At one point during her widely viewed Ted Talk, Rachel Botsman, author of What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, asked the audience for a show of hands from those who owned a power drill. Nearly everyone lifted a palm.1 “It’s kind of ridiculous, isn’t it?” she said, with a mix of disbelief and sadness, “because what you need is the hole, not the drill.” Pausing to let her point sink in—because what you need is the hole, not the drill—she then swooped in with the solution. “Why don’t you rent the drill? Or rent out your own drill to other people and make some money from it?”
The idea of collaborative consumption, and the drill meme, grew legs and took on a life of its own, at least in media channels. The Guardian, Entrepreneur magazine, Time, the New York Daily News, the New York Times, and Wired all had articles touting peer-to-peer renting, with the venerable drill acting as a trope for something quite profound—a revolution. To quote Brian Chesky, the cofounder and CEO of Airbnb, “There are 80 million power drills in America that are used an average of 13 minutes. Does everyone really need their own drill?”2
The idea did and does make sense. It’s brilliant, actually. There’s just one little problem, a hiccup keeping us from swallowing the thing whole. Adam Berk, the founder of Neighborrow, put his finger on it when he said, “Everything made sense except that nobody gives a shit.”3
It is a good point, if you can look past the profanity and absolute thinking. Sharing does have its virtues. So why not do more of it?
Camila, a hairstylist living in Queens, had been in the New York City metro area for the past twelve months. Prior to that, she had spent her entire life in Bogotá, Colombia. Our encounter was both personal and professional. Personal: I was hungry and wanted to eat some home cooked Colombian cuisine. Professional: I had learned about Camila and her business, supported by the AirDine app, through friends, and I wanted to talk with her and some of her customers.
I have mentioned meal sharing repeatedly—at the risk of giving the impression that such platforms play a significant role in feeding people, especially urban hipsters and foodies. They do not. Talking with aspiring chefs, eaters, and industry insiders has taught me that the challenges faced by the likes of AirDine have less to do with finding cooks who are willing to invite total strangers into their homes. The greatest obstacle is finding people willing to go to a total stranger’s house to eat.
Camila’s enthusiasm for cooking and being able to share it with others was obvious within seconds of my stepping into her narrow entryway. I was led to her cooking and dining area and noticed immediately the tile, which was more backdrop than backsplash, as it covered nearly the entire wall. Crimson red tiles. The lighting from above gave the effect of the room being on fire.
In her thick Colombian accent, accompanied by conspicuous hand gestures, Camila spoke more than once of how she loved being an AirDine host. “I was 100 percent behind the idea the moment I first learned about it. I love to piddle in the kitchen, but I live alone. Having someone to cook for allows me to do what I wouldn’t otherwise be able to do: cook and eat with others!” She clapped her hands together in front of her face with the word “others.”
Like most hosts I spoke with, Camila also admitted that guests were not exactly knocking down her door to eat, though she did have some devoted followers. “I’ll get about one a week, which surprises me. Did you see all the restaurants around here?” I had. You could not visit Camila’s apartment without passing two or three within a two-block radius, regardless of the direction of your approach.
Others have similarly commented on eaters’ initial reluctance to participate in these platforms, from hosts to angel investors with ownership equity. When asked to explain this apparent lack of demand, often in cities where eating out has become as commonplace as using Uber, the answers I got were mixed. Some pointed out that the hosts are the ones in control of the situation. They have home field advantage. It is their house, after all. For eaters it feels like, well, going to a complete stranger’s place to eat, which is not something we are used to doing.
One individual, an investor, put this advantage in the following colorful—if dark hues are a color—way: “You might be going to the home of an ax murderer; at least when you are a host, if your guest does turn out to be a deranged killer, you can take comfort in knowing the location of your knives. Heck, you’ll be holding one some of the time while you’re cooking.”
