The Better (Than You) Halves?

I have a friend who thinks she’s pretty funny…Ok. She is pretty funny. But don’t tell her I said so. And not long after we started The Better Halves, and I was talking about it almost constantly (yes, believe it or not…I used to talk about our dinner co-op even MORE than I do now), she teased me in a good-natured way, calling it “The Better (Than You) Halves.”

Yes, I realize that stumbling into a situation in which neighbors take turns cooking for each other is pretty incredible. In fact, the other day, I was standing on the sidelines at one my son’s lacrosse games, and the other moms were talking about easy recipes to serve after getting home relatively late on a school-night. When it came up that dinner was just magically delivered to my house by my neighbors, one of the women said (not unkindly, but in a matter-of-fact way), “Well, that’s nice for you that you can do that.”

Hmmm…

Yes. It is. And while I just smiled and nodded, inside I was thinking: “But maybe you can do it, too!”

Like the dinner co-op zealot that I am, I can’t help but think we’ve tapped into something special that almost anyone can find a way to replicate…even if they don’t live in a magical fairyland like me, with four friendly and compatible neighbor women who love cooking for each other.

Consider this scenario: two work friends love to cook, but often find themselves too swamped to get into the kitchen during the workweek. Perhaps they could make a pact to cook something for each other’s families over the weekend, swapping casserole dishes in the office kitchenette on Monday.

Here’s another: a group of three church friends who live in different parts of town agree to each cook a freezeable meal for each other’s families each week. The dinner swap could take place in the church kitchen before or after services, leaving each family with two extra meals to enjoy during the week.

And finally: a group of soccer moms take turns bringing easy-to-reheat meals to the games that can be stored in coolers in the car while the young ones kick a ball up and down the field. Everyone leaves with food that’s ready to go, and no one has to make that dreaded stop at the drive-thru on the way home.

After all, according to an article in The New York Times, a dinner co-op can take many forms:

“A cooking co-op, or dinner swap, is simply an agreement by two or more individuals or households to provide prepared meals for each other, according to a schedule. The goal is to reduce the time spent in the kitchen while increasing the quality and variety of the food eaten.”

And while, yes, the goal is to reduce kitchen time and increase meal quality, there is something more to it than that. What we’ve found through The Better Halves is that being cared for by friends—and also caring for those friends—is absolutely invaluable, and we can’t imagine going back to life the way it was.

As adults—and particularly as adult women—we are so often the caretakers for the people in our lives. We plan, we shop, we cook, we clean, and—even though we do this work out of love—I can’t express enough what a gift it is to have someone else show up with food she's prepared with her own hands for you and your family.

If you’ve ever had someone bring you a meal after experiencing the loss of a loved one—or, on a more joyous note, the arrival of a new baby—you know that feeling of overwhelming relief and gratitude when they hand you that meal.

But to have someone bring you a meal when everything is going just fine—when you aren’t bent over with grief from loss or exhaustion from caring for a beautiful new life—well, there is a surprising amount of relief and gratitude then, as well. Because, let’s face it, life is a grind…a wonderful, exhausting, wouldn’t-trade-it-for-anything grind.

And, as we’ve discovered through The Better Halves, feeding each other in a very practical and literal way has also fed us in more significant ways we couldn’t have imagined.

So, even if you can’t quite think of a way to get something like this started for yourself, why don’t you take this as an invitation to cook a meal for a friend? If you’re making a lasagna tonight, why not make two? The next time you see your friend, just give it to her and say, “Hey, don’t cook tonight.”

(Who knows? Maybe she’ll do the same for you…)