MEM/2003/07
Memorandum on Quantity
- Kind:
- Correspondence
- Date:
- July 2003
- Origin:
- From the stewardship to River House. Pinned in the River House kitchen ever since.
- Access:
- Open.
A polite request that one house cook less food, twenty-three years old, entirely unsuccessful, and annotated in pencil every year by the kitchen.
The Continuance Institute · The North House · Penobscot County · Maine
TO THE STEWARD, RIVER HOUSE MEM/2003/07
July 2003
The accounts for the year show River House spending 41 per cent above
the mean on food for a house of twenty places. The steward's letter of
May explains that the Open Table is cooked for forty and attended by
between eighteen and twenty-six.
We do not think this is waste, and we are not writing to say that it is.
The surplus goes out on the winter round and we have seen the round.
We are writing because the kitchen is cooked by a rota of people who did
not choose the quantity, and because boxing forty portions at nine
o'clock at night is work that falls on whoever is last in the room. If
the house wishes to cook for forty, the boxing should be a duty on the
rota with a name against it, and not something that happens to somebody.
The quantities in RCP/1988/09 are for thirty. We would be glad if the
house used them. We are aware that it will not.
[In pencil, beneath, in successive hands:]
2004 expected 22 cooked 40 boxed 14
2005 expected 20 cooked 40 boxed 17
...
2024 expected 24 cooked 40 boxed 11
2025 expected 22 cooked 40 boxed 15
[In a different pencil, in the margin, undated: 'boxing is on the rota.']
The boxing was added to the rota in 2011. The kitchen regards this as the stewardship having conceded the substantive point; the rota clerk regards it as the stewardship having been ignored and having tidied up afterwards.
Catalogued at the North House · reproduction permitted for study · redactions are not itemised