Home Cooking: Making friends through food

It took me a while to get into communal cooking with my flatmates. While attending the City College of New York, a public university in Harlem, I lived in the campus dorms for two years. I roomed with some insane folks and needless to say we did not cook together. When I moved into a Brooklyn flat with a bunch of pals for my last two years of uni, it somehow took us a full year to christen ‘Taco Thursday’ as a weekly family dinner. It was inspired by a friend re-enrolling in my flatmate’s art institute; we all wanted to establish a routine of getting together in the flat and intentionally spend time together as a friend group. 

Cooking with flatmates is a sweet routine to create. Whether you start out as uni friends, know each other from school, or are complete strangers, it can establish a moment of connection that lasts longer than a chat in the living room. Sure, if you don’t know your flatmates too well it could be awkward at first. Luckily your time at uni is quite rigid in that you’ll live with these people for a set time period: a term, a whole academic year, or maybe longer. It may take a few attempts to ease into it, but I promise it’ll happen. If it doesn’t, feel free to tell me that I broke a promise, to you, a complete stranger. 

In order to establish some proof behind this promise, I had a chat with Ema Smekalová: graduate of The University of Edinburgh, former resident of the Edinburgh Student Housing Co-op, and (as you may have already noticed) fellow member of Team Skinny. Ema’s connections to the ESHC and our shared history of communal flatmate cooking made this chat too good to pass up. Upon moving into the Co-op, it was decided that everyone in Ema’s flat would cook each other a meal one night a week, as we did in Brooklyn, but it didn’t end there. “The nicest part of it was that we shared all the food as well,” they say. “People would do a shop and then there'd be stuff in the fridge and cupboards. It was free to use and there was this policy of trust that we had all spent similar amounts.” 

Back in Brooklyn, we had a similar food sharing scheme. It was great: it’s a sure way to save money and makes much better use of the little space we had in the fridge. However, we had the opposite method of dealing with money. We called it ‘settling of the debts’: a weekly, fortnightly, or on particularly hectic occasions an obnoxious monthly routine. We’d all sit at the dining room table doing maths to figure out how much we owed each other from buying groceries and paying bills. Here in Edinburgh, it seems like Ema and co were definitely on the right track.

Along with communal meals in the flat, someone at the Edinburgh Student Housing Co-op would organise weekend breakfasts for the whole building. “There’s a basement, which is the communal space," Ema says, "and people would just cook loads. Someone would organise it and do a huge batch and then everyone else would bring little bits, go downstairs and we’d all eat together in the basement.” The Co-op does a great job of creating a sense of community for university students who are so overwhelmed by their course (and broke) that they aren't known for cooking lavishly, if at all. “ Beyond the breakfasts, there was Hearty Squirrel, who ESHC would collab with on a community meal.” 

Hearty Squirrel Food Cooperative and ESHC still run this collaboration each month uni is in session. Juliet is a member of Hearty Squirrel and tells me more about the collab. Even before the community meals began, the organisations' relationship goes back around seven years, with monthly community meals beginning in 2023. Juliet says the group make a meal “for around 70 people, destined for anyone and everyone on a pay-as-you-can basis. We try to highlight the importance of food seasonality, sustainability and sovereignty and talk about different perspectives and actions to take part in.” The meals serve as a way to fundraise for different causes. “Charities we’ve raised money for include Mothers of Sumud in the South Hebron Hills of Palestine, Grassmarket Community Project and Calais Food Collective,” Juliet tells me. It's a wonderful example of how communal cooking can leave uni accommodation and enter the wider community. Shared time around food is so important and an opportunity to interact with new people – and who wouldn’t want to go to a pay-what-you-can meal as a broke uni student? 

Taco Thursdays are among my fondest memories of that Brooklyn flat. It was a tried and true way for five friends to get together for a hang and it even promised all us very busy people a hearty meal once a week. Communal cooking with your flatmates can be a once a week routine, or in Ema’s case, a nightly occurrence. Communal cooking can be organised, or fall apart as people get busy with the semester. But you live together – it’s a habit that can be picked right back up when the (dinner)time is right.

---

Hearty Squirrel Food Cooperative’s first monthly meal is at Edinburgh Student Housing Co-op Basement, 25 Sep, 8.30pm, pay-what-you-can
@heartysquirreledinburgh on Instagram
heartysquirreledinburgh.weebly.com