Eating In: Common Meals at BCC
- Mike Brown
- Jul 28
- 5 min read
Common meals feature as an anchor of community life. Eating together regularly is an activity you can count on being there alongside all the big, little, and mundane activities that make up life in cohousing.
Folks new to cohousing may picture this as a highly structured activity: meals every night, or every week, or several times a week, with assigned cooking and cleanup roles rotating through the community like clockwork.
A 2001 article on the National Cohousing Alliance website surveyed 19 communities on their common meal structures and routines. While there were some common features across the board, there were no hard-and-fast rules that applied to all communities. In the end, each community found its own way to manage their meals together.
Every Community Finds Its Own Rhythm
Most cohousing communities decide early on how important group meals will be, and that choice tends to become part of the community's DNA. Some build in daily or weekly shared dinners from day one. Others take a lighter touch. Those decisions have as much to do with the community's own philosophy as it does the practicalities of putting food on the table.
The 2001 article cited above has this great quote to show you can't please everyone:
Whatever the number of common meals served, in any given community some residents think it’s way too many, while others think it is not nearly enough.
At BCC, how we do community meals has evolved over the years to land somewhere between casual and highly structured.
As a community, we tend to value each individual's independence. We like having the freedom to go to a group meal when we want to, and the freedom to skip it if we're not in the mood. And we respect that choice in each other, whichever way it goes. That said, we do have several regular, well-loved meal traditions.
Where We Started
Our tradition actually started before we even had a building. In the early "storming-and-forming" days, we held potlucks before our monthly Plenary meetings. We also met monthly for group meals at local restaurants before the COVID pandemic put a stop to in-person gatherings.
After our building was built but before our common areas like the dining room were ready for us to use, we started Taco Tuesdays as an outdoor event. A sign-up pad in the elevator encouraged contributions, we set up folding tables in the garage, and we ate on our camp chairs in the driveway. That spirit — informal, inventive, optional, and genuinely fun — has stuck with us.
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Bring something for the table Lining up patiently Improvising a way to eat together
Together Tuesdays
Although we have Taco Tuesday only occasionally these days, Tuesdays as a gathering time stuck to the calendar.
Our more regular version these days is what we call Together Tuesdays. Every Tuesday at 6 p.m., anyone who wants to can bring their own supper — whatever they were already planning to eat — down to the common dining room, and eat together.
It's low-key, no coordination required, and attendance varies a lot from week to week. Some Tuesdays it's a full table; some Tuesdays it's just a couple of neighbors catching up. Either way, it's there if you want it.
BCC's Community Activities Team (CAT) sometimes sponsors a "Take-out Tuesday," where we're invited to place an online order at a local restaurant that a CAT member will pick up and bring back to the dining room. Or we troop out to a local restaurant, like in the old days. It's a neat way to shake up the routine.
The Monthly Potluck
Every month — usually the fourth Sunday — we hold a community potluck. People bring whatever they have or whatever they feel like making. Sometimes there's a loose theme, like winter comfort foods or summer salads, but it's never mandatory.
We also potluck before our midday plenary meetings, which tends to be even more of a free-for-all.
To help things run smoothly, we use sign-up sheets posted in the elevator. Signing up lets people see what others are bringing, so you can decide whether the group needs another entrée, another dessert, or something else entirely.
The sheets also have space to sign up for the behind-the-scenes work, such as setting the tables, running the dishwasher, washing the napkins, and so on. The labor of hosting is shared informally, meal by meal, rather than assigned on a fixed rotation.
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Today's theme is QUICHE Notecards describe the dish and ingredients, if there's a food you'd prefer not to eat Please sign up Eating in at BCC
Chef's Table
Every so often, we host what we call Chef's Table, a special, themed dinner put on by a small volunteer group, usually five or six people who love to get together, cook, and put on a show.
Here's the menu from our most recent Chef's table:
A Mediterranean Feast
Appetizer: Eggplant Caponata (vegan) on toasted baguette
Entrée: Roasted cod with Mediterranean spiced butter and tomatoes, or Roasted tofu and chickpeas with Za’atar, tomatoes and tahini (vegan)
Side: Farro with porcini and cremini mushrooms and fresh herbs (vegan)
Salad: Greek salad: tomato, cucumber, bell pepper, olives, red onion (vegan)
Dessert: Fruit crumble (rhubarb, berries and/or peaches in season) (vegan) with vanilla ice cream or vegan ice cream
Is that worth skipping lunch for or what??
The Chef's Table crew takes care of everything: setting the tables, decorating the room, arranging flowers and cutlery, prepping and cooking the meal, and handling all the cleanup afterward.
The only ask of guests is a modest donation — typically $10-15 per person— to help cover the cost of ingredients. It's part dinner party, part fundraiser-free way for a few neighbors to spoil the rest of us for an evening.
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Prepping the mail can take all day The secret recipe Dinner is served
The Annual Chili Cook-Off
Once a year, in the winter, we hold our chili cook-off. Five to seven different varieties of chili show up in crockpots and Instant Pots, and everyone gets to taste-test the lineup and rank their favorites. The first-place winner receives a silly trophy that nevertheless is a source of pride.
The danger to ranking the best is overloading so much on bowl after bowl of traditional chilis, vegetarian chilis, white chilis, and secret-ingredient chilis that you've forgotten what they all taste like. Vivian cleverly got around this problem at our last cook-off by bringing a muffin tin to hold "just-enough" samples of each contender. That's a trick some of us are definitely bringing to the table next time.
Why Our Rhythm Works for Us
We don't have a rigid meal schedule or a rotating chore chart tied to shared dinners. What we have instead is a menu of options — regular potlucks, a casual weekly gathering, the occasional chef's-table splurge, a yearly chili showdown — each with its own specialness and its own way of sharing the work. You can be there every time, or almost never, and either is completely fine.
There are also ad-hoc meals around the holidays organized by neighbors who aren't traveling over Thanksgiving or New Year's Day and who want to feel the coziness of being with people during a special time. While these aren't "official" BCC events, they nevertheless attract a lot of people who also bring friends or family members to join in the fellowship.
That flexibility, paired with genuine warmth when people do show up, is very us. It's not the only way to do common meals. But it's ours.
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