Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Common meals

[Craig Ragland (craigragland]

Well, we all have our biases... and our writing often reflects them.

Generally, supporters are the ones actually do the work to learn, then
write, and get included in publications (especially when they are not
compensated - and the "publication" includes editorial review).

Academics and journalists, who do receive compensation (of one type or
another), have other motivations when doing their required work to study,
then write, and get included in publications. They are much more likely to
write critically of topics.
Everyone involved in cohousing is invited to create articles for Cohousing
magazine. I would love to see more submissions - and am pretty sure our
editor, Donna, would as well. This is also true for Communities magazine -
witness the frequent requests from their editors over the years for
submissions. In both cases, alas, there is no compensation for the authors.

Personally, I'd be quite interested in articles that challenge cohousing's
sacred cows - including common house shared meals. On the other hand,
criticism by the dissatisfied are not likely to dissuade me from
enjoying Songaia's shared meals - 5X per week with 13 out of 15 families
joyously (mostly) participating.

We will be sharing some common meal frequency research results in one of the
National Cohousing Conference plenary sessions next week:

http://www.cohousing.org/2008/overview

This brand new research by Coho/US research director, Betsy Morris, was
based on information on 102 communities - out of our larger sample of
cohousing communities in the USA.

We plan to share information from the research in the new Research Room in
the new Members Area of the Cohousing Website that will also be launched at
the Conference.

 I believe some of this work will also be published in the next issue of
Cohousing magazine:

*http://www.cohousing.org/cm/issue*** <http://www.cohousing.org/>

On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 9:21 AM, Sharon Villines <sharon [at] sharonvillines.com>
wrote:

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>
> I think the questions are highly biased on favor of having community
> meals at all. Since some people feel that common meals define
> cohousing, I think it would be a good time to test this premise by
> asking questions like:
>
> How many people are perfectly happy with few if any common meals?
>
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>
> --
> Craig Ragland
>
> Coho/US executive director
> http://www.cohousing.org
> craig [at] cohousing.org
>
> Please try email first, include your phone number (w/time zone) - or give
> me a call: 425-487-3550 (Pacific)... communicate!