Food

For 4 years, I lived in the presence of a 10-gallon crock pot, a wok measuring 30 inches across, and colanders large enough to hold 20 pounds of potatoes. Every week I would use a lighter to manually light the pilot lights of a massive stovetop with 10 industrial burners, exhaust fans blaring above me, and start preparing 40 servings of food. I wasn't a live-in chef at some restaurant, but a resident of pika, a cooperative student house affiliated with MIT. pika, a wacky 3 story student-run house of around 30 residents, became my home-away-from-home for those loving, wonderful years. It was at pika that I learned about my place in the world, how my actions touch the lives of those around me, and how to find the time away from textbooks to pursue unconventional ideas. It was also within those walls that I had my first real experiences with cooking.

My freshman year at MIT, I joined pika's public mealplan, where in exchange for a small* sum of money and 2 hours of cooking each week, I was fed delicious meals every day of the week. At first I assumed the role of "little cook", my responsibilities mostly limited to washing and chopping vegetables, looking over pots, and making rice, under the supervision of a more experienced cook. I gradually developed a love for being in the kitchen, and started listening to more experienced cooks share advice on how to plan meals. Within a few months I had become a "big cook", and was assigned my own "little cook" to do the dirty work for me.

The guidelines for cooking at pika were simple, yet by no means easy. Dinners should contain adequate sources of protein, carbohydrates, and vegetables. They should have a complete vegan option for those on mealplan who don't eat animal products. Cooking shifts are only 2 hours long, so everything needs to be relatively quick to prepare. And finally, each dinner's budget was only $75, for around 30-40 servings. Here, I will share the lessons I've learned from cooking with these restrictions.

*At the time, mealplan cost $180/semester for non-residents, coming out to around $1.50/meal.

Lesson 1: Vegan Protein

At some point, a resident of pika who was particularly concerned with getting enough protein in their diet calculated that 30g of protein per serving was a sufficient quantity. Since then, I have aimed to reach 900g of protein for a whole meal, about 600g coming from "primary" protein sources and 300g coming from other foods. For all of the analysis below, I will assume that I am cooking for 30 people, so anyone cooking for a different number can scale accordingly. Most of the time, the primary protein source forms the base of the meal. The most common proteins at pika were the following:

Beans

Beans come either canned or dried. My favorite are black beans, probably a relic of my Brazilian heritage. Each can of black beans contains just under 30g of protein, meaning that you need just about 2/3 can/person. Costco sells cans at around $1 per can, yielding a total of $20 per dinner on beans alone, or $0.67/person. A better deal is to cook your own dried beans, which can be purchased in bulk from Azure for under $2/lb. Dried beans have around 45g protein per cup, so you need ~1/2 cup per person or 13 cups for pika. This comes out to around $10 per dinner, or $0.33/person.

Tofu

Tofu is sold at Costco for around $6 for 4 packs of tofu. Each pack has around 40g protein, meaning 15 packs per dinner, at a cost of $22.50, or $$0.75/person.

Seitan

Seitan is made from vital wheat gluten, which can be bought from Azure in bulk for $7.50/lb. Wheat gluten is approximately 3/4 protein by weight, so we need 800g flour, for a total cost of ~$13 per meal, or $0.43/person. Note that 800g gluten doesn't actually yield much seitan, so often we make more than this quantity for a single meal.

Tempeh

Tempeh is sold from Azure at around $0.30/oz, with each ounce containing 5g protein. This means 120oz for a meal, for a total of $36, or $1.20/person.

Lesson 2: Tricks For Serving People

Some ingredients are expensive, but are still "necessary" to have for whatever combination of dishes you're making. Ideally you would want everyone to get a little bit of it, but in practice the first people in line may take more than their fair share. The easiest way to deal with this is to premix this more-desired expensive ingredient into a larger, cheaper-per-volume dish. For example, one time I made a pasta dish with a side of fancy vegan sausage. I knew that a small fraction of residents did not want to eat fake meats at all, so I couldn't just mix all of the vegan sausage into the pasta. However, if I left the sausage by itself, the first few people in line would all take more than their allotted ~3 pieces. As a solution, I mixed the sausage into about half of the pasta, and left the other half of the pasta sausageless. Since I had made way more than enough pasta for everyone, everyone got to try to sausage!

If mixing your fancy ingredient into something else isn't viable, what I would do instead is to make it as frustrating as possible to serve yourself of the item. Unfortunately, any concrete examples of foods escape me, but I clearly remember setting out a small quantity of a particular food item with only a tiny coffee spoon or chopsticks for people to serve themselves with. Certainly, someone could spend a long time serving themselves more than their 1/30 of this ingredient, but they would look like an asshole as others piled up behind them in the serving line.