How to Share the Work of Cooking And Build Community

Shannon Amspacher has a dream. What if we cut our weekly cooking time nearly in half, added more variety and home-cooked food to our family’s weekly menu, and built meaningful community ties at the same time? That’s the idea behind Potluck, a technology platform that Amspacher is in the process of developing that would match individuals with someone in their community who also wants to share the load of weekly meal planning and preparation.

How Potluck will work is simple: You match with a person, get to know them, a little about their family, and their likes and dislikes. Then you cook, and you share. If you’re making lasagna to feed your family dinner on Sunday, with leftovers for lunches, you simply double your recipe and pass one batch on to your Potluck match. Your Potluck match does the same, say, doubling the recipe for a pot of stew they were going to make anyway, then swapping batch cooks with you. With just a bit of extra prep during a single cooking session, and smart bulk shopping, you’ve now got two home-cooked meals for the week—without doubling your time in the kitchen or your grocery bill and without the meal fatigue of eating the same dish all week long.

Potluck’s platform will use smart matching to help connect people through shared communities or mutual affiliations (think Bumble for Friends, Nextdoor, or Hinge, but for family cooks). Even as Potluck’s technology is still in development, the idea resonates deeply with the hundreds of people already following Amspacher’s project and either taking part in community pilots or signing up for a waitlist for the technology.

The practice of sharing batch cooks—bringing a casserole or a pot of soup to a friend or neighbor after they’ve welcomed a new child or faced the loss of a loved one—is an ancient and nearly universal one. But a variety of factors—from the loneliness epidemic to growing work-life conflict and women’s continued disproportionate responsibility for meal planning and cooking—have created ever more need for community support, even while the same factors have made it more difficult for people to find their communities.

Amspacher is encouraging people interested in the concept to try their own experiments with sharing batch cooks now. She hopes to prove the idea will make people’s lives easier, and to learn from their experiences, so she can build a better product. Potluck and Better Life Lab Experiments (BLLx) have partnered to create a step-by-step experiment for batch-cook sharing, designed both to help busy families and to provide her with feedback.

I interviewed Amspacher about the Potluck platform and her interest in lightening families’ work and mental loads. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Haley Swenson: At BLLx, we’re interested in reducing and redistributing all the unpaid work it takes to run a household. We’ve had a few past experiments with cooking and meal planning, but it’s a complicated area to try to intervene in, because it can be very personal and culturally specific, and there are so many moving pieces and time constraints involved in getting food on your table.

I’m curious: As you’ve been on this journey into the care world, what about food, as a pain point and as an opportunity, has begun to resonate with you?

Shannon Amspacher: During a New America event on AI and the mental load, someone said, “For some people, food is love, and for some people, food is a chore.” And I think I fall somewhere between those two. I love to cook when I have the time and the mental capacity to dedicate to it. But for me, that's not weeknights at five o'clock when I have to get dinner on the table.

It became an especially acute pain point after my son was born: I don't have childcare during that time—most people’s child care ends right as it’s time to make dinner—and yet somehow I’m supposed to cook a meal, and feed him, and care for him at the same time. Now, I have a partner I can share this work with, but sometimes we aren’t home at the same time. And I imagine how challenging this is for a single parent juggling all this alone.

I felt compelled to solve for this. There has to be a better way when my neighbors next door are also going through this and having the same challenge, and cooking their own meals three times a day. I thought, why aren’t we pooling our resources in the same way that we pool insurance or other employee benefits, or the same way that we share the utility of a car through services like Uber, or all of these other services that we're starting to put into a more cooperative model? Why isn't food part of that journey so many of us are on?

Beyond your own experience, what has the research shown you? What kind of evidence have you found to support the idea that there's a need to put food and dinner into the sharing economy?

