Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Organic Food and cohousing

[John Beutler (jbeutler]

I have a philosophical point I want to make about the drift of the 
discussion, and that is, I think we want to be careful to not make the 
cohousing movement an incubator for every [nutritional] fad that comes down 
the pike.  I have no particular bone to pick with organic veggies, or trans 
fats or seafood contamination, but I think institutionalizing such points 
of view will marginalize the cohoousing movement.

At Liberty Village, we try to respect vegetarians by providing a reasonable 
alternative at community meals.  With a larger community, this is not so 
hard to do.  We recently had a wonderful person move in who has difficulty 
with both gluten and dairy - this is going to be much more difficult to 
deal with in group cooking.  But these are actual demonstrable needs, as 
opposed to opinions of what people ought to eat.  I say that if you are the 
cook, show us how wholesome and tasty your particular type of food is, and 
we'll all happily eat it, but don't ask someone else who's cooking to hew 
to your perspective of how it should be done, whether that's organic or low 
trans or whatever.  And label the food so people know what you've made.

My point extends to other areas of community life.  We don't want to be 
pigeonholed as lefties, though many of us are.  We don't want to be viewed 
as retirement communities unless that's the goal.  The appearance of 
normalcy is important for cohousing to grow and thrive.

Cheers

JAB





At 12:24 PM 6/4/2005 -0700, Deborah Mensch wrote:
> At communities where there is not an agreement from the get-go to
> purchase organic when possible, have there been any evolutionary
> changes toward organic? If so, how have these occurred?
>
> I could ask the same question about other current changes in
> nutritional awareness, such as avoiding trans fats or avoiding seafood
> that is commonly contaminated or environmentally damaging.
>
> Thanks,
> Deborah Mensch
> Pleasant Hill Cohousing
>
> On 6/4/05, Mary Ruthsdotter <maryru [at] sonic.net> wrote:
> > Two Acre Wood makes a point of buying organic whenever possible.  The
> > incremental cost increase seems small in life's long run.
> >
> > Mary Ruthsdotter
> > 660 Robinson Road
> > Sebastopol, CA  95472
> > (707) 824-6844
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Chris ScottHanson [mailto:chris [at] cohousingresources.com]
> > Sent: Saturday, June 04, 2005 7:45 AM
> > To: Cohousing-l
> > Subject: [C-L]_ Organic Food and cohousing
> >
> > Would I be correct in assuming that virtually ALL cohousers support,
> > and even possibly promote the organic food movement?  That some of us
> > can't afford to always eat organic, but that most if not all of us
> > try to do so?
> >
> > Just wondering, because I thought the recent Store Wars movie was a
> > great educational and fun piece promoting the use off organic foods.
> >
> > What are your thoughts, cohousers?  Oh!  And please let me knot if
> > you think this is off topic.  A cohouser sent me this link, below and
> > we agreed it would be good to circulate widely, especially to
> > cohousers with kids.
> >
> >
> > Chris ScottHanson
> >
> >
> > On Jun 3, 2005, at 12:55 PM, Fred H Olson wrote:
> >
> > > On Fri, 3 Jun 2005, Chris ScottHanson wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > >>   http://www.storewars.org/flash/index.html
> > >>
> > >>
> > >
> > > Is this really related to cohousing?
> > > If so why not a few words of explanation?
> > >
> > > Fred
> > _________________________________________________________________
> > Cohousing-L mailing list -- Unsubscribe, archives and other info at:
> > http://www.cohousing.org/cohousing-L/
> >

John Beutler
Liberty Village, MD
jbeutler [at] adelphia.net
http://www.libertyvillage.com/