Others speculated that not knowing more about how the food is being prepared might turn away some eaters, creating anxiety over whether their meal is actually safe to eat. Camila made reference to this at one point in the evening, after we had eaten, I noticed. Rolling the fat end of her upright port glass between her palms, she explained, “Cooks know how their food was prepared; they made it, so they should trust that it’s safe to eat. Guests, on the other hand, almost have to take it on faith that they’re eating something that won’t get them sick.”
Having come from Colombia, Camila also thought that some of the barriers to the business are cultural. With the port glass now resting on the table, freeing her hands to animate and accentuate her points, she continued: “I was raised thinking it was perfectly normal to open your house to people. Then”—bam!, both hands slapped the tabletop—“I came to America and learned quickly that not everyone thinks and eats that way.”
While seemingly unconnected, these two points, about control and culture, are closely related. The connecting thread: social distance. We generally do not talk, let alone eat, with people all that different from us anymore. And as for strangers: we all know what we teach our kids at a young age about them. Not that the advice doesn’t have its merits. But those merits come with costs, too.
Camila made the connection, noting the cultural differences between what she knew in her country of birth and those she has experienced in the United States. At one point in our conversation, right after the bandeja paisa had been served, she quipped, “For such a free country, you sure seem afraid to interact with people you don’t know.”
Camila would have surely disapproved of the aforementioned “ax murderer” remark. That that would be the first thing to pop into someone’s mind when contemplating eating at another’s house says something about the state of things. Rather than worrying about not having anything to talk about—or a million other things—their mind goes there?
The social friction rubbing political discourse raw today, where some think it is okay to publicly call Mexicans rapists and where we are quick to associate strangers with ax murders, also colors concerns over food safety when it comes to peer-to-peer food sharing. Camila was trying to make precisely this point. This is not to suggest that Americans recoil at the thought of eating at another person’s house. We might have our concerns—such as when I attend family reunions in the summer and see potato salad sitting for hours under the hot sun. Yet we generally keep those concerns to ourselves, for the sake of keeping the peace, while at the same time silently making sure to steer away from anything questionable.
I am not suggesting that eating at a stranger’s home is risk free. But something is socially amiss when the default position becomes strangers and their food cannot be trusted, even though, I should add, these meal sharing platforms monitor their chefs’ cooking spaces. Meal sharing businesses, at least the ones I am familiar with, always have someone come and inspect prospective chefs’ kitchens before they are admitted to their “team.” Skirting city or state health inspectors, as some of these platforms do, does not mean their chefs skirt common sense. These platforms generally require some level of food safety training, which is more than I can say about, say, Uber Eats, an online platform for meal ordering and delivery—meal handling comes with risks too, let’s not forget.
In Colombia, Camila was raised to give people the benefit of the doubt when it came to eating at their home. “You just trust them,” is how she blithely put it. The risk of that position, of course, is illness: an upset stomach, perhaps some diarrhea, and, yes, maybe even death. These are real risks, to be sure. But those risks are no different from those you incur when you eat at the house of a friend or family member. Why the double standard?
I have already given the answer. Social distance. It is hard to give strangers the benefit of doubt if we are worried about them being ax murderers.
Worrying about whether a host might be harboring a killer in the kitchen—perhaps E. coli lurking on the counter—is not even the worst of it. As Camila explained, having brown skin and a “Spanish sounding surname” has forced her to confront those lesser angels that have taken control of a small but vocal percentage of our electorate.
With her normally “vocal” arms and hands lying silent, Camila looked at me. The pain in her voice gave her words more weight than any physical gesture could. “Being from south of the border has cost me.” She then told me about an instance in which she had received feedback for a meal she never served: vile comments that centered on her ethnicity and questioned her legal right to live in the country. “A hit-and-run job,” based solely on information contained in her profile, was how she explained the written attack.
At that moment, her hands came back to life. Not the exaggerated movements that I had grown accustomed to seeing: something else, not at all animated by excitement or pleasure. Shaking.
