Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Paying for meals...and cooking them

[Stuart Staniford-Chen (stanifor]

David Mandel writes:

> Invite me for dinner sometime and maybe I'll be amazed. 

That's right!  We owe you guys now after you had us over.

>        A few questions: do you require exact change? When you haven't made it
> to the bank that day and need to borrow from a neighbor, doesn't that add 
> hassles and complications to your life? 

Well, nobody is standing there to count out my money and yell at me if 
it's wrong, so if I throw in $2 instead of $1.70 then it's ok.  Some 
people pay by check.  I would say the change issue is a nuisance, but a 
pretty minor one.

> And how do cooks calculate the cost of a meal? 

cost = total cost of meal / number of people + $0.25

Oh, and kids pay 0.75 flat rate.

> Surely you have a lot of staples already in your pantry. 

Spices and stuff are free - they just come out of the community budget.  
Everything else you pay cash. 

> Also what about the cost of electricity, gas, cleaning materials, water? 
> Replacing the fridge someday?

That's where the $0.25 comes in.

>        Finally, I assume N St. has some pretty low-income people, as we do. 
> Aren't they deterred from going to the more expensive meals? That would feel 
> creepy if it happened here.

I don't actually know whether anyone feels that way or not (since I'm a 
cheap cook).  But if there are people who do, then there's something to be 
said for having that fact impinge on the people cooking expensive meals 
rather than getting masked by an averaging procedure.

>         If common dining at least a couple times a week is such a central 
> feature of the cohousing concept, then shouldn't we at least exert major peer 
> pressure to have all participate in the work (eating any given meal is still 
> optional, of course)? I know that with us the issue never arose (not yet, 
> anyway). If you live here, you're expected to be on a cooking team, and each 
> cooking team is expected to do its thing once a month. Perhaps making the 
> schedule less onerous than it seems to be elsewhere keeps anyone from feeling 
> too oppressed by it.

Since our system works well for us, why should we change it based on 
theoretical worries about something that might or might not happen in ten 
or twenty years?  And isn't "major peer pressure" a lot more likely to 
fragment our community than strengthen it?  Yours works for you; ours 
works for us; if it's not broken, don't fix it.

Stuart.