Kitchen Diplomacy: Tips for Sharing a Kitchen
Given the amount of mess that is created in the kitchen, it is an area ripe with opportunities for arguments, hatred, and general strife. Pilfer your housemate's Spaghetti-O's one too many times, or leave that spoilt milk on the counter, and you could be in for a classic kitchen shouting match. In such an incendiary area, it is best to establish rules at the beginning of the semester, before problems start.
Sharing Food
Many different systems can work for dealing with purchasing and sharing food. Ideally, everyone would pay for exactly what they eat. But problems arise when you are starving at 2 am and the only thing in the pantry are your housemate's Doritos. Or when someone eats your $7-a-lb. steak and repays you with a package of hot dogs. So establish some guidelines to deal with these gray areas. Here are a few examples of food-sharing systems. You will have to evaluate your own house dynamic to determine which will be the most desirable. Have your own system? Contact us or contribute to the Forum.
- No Sharing: Simple and easy. Everyone has their own food. You know what is yours, you eat it, and you stay away from everything else. If in some case you have to borrow food, it is repaid quickly with the same exact item. This system works well if housemembers have widely varying appetites, or if they are especially sensitive about equity in food expenses.
- Full Sharing: Utter mayhem, but more laid back. You can eat anything in the fridge or the pantry, regardless of the purchaser. The catch is that each housemember must vow to buy a roughly equal amount of food to what he or she eats. This system is great because it allows you to eat when you are hungry or in need of an indgredient. You can then make food purchases at a more convenient time. However, this system leaves open the possibility that someone will pay less than their fair share. It requires that if you get screwed, you need to stand up for yourself. If you spent $30 on Pop-tarts and didn't get to eat a single one, speak up! Often times in this system, the perpetrators are unaware that their hunger is causing anguish to someone else. This method works best among close friends with similar appetites.
- Rotation System: Strict but effective. This is a system where one housemate goes out at the beginning of the week and buys food for the house for a week. Each housemate has a week for grocery shopping, and each buys a similar amount of goods. If an individual wants more, they can make extra purchases themselves. This system works best if each housemember has their own transportation or easy access to a grocery store.
Cleaning
Delineating cleaning responsibilities can be equally contentious as grocery shopping. Students come in with vastly different expectations of kitchen cleanliness and willingness to clean. The student who does not mind a sink stacked high with dirty dishes is now the arch enemy of the neat student who conscientiously cleans up after every meal. Different rules work for different houses, such as separates sets of dishes, or a designated dishwasher. However, Practical U recommends this guideline: you washed it, you can use it. Sounds simple, but there are some important nuances that need explaining.
For a house with members who have fairly similar expectations of kitchen cleanliness, the rule is fairly straightforward. If you make a meal, you need to clean up your mess afterwards. This means the stove and countertops, as well as dishes. Easy. Reasonable leeways should be given as far as "afterwards" is concerned. If drunk or in a rush, said chef can certainly wait until the following day to clean his mess.
Kitchen Quandary: An Example
Two students live together in an apartment. Jeff is very neat and clean and always washes his dishes immediately. John, on the other hand, tries to get by with never washing a dish. One afternoon, Jeff takes a clean mug from the cabinet, drinks tea from it, then washes it along with another dirty mug that was on the counter. He now has a net positive of one clean mug (he dirtied one mug, and washed two; net of one clean mug). This would entitle Jeff to later take a clean mug, drink from it, and leave it dirty in the sink. John takes a clean mug from the cabinet, drinks a beer from it, then dumps it in the sink. He has a net negative of one dirty mug. The next time he wants to use a mug, he must first clean one out before using it. This way he is not using dishes that other people washed for him. If this John does not want to wash dishes, then he should not use dishes! Simple!
The situation becomes a little pricklier when you have one housemate who is a neat freak, and one who can't tell the difference between neat and hazardous. The neat freak wants a clean kitchen, but surely should not have to clean up after the indifferent student. Likewise, the indifferent student should not have to go out of his way and change his habits to satisfy the neat freak. Here is where the guideline plays its role. Each housemate can only eat from those dishes that he has washed. If you wash a mug, you can drink from a mug later (not necessarily the same exact mug, but you get the idea). The net count may seem difficult to track, but in practice it really is not. The neat students wash their dishes almost immediately anyway, so do not have to keep track. The indifferent students never wash their dishes after use, so they will always need to wash a dish first before using it. Everyone in between will do fine keeping an approximate reckoning.
Summary
You can save you and your roommates a lot of angst if you establish some initial kitchen guidelines during the first few weeks of school. Try and be observant those first few weeks and determine each roommate's kitchen personality. Who is neat? Who is lazy? Who demands a spotless kitchen? Who is entirely flexible? Determine the overall dynamic of your kitchen. Stamp out all problems early and they will cause less angst in the long run.
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