Food & Kitchen

A huge portion of co-op life revolves around food. We shop together, cook together, eat together, and clean up together. Meals play an essential role in making the co-op into a community, not just a place to live.

This section describes how each part of the co-op's food system works. The details may be different for each house, but overall it works the same in both houses.

Meals

Both houses prepare several meals a week. Meals are typically served at 7 PM (or 6/6:30 on Sundays, to accommodate house meetings). All co-op meals are vegetarian, with options to accommodate vegans and other dietary requirements as necessary (allergies, gluten intolerance, etc.). In general, both houses try to buy food with house funds that can be consumed by all their members.

Cooking

Each meal is prepared by two people. Cooks must submit a recipe to the Food Coordinator a certain number of days before the meal, so that the Food Coordinator can compile a shopping list and the shoppers can buy the food. (Check your house's specific policy for details.)

When cooking, take care to be hygienic. Make sure cutting boards, utensils, and pots are clean before you start using them; wash your hands before cooking and during cooking; tie back long hair; discard food dropped on the floor or other dirty surfaces. If possible, clean dishes & utensils as you cook, so that you don't have to do it all at the end. Be mindful of the allergies or other dietary restrictions of people in your house, and be careful to keep ingredients and utensils separate as necessary.

Cleaning

See chore descriptions for an explanation of how responsibility for cleaning the kitchen after meals is divided between cooks, After-Dinner Clean ("AD Clean"), and Dish Night.

Late Plates

Both houses allow members to request "late plates" if you won't be around at dinner and want a plate of food set aside for you. And we actually have a nifty tool for doing so: PlateBot! PlateBot allows you to request a late plate via text or by clicking a button on plate-bot.com. Just go to the website once to get your name in the system, and you'll be good to go! (See "Help" in the upper right corner of the site.)

Guests

We love having guests at meals! For non-residents, their first meal at the co-op is free; after that, they can eat for $3 a meal (current policy at both houses as of summer 2016).

Neither house currently has an official "boarding plan" for non-members who want to eat at the co-op more regularly, but the co-op has offered such a boarding plan in the past. Houses can decide their own rules around guests who want to access the meal plan.

Kitchen & Food Storage

Again, both houses have their own rules around the kitchen and food storage. But here is a general overview of how it tends to work.

"Common Food" vs. "Private Food"

The distinction between "common" and "private" food is pretty intuitive: "common food" is food that is up for grabs for anyone to eat, while "private food" belongs to a particular person.

Each house has specific fridges and/or pantry areas that are designated for storing common or private food; ask your housemates to find out how it's done in your house. In general, private food needs to be labelled with your name, and common food needs to be labelled with the date when it went into the fridge (but again, the details differ in each house). Labelling food helps keep the kitchen & pantry organized and makes it easier for the people whose job it is to clean these areas.

Kitchen Cleanliness

See chore descriptions for an explanation of how responsibility for cleaning the kitchen is divided between cooks, After-Dinner Clean ("AD Clean"), Kitchen Konquerors ("K2"), and Dish Night.

Kitchen cleanliness can often be a source of tension within the house. See Common Areas > Kitchen for some suggestions about how to deal with this.

Shopping

The Food Coordinator(s) is responsible for budgeting for shopping trips and writing shopping lists. The shoppers may make trips to multiple grocery stores (Valli Produce, Whole Foods, Jewel) in order to find the stores where particular ingredients are cheapest and/or find specialty ingredients. When feasible, the co-op has also occasionally purchased food from bulk food co-ops or CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture) in the past.

There is often a tension between two competing goals in food purchasing: trying to minimize cost, and trying to buy sustainable, organic, and locally-sourced food. This is a continuous balancing act, and each house has to determine for itself what its values are when it comes to food consumption. You may want to use surveys or meetings to figure out which food items your house finds it most important to purchase sustainably, or if there are certain food products people don't want to purchase.