The great Grocery Liberation Experiment

Living in a shared apartment is a curious mix of personal and communal space. Here at Haraldsgade 54 we have a great deal of the latter and less of the former. There’s lots of space for hanging out in ‘public’ and people sit around reading books, studying or watching television. We do this on our own, together or sometimes with other friends and there are very few uncomfortable breaches of interaction bubbles. When we need some time alone there are always our bedrooms; full of personal trinkets and laundry bags. I image this is pretty much like shared accommodation everywhere. However, we haven’t yet mentioned the universal exception to this stable sanctity.

The kitchen is where boundaries are established, borders are erected and names are scrawled on packs of butter. Resident’s supplies are hoarded away behind cupboard doors and tidied from the work surfaces. But even this falls short of the true communal horror… the fridge.

This glossy, chilled box is the front line of shared living, where notes and bills are posted and war rages inside. It’s a head on crash of irrational ownership emotions. Classification by shelves is an obvious but flawed approach, which holds up only until personal ration quantities become uneven. Encroachment tactics are deployed and soon enough there’s a wide spread labelling and level-monitoring epidemic. Oh for the casual ambiance of the living room and its naive social transparencies!

After debating this for a while at a recent house meeting, we hit upon two great discoveries. Firstly that everyone spent around the same amount of money on food each week, and secondly people were sad to wake up on a Sunday to find their cupboards bare and all supermarkets shut(*).

So, Haraldsgade 54 decided to launch the Grocery Liberation Experiment, in order to purge all mental guards and instilled social norms from the kitchen area. After the uprising, foodstuffs were brought out of their isolated cells, categorised and then put back on to appropriate shelves with their new friends.

The results were visibly stunning, particularly as the duplicates started piling up: six half-full margarine pots, five opened jars of pesto and enough stock cubes to flood the streets with bouillon. Boosted by this iron curtain collapse, we declared a free state under the following constitution:

1. A weekly shop for listed essentials will be performed by house members in turn from a money pool.
2. All personally purchased food lies in the public domain by default.
3. Teaming up at meal times is encouraged and leftovers should remain on the stove.

It will be interesting to see how this turns out. Personal grievances are nearly always irrational and so everyone just has to focus on keeping theirs in check for the greater good.

Initial feedback is that this evening I wanted a leek for my soup and there was one waiting for me in the fridge. I’m now going for ice cream I didn’t know I had, while trying not to mind that hunk of cheese that’s missing from ‘my’ block.

(*) Danish trading laws