Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: bulk buying

[Pare Gerou (paregerou]

Hi Melinda,

Buying in bulk seems to me part of a larger investment in the design of
your meals program-- of treating your meals program more like operating a
small cooperative restaurant rather than having a head chef plan and shop
and sous chefs helping to cook.  If you stick to that later more
traditional US cohousing meals program model, then buying in bulk just
leaves lots of goods in your pantry that might rot and no one wants to
clean out.  We are trying a different take on cooking and eating together
by setting up social design, legal design, and architectural design
to incentivize a more "cooperative restaurant" approach to meals. That
involves "bulk" purchases from local farmers, butchers, and fisherman,
among many other things.  For us, the Mediterranean lifestyle is all about
good, local, fresh food prepared together, so we design- our common house,
our circle structure, our HOA fees, our "work" program, and our legal
structure, all to incentive meals program as our main activity and in a
more collective way.

We are putting a small restaurant walk-in freezer near our kitchen, we are
designing a large pantry, and we are planning for a robust meals circle.
The meals circle will do the meal planning and shopping with local farmers,
butchers, and fisherman.  We chose a restaurant kitchen architect to plan
our kitchen.  We will cook from our pantry and freezer.  We have a legal
structure allowing us to write off the cost of food purchases and thus our
meals, providing an added incentive to attend.  This is unfortunately
something you cannot do in the US, but I have never explored US grants or
creative HOA dues design.  We also incentivize more investment of time in
the meals program by reducing your HOA fees if you give extra additional
time to that particular program.

Our dream is that a circle will plan, then a few will go 20 minutes down
the road to the seaside village, buy us a whole bunch of fresh fish (bulk?)
with our food fund for that day, and the daily cooks are going to grill
them outside on our grills, with whatever fresh vegetables and herbs and
potatoes we have, and then we are all going to enjoy the meal outside.  I
have no idea if it will work, but I see the traditional approach in the US
not working for some communities when the community ages and the burden for
the head cook become unmanageable, and this approach breaks it down into
smaller work parts and gets us supporting local farmers.  Wish us luck...
We have to build the village first :)

Pare Gerou
Greek Village Cohousing

On Mon, Aug 7, 2023 at 7:08 AM Melinda Darer <melinda.darer [at] gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Village Hill Co-housing is looking into bulk buying. I would appreciate
> hearing from others how you manage that, and what items you have chosen
> (and why) especially how you started.
>
> Appreciate your thoughts,
> Melinda
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