When I look at the overall market, there are 50 million U.S. adults who plan to prepare meals every day or every week. Then I honed in on the personas that are really struggling with this. And that narrowed it to roughly 46 million individuals. I niched down even further down, and about nine and a half million are busy parents, caregivers, and time-crunched professionals. These are the folks who are going to find the most immediate value in something like this.

And when I layer on other things like time poverty, especially for mothers and women who tend to have more childcare or domestic responsibilities, this stress can become even more pronounced. According to research by Better Life Lab, 94 percent of mothers make meals or feed children, compared to 76 percent of fathers. So you start to get into the time, but it’s not just the time, it’s the stress and the mental load of it. Communal cooking can not only reduce individual meal prep time by up to 80%, but also significantly cut down on mental load. And we're all looking for more ways to connect, but we're also so time-crunched, so where does it fit in? Potlucking can cut down on daily stress while giving community members a chance to share a meal and connect. And because you’re only cooking once, the decision-making, cleanup, and multitasking that often fall to caregivers are cut dramatically, freeing up both time and headspace.

When I was pregnant, two of my wife's friends flew in to visit us. They came with a spreadsheet of recipes and ingredients, all of which they ran by us ahead of time to make sure they aligned with our tastes. They made a run to Costco, and then for three straight days, they just cooked in our house, making soups, pastas, curries, and breakfast burritos. Our freezer was full. I think we lived off that stash for the first month of our baby’s life. Of course, we can't all fly around the country doing this for each other, but the spirit of it is alive and well in many communities already.

What are the stories that sparked this idea for you? What examples from history made you feel like this is something we could actually do for people?

There are a lot of different cultural practices around sharing meals as a way to care for one another. In Danish culture, there’s something called fællesspisning. Essentially, there is a community center, and on a designated weeknight, it’s transformed into a communal kitchen and cleaning situation where you can pay a very small amount, typically around $5 to $10 to eat, and the whole neighborhood is there! In Malaysia there’s a postpartum confinement period known as pantang, which involves professional, community, and family members taking care of the new parents, especially the mother. The care routines involve massage, body binding, and, of course, providing lots of nutritious, healing meals. Pantang can last for about 44 days, and researchers have found that Malaysian mothers have significantly reduced rates of postnatal depression.

We see these meal-sharing approaches for postpartum periods, but it makes me question why this isn’t an extended practice for other difficult seasons of life, like going through surgery, or just being a working parent or caregiver.

Some of the people reading this interview will love the idea of swapping batch cooks but can't imagine who to partner with. What should people think about when they're trying to find a partner?

It’s important to find your people and get out in the community. Of course, it could be a faith group, but it can also be a fitness center, or just going out and talking to your neighbors. My hope is that Potluck can start to rebuild some of that trust and provide that initial icebreaker, because everybody eats. Starting up conversations around this is part of an essential human need to build more of a friendship and community mindset. So get out, talk to your neighbors, invite them over, and start talking about food. Figure out what recipes they like making, what they grow in their garden, their dietary restrictions, and so on.

One of our constant design challenges in BLLx is ensuring that our solutions don’t create more work for people trying to reduce their load. For some people, this experiment may seem difficult, especially if they don’t have a ready-made community; this practice of potlucking and community outreach can feel uncomfortable, which can be exacerbated by things like dietary restrictions and the feeling that this is just another thing to add to their mental load. What would you say to someone who’s worried about the effort this will take?

When I was inspired to create this technology, I was trying to find places in my life where I could find more connection, but I also knew I didn’t have a lot of time for that, which is why I focused on integrating it into things I was already doing. I was already doing meal prep and cooking, which is why those became my focus. For those who feel like they can’t take this on, remember that it’s something you’re already doing, and it’s helping you to optimize and cut down your time in the kitchen. When you are cooking, you can double up the ingredients to provide food for others, while still keeping time for yourself on the nights when others are providing for you. Technology has played a big part in isolating us, but my hope is that, with intention and thoughtfully designed platforms like Potluck, it can bring us back into our communities.