“There are so many people today who think the only good Muslim is a dead Muslim, who hate people from Mexico and Central and South America, and African Americans too. The risk for bigots using something like AirDine has nothing to do with food safety. The risk lies in going to someone’s house and being greeted at the door by brown skin or by someone wearing a turban.”
It is an interesting, and in equal parts sad, question: how much of this social resistance to peer-to-peer meal sharing is about fears over food safety and how much is about fear, period? I kept my ears open from that point on for similar experiences among meal sharing hosts, especially those with dark skin or non-Anglo sounding surnames. Regrettably, Camila’s was not the only story animated by racism, ignorance, and fear.
How we can overcome those obstacles, through sharing, no less, is the subject of this and the remaining chapters.
The stories I have been telling, while informed by first-person accounts, are plucked from a single, fixed point. There is nothing wrong with this approach. Journalists, politicians, social scientists—heck, everyone—makes conclusions and tells stories based on one-off encounters. I am not questioning this practice. Let’s also be realistic. It is hard enough getting people to make time in their busy lives to have someone like me intrude and ask a bunch of questions. To do that twice—that is a bridge too far for all but the most patient.
When presented, however, with the opportunity to talk to someone twice, you treat it as Yogi Berra told us to treat a fork in the road. You take it.
I was introduced to Catherine, a commercial real estate agent, through a mutual friend. She had been in Colorado only a month, having moved to Denver with her husband and daughter. She had come from a suburb of Chicago—the neighborhood, a gated community. Catherine described wanting to become part of her new community, which is what attracted her to a local food cooperative. “We’ve always been active in our community; we want that same feeling here,” was how she explained it. That “community” back in Chicagoland sounded quite exclusive, involving membership in a posh country club, the Commercial Club of Chicago (I had to do an Internet search on that one; it’s an elite club, founded in 1877), and PTA committees in their child’s private school. The community she had left was a monoculture: almost all white, exclusively affluent, and mostly right of center in its politics.
Catherine seemed to be on track to reproduce what she’d had, and who she had been, while living in Chicago. She and her husband picked the community that they did in part because of its country club—“one of the best in the state,” she exclaimed proudly. As for the new neighborhood, while not gated, it might as well have been. The price of a neighboring house listed for sale made it clear that this was a place for One Percenters.
An urban food co-op membership was something entirely new for Catherine.
The demographics of the cooperative looked a lot like Catherine’s household, if you include in that comparison the nanny, cleaning person, yard person, and fishpond person. Yes, a fishpond person: in front of the house was a kitchen table sized pond with a bridge you had to cross to reach the front door. “Your own moat,” I said jokingly. Anecdotes aside, the co-op was diverse, socially, culturally, politically, and economically.
Having navigated the moat, I crossed the threshold and entered a large sitting room. Moments later, Catherine and I were seated comfortably in a room decorated with pieces of oversized plush furniture, their bulk amplified by throw pillows and blankets in an array of colors and fabrics. The décor gave the impression that the room would swallow anything louder than a whisper. I recall that as I sat down, there was an eruption of dust from the soft cushions, a type of nonvocal groan from something being put to work for the first time in days. Against the low early morning dawn, sun danced off particles that seemed suspended in space, carried by currents that I could not explain.
Most of that first meeting was spent discussing the co-op’s most worthy and most challenging elements. For someone who had initially justified joining the co-op to become better integrated into the community, Catherine did not spent much time talking about people, other than her kids and husband. Squinting as the sunlight poked through a window behind me and aimed its rays at her now illuminated face, she told me the real reason why she had joined the co-op. Two kept creeping into the conversation, cost and nutrition, as when she explained that the value of her co-op membership resided principally in her ability to “get inexpensive fresh, locally sourced, wholesome food.”
The challenges she faced, meanwhile, were significant. This inexpensive, wholesome food did come at a cost.
Catherine portrayed the volunteering assignments as “at times uncomfortable.” This particular cooperative went beyond the pay-to-play model; it strongly encouraged members to volunteer as part of their “dues.” These initial tasks took many forms, from working on the store floor to being on various committees and serving as a co-op ambassador, where you drum up support and members for the organization.
