Actually, this is a sharing art installation by Emily Doskow and Luan Stauss, meant to draw the curiosity of and start conversations with the herds/flocks of passers by at our San Francisco Green Festival booth last weekend. Oddly, during the course of the weekend, not one, but TWO of the cows disappeared. Now who in their right conscience would steal from a booth about sharing? (The chickens have been brooding about it ever since.) Whoever you are cow-nappers, just know you got a special cow on your hands and she fully expects to be shared.

This is Frugal Foodies, a Bay Area group that brings people together to cook and eat in community. Founded by J Moses Ceasar in 2005, Frugal Foodies has thrived since then in Berkeley and San Jose. Menus vary (according to the site’s blog, a recent evening was an experiment in veganism) but are always vegetarian and mostly organic.

My friend Margaret went a couple weeks ago and came back glowing with great things to say about how it works and how much fun she had. I hope to try it soon and report back on another fun way to share food.

Cooperative grocery shelves

EcoSalon posted a nice piece today: “Sharing: It’s not just nice, it’s necessary.”  I love the “rundown of the 15 coolest sharing concepts.”

By dividing literally hundreds of plants and giving them away to good homes, my mom gives her garden really good karma. I mean, look at at it:

I also read a heart-warming story about a woman in North Carolina who grew 2000 vegetable starts to give away, after learning that many local families were struggling to put food on the table as a result of the recession. First, she put out the word on the Internet and got a ton of seeds donated. She started them in small pots, then had an event to hand them out. She gave them to anyone, on the condition that they also share the harvest. Great way to spread the sharing spirit! She literally planted the seeds of sharing in the community – I love it!
By the way, if you want to do something for Climate Action Day, giving out tons of seedlings is an idea!

This is Frugal Foodies, a Bay Area group that brings people together to cook and eat in community. Founded by J Moses Ceasar in 2005, Frugal Foodies has thrived since then in Berkeley and San Jose. Menus vary (according to the site’s blog, a recent evening was an experiment in veganism) but are always vegetarian and mostly organic.

My friend Margaret went a couple weeks ago and came back glowing with great things to say about how it works and how much fun she had. I hope to try it soon and report back on another fun way to share food.

But I NEVER would have guessed that one of the most frequent comments we hear is: “Oh, my neighbor and I have been thinking about sharing chickens!” The first time I heard this, it was charming. Cool idea, I thought. But now we’ve heard it again….and again….and AGAIN! Chicken sharing, chicken clubs, coop-building parties, and all kinds of people who are really putting the “coop” in “cooperative.”

Chicken sharing actually makes a lot of practical sense. Let’s say you, like most people, eat eggs, and you are thinking about getting chickens (and by that, I really mean hens; roosters make noise, not eggs, and they are often illegal to keep in high-density residential areas). If you live in an urban or even suburban area, this could meaning devoting a significant portion of your yard to building a coop and giving the chickens a little free range. Many people wouldn’t go to all of this effort for just one or two chickens. But what if you get 15 chickens, have a coop building party with seven of your neighbors, and start taking turns caring for the chickens? You could even take down part of a fence so that the chickens can have more space to roam into your neighbor’s yard. Each neighbor is assigned one day of the week to feed the chickens and collect eggs.

What do you get? Fifteen hens will produce, on average, around 7 dozen eggs per week. This means that each neighbor will have a dozen fresh and delicious eggs. If that sounds good, take a look at www.backyardchickens.com, which has all kinds of great resources to get you started.

Chicken sharing is very much in line with the movement to eat fresh, local, organic, and sustainably produced food, so it makes sense that many people are turning to chicken sharing. And I imagine that chicken sharing will naturally lead to other kinds of sharing in the neighborhood. If I had a dozen or more eggs per week, I’d probably make a few quiches and share them with the neighbors, which might lead to more regular meal exchanges. Maybe we’d plan a monthly brunch potluck. Maybe start a shared vegetable garden in another neighbor’s yard, and start cooperating to compost all of our food scraps. Maybe start a dog-walking rotation, or a child care cooperative. The possibilities are endless.

So I still don’t know which came first — I just know that both the chicken and the egg are at the forefront of a movement, and that every neighborhood with a chicken club has already hatched a small sharing revolution.

CAR:

RIDES:

FOOD:

HOME:

GOODS:

TASKS:

BUYING:

SPACE:

WORK:

CARE:

SKILLS:

FUN: