Dinner at Sassafras Co-op: Food and the Making of a Conscious Community

This project talks about my experiences as a student researcher at Sassafras Coop, which is a vegetarian housing co-operative near the university campus. Fourteen co-op residents share the house and everything in it, including cooking and labor responsibilities. A critical part of co-op ideology is the building of community. At Sassafras, food plays an important role in the creation of community through its designation as a vegetarian space,shared cooking and food purchasing, and a shared daily meal. Food is central to my project because it is the object which initially attracted me to Sassafras. I immediately identified with Sassafras' foodways, and this has evoked memories and previous knowledges that are a source of pleasure but that also mediate my experience and analyses. Looking at food provides a window through which one can identify how the connections between individual members' sense of ???being in the world??? and Sassafras ideology are lived out in daily life at the co-op. Egalitarianism, re-use of resources, vegetarianism, conservation, anti-capitalism, and a general rebuilding of community all play into what I call Sassafras ideology. Broadly speaking, this project speaks to the ways in which individuals come together to consciously negotiate their understandings of the complex processes of the world.unpublishe