How to Plan Meals With College Roommates

Living in an apartment in college can be a costly venture. One way to help alleviate some of this burden is by planning meals with your roommates. Sharing food costs will save you money on groceries, and cooking and eating together can help build stronger relationships. Successfully planning and cooking meals with your roomies can be a win-win situation for everyone involved.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

1. Talk to your roommates and decide how many meals you plan to eat together. This might only be dinner, or it could be all meals. Figuring this out is an important element since it can affect who cooks what, when and how you will divide food costs.

2. Decide how you will divide up the cost of food. Come to an agreement about who will pay for what. Whether you want to take turns buying groceries for individual meals, or have each person buy a week's worth of groceries at a time, make that decision before heading to the store.

3. Set a budget for joint food expenditures. Stay within your budget, even if that means omitting the bag of chips or box of cookies.

4. Take turns going to the grocery store to stock up on food supplies. A good rule might be that the person paying for groceries that day or week should do the shopping.

5. Look for recipes, together and separately. Keep each other's food preferences and needs in mind when finding recipes. Also look for recipes that are relatively simple and don't involve a lot of expensive ingredients.

6. Formulate a meal plan for what meals you will have when. Everyone should contribute meal ideas to keep things diverse and everybody happy.

7. Create a cooking schedule if you want to take turns cooking meals. Take everyone's class or work schedules into consideration when deciding when each person will cook. You might decide you're better off all pitching in to cook meals together, though.

8. Make a schedule for doing dishes. Assign dish duty to individuals rather than trying to do it as a group, and commit to doing your part. That way no one gets to wriggle out of doing dishes, and no one feels like they are stuck doing all the work.

9. Reevaluate the situation after a month or so to decide whether group meal planning is working out. You may need to modify some of your policies to allow the system to work optimally for everyone.

Tips & Warnings

• Make a contingency plan for times when the person with cooking or dish duty is going to be gone due to homework, extracurricular activities, etc. Try trading shifts with a roommate who is available that day.
• Decide what you will do if one roommate does not want to be involved with group meals. Set boundaries on use of community food for those who do not financially contribute.
• Confront roommates who have committed to cooking or cleaning and aren't keeping up their end of the deal. You are all in this together, so everyone is responsible for doing their part.

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[atomiccafe]

on 6/10/2009 Great article! Sort of reminds me how much fun the joint cooking thing can be. I have a bunch of friends who have moved on to apartments who all meet up for potlucks or who "apartment-hop" every week for dinner if they don't love together.

5 stars!