Cohousing-L Mailing List: Cooking and cleaning, was Meal Frequency

[Brian Tremback (brian.tremback]

Since we moved in 3 years ago, we've typically had common meals every other
day -- meals prepared in the common house 2 or 3 times a week (Mon-Wed-Fri,
then Tue-Thur, in alternation) and potlucks on one of the days of the
weekend. Potlucks are usually only attended by a handful of people, but the
prepared meals regularly pull in 20 to 25 people, sometimes up to twice that
number. Our total population is about 60 people.

Each person is asked to sign up for a 4-person dinner crew once a month.
People are free to sign up whenever they want and for one of 4 positions -
head cook, 2nd cook, early assistant, and late assistant. We've had no
problem getting people to clean, probably because the cleaning position
(late assistant) involves the least amount of time commitment (usually only
1.5 hours), and it can be done anytime after dinner, so there's less
conflict with one's work schedule. Compare this to a head cook and 2nd cook
who might easily spend 4 to 6 hours in meal planning and shopping and
preparation. There is also an early assistant who, besides helping the
cooks, also starts some of the clean-up and usually ends of working about 2
hours. One drawback to the late assistant position is he/she usually ends up
working alone. But the people who sign up for it don't seem to mind. We also
have other cleaning assignments that support common meals, like dining room
floor mopping, table washing, napkin laundering. But those occur on a
schedule separate from common meals.

In designing the community, we could so we did avoid commercial equipment.
We make do with 2 KitchenAid residential dishwashers. These have worked
fine. After dinner, each person rinses and loads their own dishes into the
dishwashers.

-- 
Brian Tremback
Burlington Cohousing
Burlington, Vermont