Invitation to Join a Committee to plan Cooking Consortia

[Guest guest]

Hi Everyone,

 

I joined the group recently and have been a vegetarian (trying to be vegan for

several months now.)

 

I've found it difficult to be vegan in our society. Everywhere you look, the

manufacturers have put dairy into our food. So we are largely forced to cook

our own food. And living alone, its annoying to have to buy for example, a

whole cucumber or a whole bag of sugar just because you want those ingredients

in a particular dish, and in any case, its a lot of work and quite time

consuming to have to cook every meal for yourself, and in the middle of a

recession its hardly cost-effective to be constantly going out to eat.

 

When I was a graduate student a couple years ago I knew a group of Indian

students that had a wonderful mechanism. The group of about 16 formed a cooking

consortium. Every day, some group of 2-3 of them would cook dinner for the

whole group (and clean up... but being scholars they were intensely interested

in minimizing the number of utensils used). When dinner time came around they

would all meet at the apartment of whoever was hosting it that night and have

dinner.

 

The system worked great. The food was mostly vegetarian and because they were

cooking for a crowd they were able to buy in bulk. They got a chance to

experiment with new recipes, and while any given person only had to cook and

clean once a week (and in fact, its not 16 times as much work to cook for 16 as

for 1), everyone was assured of a good healthy and tastey meal every night, not

to mention the chance to make community, gossip, and generally have a good time.

 

When I moved to San Francisco I began to think about how this model could be

adapted for city life, among the local vegetarian community. Obviously, its

hard to imagine doing this kind of thing every night, but maybe 2 times/week or

so would be practical. But San Francisco, with its relatively high density of

vegetarians and compact geometry, might prove a good testing ground for the

development of urban vegetarian cooking consortia.

 

So I'm putting out a general invitation to all vegetarians around here to join a

planning committee to study how the cooking consortium model could be applied

here... and eventually to organize some. If you're interested in studying this

matter and brainstorming how to organize such a group (or groups) please write

me an email dg2222. We'll probably have our first committee meeting

next week.

 

Thanks,

Dave Goggin

 

ps: I love cheese. Does anyone know where to find fake vegan blue cheese,

smoked gouda, brie, port wine cheeseballs, and other delicacies? How about

vegan Italian sausage and salami, bratwurst, etc? I sure miss that stuff... :-|