In the West, we're all familiar with Christ's miracles — feeding thousands of people with just five loaves of bread and two fish, and so forth. Now we may not be able to perform miracles like that, but using the teachings of Christ and the early Christians, we can increase our food supply and decrease costs if we live in groups. Here's how it works.
Normally, when we live in groups, we use Sharpies to mark up which food is ours, and everybody gets to eat their own food only. However, this is an inefficient way of managing food supply. Instead, use this rule: all the food in the house is community food, provided everyone contributes. This is pretty much the only way to ensure that everyone eats properly. Why? Because when everyone contributes food, people will naturally specialize in what kinds of food they buy. Joe might buy all the vegetables, while Karen buys the grains, and Jeffery may specialize in microwavable instant foods. Because everyone is contributing something, we can rely on other people in the household having the other food we need when we buy only our specialized food. And because we're buying specialized food, we can take advantage of deals and decrease prices by buying in bulk.
Note that people naturally specialize. It isn't necessary to plan out who will buy what food. The system actually works better when people organically decide what food to buy based on a number of factors, including need, price, knowledge, taste, and so forth. But people will end up specializing, and part of the point is to welcome this.
One reason why this works out better for everyone is because the food we buy will be less likely to go bad. Often, we're forced to buy more portions than we need if we are buying just for ourselves. This is especially true with fresh produce. But yet, we must buy the food or we will go hungry. This is less of a problem when we are buying for more than one person.
One subsequent effect of this is that we can take advantage of foods we don't need too often, and increase the richness of the diversity of our food. For instance, we may have a craving for radishes one day. But we know that we won't really want to eat radishes every day. So we buy enough radishes for one person one or two days, which is possible in most supermarkets, while buying the staple foods we need for the rest of our diet. That way, we satisfy our cravings and no food goes to waste.
We can also take advantage of cropping of foods. For instance, if we buy local, there may be an influx of a great deal of specialized food, like say, fresh Kokanee Salmon. Since we know we will all be eating it, we can buy more than we normally would. There will be leftovers, and none will go to waste.
We may balk at this idea because we won't necessarily be catering to our own particular tastes in food. Since we will be forced to eat the food of others, we won't necessarily have any guarantee that we will get our own favorite foods. But if we take a larger view, and look past merely our own tastes, forgiving the trespasses of others onto our food diets, we will begin to understand that our diets will be diversified, which is healthy for us, and that we won't go hungry on a low budget. Because of this, we can free up our money for more interesting activities than just eating every day. We can be more generous and liberal with our overall budgets, because the food budget will be less. All in all, following this system will work out better for everyone.
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