June 2024 Great Story

Cooperatives have always been rooted in the ideas of self-help and solidarity. Here, we do things ourselves, and we do things together. To support those ideas, we also put a serious focus on education- which, true to form, we do ourselves, and we do together. Our members learn and teach each other about the world, their own history, ways of living harmoniously with one another, and many other tools that bring ease, comfort, and empowerment to life in a co-op.

Living with others, people come together over food. Whether it’s eating dinner made and shared with one another, or just leaving the too-many cookies you made on the counter, it’s how we start friendships and conversations, and heal wounds as well as appetites. This, too, we may do together and for ourselves: Each of the Spartan Housing Cooperative’s houses has its own food budget, and many of them have shared meals which are prepared as members’ chores in the house. A recent survey I ran as part of my service, however, indicated that houses don’t stock their pantries very well- nor do any houses endeavor to have more than five hot meals a week. A handful of our houses don’t have any house meals.

When done right, the benefits of cooking ourselves and for each other are clear: Cooking at home is, historically, far cheaper than eating out, and the increased buying power that five or even 25 people have means they can shop in bulk, taking advantage of lower unit prices to buy food for less money, or more and better food for the same cost; Building relationships with vendors and local farms means houses can often find deals that way too- There are co-ops in Ann Arbor that get all of Zingerman’s Deli’s old bread once a week, for free! And the benefits are not all financial- living on my own, I have to do all the shopping, cook every meal I eat, and wash every dish not only from eating, but from cooking as well. And with all of the other things that need to be done to keep a house clean and pleasant to live in, that’s a lot of work! In a co-op that has one meal a week together, unless cooking it that night is your chore, you only have to worry about dinner six times- and in a co-op that has seven meals a week together, you only have to cook at worst once a week, and by that point you’re cooking for your friends, so it’s much more worthwhile. Typically, the people whose chore it is to cook a meal are not the same people whose chore it is to clean up after a meal either, so both parts of the task feel much less burdensome. Depending on how the dish system is designed at a house, members may only need to wash dishes once a week or less often. As someone who hates the neverending slog of daily dishwashing, only having to worry about it once a week, in a way I can put on my calendar, is a serious boon- not to mention that cooking for many people at once typically yields the same amount of dirty cookware as cooking for one.

So why doesn’t every house do a hot meal every night? Why not follow what we did in the ‘70s, and have members of three different houses make not only a hot dinner, but a hot lunch as well? Well, these programs have a lot of inertia- they’re really easy to keep going, but really hard to start or ramp up. The pandemic certainly came with sufficient force to stop many house food systems in their tracks, and in that and many ways our communities are still reeling. All of the institutional memory about how these things work, how chores ought to be delegated and scheduled, how the fridge ought to be arranged to support crates of vegetables and incoming leftovers, what size pot to use and where to get lentils in the right quantities to make soup for everyone- that’s all stuff that the pandemic caused us to lose, and we have to find it again. Kitchens are in disarray because they don’t have to support efficiency and convenience, and budgeting conversations sound like Congress: the less we do, the worse we do it, the less we have to pay for- these ideas of austerity have trickled down from other governance structures, and have us forget why we come together in the first place. In a moment that derides government, government work, and government workers for inefficiency, cost, and untrustworthiness, it’s no wonder that cottagecore became the aesthetic de jure- when all of our experience with group projects large and small is so wholly negative, who should be surprised that everyone wants to bug off to the woods to live alone and fend for themselves? Why come together when we never talk about why we should, what we gain, why it’s worth it?

The Spartan Housing Cooperative’s Education Committee, or EduCom, is exactly where we go to talk about why we do this, what we gain, and how we can make it worth it. So, after doing my surveys and running my numbers and making my recommendations, I swung by one of their meetings to make my ask: Can we develop a robust internal education program about food systems in our houses, how we can buy food, inventory it, and cook it in ways that are good for our budgets, bellies, and community at large? Can you do that, since my service is nearly over, and you’re the people to keep this work going? And they bit! We had a really excellent conversation about that, and some other recommendations I had. They were interested, excited, and asking good questions- “my house only has five members. Cooking a hot meal every night with that few people is extra hard- can we still benefit from something like this?” Eventually, I pointed to a couple of specific members and asked, “Can you be the one to do this?” They all said yes, and now it is theirs to do themselves, together.