Catherine was coy when asked to explain what she meant by being uncomfortable. “I just don’t have much in common with a lot of the people I work with,” was the closest she came to providing an explanation. It was not until near the end of the interview, when I asked if she had any memorable stories involving a co-op experience, that I managed to get some insight into what not having “much in common” meant.
She recounted two stories. Each involved individuals with backgrounds and income brackets different from those in the community she’d left behind in Chicago. The specifics of both, while interesting, are secondary to the fact that Catherine’s early anxiety about volunteering resided in her being made to interact with people whom she was not used to interacting with. In these accounts, she talked about “having to work with someone who spoke broken English.” Her first story involved volunteering alongside an immigrant from Vietnam. In the second, the person had been born and raised in Nicaragua. Although Catherine mentioned specifically the language barrier, her words betrayed a deeper unease. At one point, she remarked, “I’ve interacted with immigrants but usually on an employer-employee basis.” Which I took to mean This is the first time I’ve had to interact with immigrants as social equals.
Catherine’s feelings were not unique. Scholars have reported similar findings in both controlled experimental designs and noncontrived social settings. Within a short time of meeting, people with greater status begin to disengage from conversations, as evidenced by less head nodding and laughing, when paired with someone “below” them in the social hierarchy.4 If the conversation does continue, it likely devolves into a one-way talk, where those with greater status resort to nonengaged head nods as they scan the crowd for someone more worthy of their attention.5 In a word, these exchanges tend to make those involved uncomfortable.
Fast-forward two years.
I reentered Catherine’s life on a hot August day. Given the hundred-degree-plus temps, we decided it best to reconvene in the cool confines of her house. To say the room of our first meeting had undergone a makeover would not have done justice to the scope of change. “Reborn” might be a better term. Besides the cold, slick, and reflective leather that had replaced the warm, textured, and absorbing plush, the room had gotten taller. Soaring vaulted satin ceilings had replaced the orange-peel textured drywall that previously rested within jumping reach overhead. On entering the room, I was greeted by a chocolate dachshund—also new. His bark echoed through the room as if we were in the gymnasium at my son’s elementary school.
Over iced coffees and chocolate chip cookies we discussed food, politics, and her cooperative experiences to date. At first blush, things looked much the same. Her real estate practice was thriving. She and her family were also making time to enjoy their country club membership. Catherine had even gotten her feet wet sloshing around in state politics by helping fundraise for local Republican candidates.
It was not until we delved into her comings, goings, and doings with the co-op that I was able to discern some meaningful differences in this Catherine compared with the one I had interviewed two years prior.
Catherine’s participation in the cooperative had not waned. If anything, it appeared to have increased. By her account, she was “more involved in co-op politics and management now than ever.” Her daughter, a teenager, had even started volunteering, serving on a committee charged with expanding outreach opportunities.
Recalling our first interview and the anxiety I had detected in some of Catherine’s responses, I asked her to tell me about any especially memorable volunteer experiences. The resulting conversation was wide ranging and wandering. After two years, Catherine had done about anything and everything one could do as a volunteer—she’d done committee work and website design, served as checker and bagger and as house party host to get the word out about the co-op, stocked shelves, and picked up produce from local growers.
In contrast to our first interview, Catherine made no reference to language barriers. I found this especially striking, given that she continued to volunteer alongside diverse populations, including people who spoke English as a second, or even third, language. I wanted to hear especially about her experiences in working alongside co-op members who were different from her and her family—in other words, not white and most definitely not affluent. One particular exchange is worth recounting. It involved what she called an “outreach project to a Hispanic neighborhood.”
