Spare Key Springfield: history

Dispatches from Columbia

Dispatches from Columbia: Rob Hunt’s Initial Report on Dinner Club, c.3/2016

(Jay here. As the new History Tzar, I get to comb through some of the un-posted blog posts of yore. Here's one that got stuck in the tubes but should have been posted a long time ago. It's Rob writing about his and Abbey's discovery of the Dinner Club concept, for which we are very grateful. I posted about this earlier but I didn't realize he had already written it. I like his better. jh.)

Dear Spare Key,

Abbey and I recently made a trip to Columbia to visit friends. She has a school mate there who runs the Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture. They also have a wonderful old house where they live with five other energetic adults, from college students to young professionals. This shared-housing model caught our interest and we were eager to report back to Spare Key Springfield.

While we aren’t ready to buy a big house and move in together, Columbia had another community rhythm that really resonated with our group. They call it dinner club.

While the potluck is the staple of community eating, we have found potlucks to be a little tiresome and sometimes uncoordinated. Truly, there is beauty in the variety of random dishes you see at an honest-to-goodness potluck dinner, reflecting the wide spectrum of cooks and diners in the group. However, as a model for sharing meals once or twice weekly, this model causes some problems. One is that everyone ends up cooking every time. It’s true that you only have to prepare one dish and you get to eat many; however, it can lead to a bit of burnout. Second, not everyone likes the “pile your plate with whatever is on the table” approach, and it’s hard to coordinate a culinarily coherent potluck dinner.

I have to say, Spare Key has become pretty good at potlucks, and I don’t think anyone would complain too much about our dinners. That said, we may decide to keep our potluck system and extend it into the future. My purpose, in reporting to Spare Key and writing this post, is to describe another way.

The rules of dinner club are simple. One person cooks for everyone else and the meal should cost no more than $25 to prepare. Cooking a meal for everyone earns you 10 meals with the dinner club and everyone has access to a healthy supply of home-grown veggies. With its simplicity and ease for everyone involved, dinner club has allowed this particular group of people to share dinner five nights a week! At first this seemed very overwhelming to us, but the more we talked to them about it, the more sense it made. Everyone has to eat anyway, so you can either cook every night, eat out, or eat with your friends. They will even pack it to go for you if you are on the run, so you can’t lean on the I’m-too-busy crutch.

For us here in Springfield, we are excited about simplifying our dinner meetings on Tuesdays and Sundays. We are going to start slow and steady and see if this idea fits our group. Rather than our longstanding potlucks, only the host will be responsible for the main dinner and one other person will bring salad. If people have food to share they are encouraged to contribute, but this should relieve some of the burden of food preparation every week. Who knows? If it goes well, we may also be eating together even more often than we do now!

As it stands, Sundays will be hosted at The Howard’s Hospitality House and the Gallery on alternating weeks, and Tuesdays will be hosted at The Bell Tower and The Good House Providence on a similarly alternating rotation. We are also excited to include more of our friends in these shared meals, so if you are reading this now, please contact one of us and plan on attending once or twice to see how you like it. We are eager to bring our friends in to tighter circles and share life with more of you.

Rob Hunt

7:47 AM
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