The promise of co-ops

By Mike Wang and Anupama Pattabiraman

At this time of year, many sophomores and some juniors and seniors are considering one of the more important decisions of their time at Princeton: where they will eat. For some of you, this is a big deal. Since the beginning of your freshman year, you’ve been prodded and primed from all directions to join a particular club, to join with a particular group of people and quite possibly to take steps to increase the likelihood of gaining acceptance to a particular bicker club.

Others of you haven’t given much thought to the question until recently, and now that it’s finally time to make the choice, it seems too sudden, too soon. Your friends are rapidly dispersing and clustering around clubs that for you were just a passing fancy, places where you’ve perhaps eaten a few meals or gone to for parties or formals.

Then there’s a solid contingent of you who have already decided to either revel in the freedom of going independent or in the familiarity of staying in a residential college. The cost and flexibility advantages seem pretty clear, and you figure you’ll be able to spend quality time with your friends in eating clubs anyway. So, why not save some money and live in a more spacious room?

There are a few of you who have tried being in a club, paid your dues and enjoyed the nice meals, company and events your club has to offer. But you’re not sure you want to shell out this much money next year, and you know your friends will reliably invite you to their clubs anyway. At the same time, you’d prefer not to live in a residential college or rely on the skills of your cooking hand.

For those of you still pondering your decisions for next year, we’d like to share some of our own reflections. Last year, we were vacillating between joining our friends in their respective eating clubs and treading into the uncertain territory of independence. We decided to have a fling with self-reliance, and we found it to be a relationship of exhilarating choice but consistent unpredictability. The days would fluctuate between outings on Nassau Street, pleasant meals with friends in clubs or colleges, occasional cooking and calculated foraging at events offering free food. We would gather other determined independents to showcase our budding culinary talents over Sunday brunches, venture into the lesser-traveled restaurants in town and learn about nuclear energy policy over lunch in Robertson. And all the while, we were confident that, at the very least, we were getting our money’s worth.

But there is something to be said about the community and cohesion that is part of the residential college experience during our first two years and is part of the eating club experience during our final two years. There is a certain comfort to being able to sit down and enjoy the company of your friends at the dinner table every evening — a new dinner table, but often with old friends who have become family. At the same time, joining a club gives us an excuse to press a “restart” button on our social lives. After many of us settle into our familiar niches within our dorms or student groups by sophomore year, we are suddenly granted an opportunity to meet people again, to go out with the same freshman-year thirst to discover all our acquaintances’ talents and quirks behind their ordinary shells.

Regardless of the criticism the eating clubs sometimes receive from students, alumni or the administration, they do provide a social space for upperclassmen, one that solidifies existing bonds and helps forge new ones. But they are not the only organizations that can.

We decided to create the International Food Co-op last year because we believed that co-ops have the immense potential to fill that role on campus as well. In co-ops, we cook together, eat together and have found the balance between creating a social space while being financially sensible and sustainable.

And we are growing.

Last year, there were barely 50 upperclassmen in co-ops. This year, there are nearly 100, not including those on our waiting lists.

Even though food co-ops have been at Princeton for over three decades, we are at an inflection point where we are attracting a truly diverse group of former eating club members, residential college members and independents. With three co-ops now on campus, co-ops have emerged as an alternative that merges the best of the independent and eating-club worlds.

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The Brown, 2-Dickinson and the International Food co-ops provide a community and social space, with a price under $700 per semester that reflects our pragmatic sensibilities. Without having to pay for labor, property maintenance, various social fees or any other medley of costs, co-op members can focus on making good food and enjoying it in good company. Most importantly, co-ops give people the flexibility to mold their social experience in the fleeting years we have at Princeton.

We created this option because we believe that co-ops can fulfill this enormous potential and have already begun to. For those of you who are agnostic toward eating clubs or are uncertain about going independent, we invite you to join this healthy and happy movement of students who value choice, community and homemade curry. If you like what you see, join us. If you think you can do better, maybe you should start a co-op, too.

Mike Wang ’10 and Anupama Pattabiraman ’10 are the founders of the International Food Co-op. They can be reached, respectively, at mikewang@princeton.edu and apattabi@princeton.edu.