About a year earlier, the co-op had made an intentional effort to engage more directly with surrounding disadvantaged neighborhoods and households in an attempt to, in Catherine’s words, “do something about food security in the area.” A predominately Hispanic community was located just miles away from the store, in a USDA defined food desert, no less. Cooperative members, some of whom called that neighborhood home, began engaging with households to learn about their food needs in the hope that the co-op could better serve them.
“I ended up on that committee in part because I had a large enough vehicle,” Catherine recalled. The outreach committee was composed primarily of native Spanish speakers. It quickly became apparent that transportation was going to be a real barrier to participation. Catherine again: “Not everyone had a car, or at least a reliable one. No one had anything large enough to hold all of us. That’s where I came into the picture, to help bus people around the neighborhood.”
It was during this discussion that her past political activities, namely, as a partisan fundraiser, entered the picture. Holding a half-eaten cookie in her left hand, she told me how experiences with the cooperative had changed her attitudes toward immigrants. “If my friends back in Chicago could have seen me loading up my SUV with who I had in it.” She was chuckling now, covering her mouth with the back of her right hand as she tried to finish chewing. “We weren’t exactly bleeding hearts”—as in, progressive Democrats. Her hands returned to her lap, cookie and laughter both gone. “We were just the opposite.” I noticed that she included herself in that group and that she used past tense. “Generally, we supported candidates who were all about being tough on crime, and that included being hard on those here illegally.” Her voice got quieter, perhaps with regret.
I asked whether her attitudes had changed at all. She replied faintly, a wistful look in her eyes, admitting that her political beliefs “had evolved.”
I’m always careful when broaching a person’s politics, even more so in today’s climate. I tried to navigate these waters delicately. In the end, Catherine identified issues such as immigration reform, poverty, and health care in which her beliefs had moved “closer to the center than where they were a few years back.”
It was undoubtedly an interesting admission. But why had she changed her mind?
“There are two takeaways that I have from all those experiences,” Catherine said, referring to her time with the cooperative and its members. “The first, it’s easy to be hard on a population when you never have to interact with them.” If only we all displayed this much self-reflectiveness and honesty. “And second, there is something distinct about the cooperative experience.”
And here’s where she brought up sharing. “There’s something to be said about sharing a business, where you have a blurring of lines between producers and consumers, owners and workers.” Just like that, unprompted, this registered Republication went there, talking about the virtues of a sharing economy. To justify this position, she started by talking about efficiencies, perhaps as much for her sake as for mine—for example, “There are labor efficiencies that come with avoiding worker turnover by having the owners do the work.” This proved a short-lived volley, however, as the conversation quickly turned to the noneconomic virtues of working and owning together.
“At the end of the day, there’s something even more valuable than money that these places are generating.” Catherine was talking about cooperatives specifically, though I am sure she would be comfortable generalizing to any platform that meaningfully brought people from diverse backgrounds together. “Let’s not forget, economies work best when people don’t hate each other. So that ought to be priority number one: community building”—there was that intonation again.
With that, she stood and grabbed the now bare cookie plate. Time’s up, I thought. Her daughter needed to be picked up from a friend’s house. While walking to the kitchen, Catherine said over her shoulder, “I’m still a pretty traditional gal in a lot of ways.” Then she stopped at the kitchen island and turned to face me, resting her plate on the granite.
With a smile and a wink, she added, “But I’m loosening up.”
You were introduced to Josh at the book’s beginning. Josh, to recall, is a dairy farmer in Massachusetts. He raises Brown Swiss, cows that are widely praised for their milk’s fat-to-protein ratio, which makes it ideal for cheese making. And he belongs to a unique cooperative in which members share land, animals, equipment, and buildings. Upon buying into the cooperative, Josh joined three other households and had immediate access to infrastructure, land, and animals—specifically a small greenhouse, certified organic fields, two machine sheds, a barn and dairy parlor, and a herd of Brown Swiss.
I am returning to my visit with Josh thanks to a conversation we’d had about the “culture shock” he experienced when first exposed to a world where “sharing took precedence over individual property.”
Culture shock?
The individual ownership economy’s reach is deep, shaping not only what we do but also how we think and feel. This influence is not always apparent. Often it reveals itself only when one is confronted with a situation that doesn’t conform to preconceived norms and expectations—culture shock.
The shock comes from having our individualism challenged. We value independence, for good reason. This, however, should not be confused with giving selfishness the green light. You can be independent without being a prick. We need to ask what we’re producing with the status quo. Kids as young as three, after handling coins for a short period of time, have been shown repeatedly through experimental design to be less helpful and generous to their peers when compared with others who handled things such as similar-sized buttons and candy.6
Part of the reason, then, why many do not give a shit about sharing, to go back to Adam Berk’s colorful quote at the chapter’s beginning, is that we are socialized not to. Should we really be surprised to learn, then, that people are uncomfortable when placed in situations lubricated as much by trust and social capital as by money and contracts?
As my interview with Josh neared its end, we found refuge from the hot sun on the front porch of his decorative Victorian Painted Lady. I remember being frustrated, ironically, by a light breeze. Doing more harm than good, it circulated out the cool, shadowed relief with air that felt as if it had been blown from a hair dryer. The only consolation was that it was scented by the sweet smell of the wisteria vines and their blossoms overtaking the lattice next to the house. With me sitting on an Adirondack chair and Josh on a swing, he told me about what he called “the transition”—a yearlong period that began just prior to his family’s move to the cooperative.
Josh and his wife, Rosemary, had belonged to the cooperative for about five years. When they joined, their youngest child was fourteen and their oldest sixteen. He recalled what it was like to move into this new world and come to terms with it.
“In some ways, the kids had the hardest and easiest time adjusting.” Leaning forward, Josh reached into his back pocket, pulled out his wallet, and showed me a family picture. It had been taken on the steps of the porch we were sitting on. His children are now both grown up, one in college, the other enlisted in the army, and their photos act as proxies for the real thing. With his eyes fixed on the picture, Josh added, “They were just dumbfounded by the idea.” The idea being that their mom and dad co-owned their farm with three other families. “And that meant they shared things too”—a nod of the head in the direction of the boys’ picture at the mention of they.
He recounted, for example, how his sons had loved raiding the family garden pre-transition. “They’d come home from school and spend hours playing with their toy tractors in the dirt and eating whatever was ready to be eaten,” he explained with a smile and with pride in his voice, adding, “When we moved, they had to learn that the garden wasn’t all theirs.” The biggest challenge, however, was learning to share the strawberry bed. Previously they’d had to share only with the birds, an act made less painful thanks to netting. “To share with the other families, that almost killed them that first year.”
It took that first year for his sons to get used to their new reality. But Josh assured me that they eventually “came around to things.”
Josh admitted to going through a transition period too, along with his wife, which speaks to the extent that sole ownership is normalized in our culture. Here were two adults who had actively sought out a new way of life. Before the day of legally becoming co-owners, they had invested dozens of hours with an attorney, committed to a six-figure investment (co-owning a farm isn’t free, or even cheap), and participated in countless get-togethers with their then prospective partners. Intellectually, they were both 100 percent behind the idea. Josh mentioned how they “both knew” they wanted to do something like this. It was something they had known for a really long time. And yet, these thoughts of co-ownership were initially not strong enough to override the unspoken socialization most of us receive over the course of living “normal” lives in an ownership economy.
Josh explained it this way: “I’ll admit this now, that at first I think we liked the idea of cooperative ownership more than the actual practice. But we got used to it, with the help of the other community members”—that was another interesting point, that he referred to his co-owners as community members.
Five years in, where are Josh and his wife at now? With the “resocialization process complete”—Josh’s term, though I could not have put it better myself—it sounded as if they would not want to live any other way.
Here’s to establishing sharing habits early. Recognizing too that what is first uncomfortable can be made more manageable, normal even, when confronted together. We should not expect all types of sharing to work overnight.
So: if at first we don’t succeed …