Lothlorien Hall is one of the twenty Berkeley Student Co-ops. Lothlorien (Loth) houses 56 students who live cooperatively. 10-20 boarders pay a fee to eat food at Loth and use the kitchen and the facilities (including sauna, garden, hot tub, sun deck, and band room). Student groups such as the Society for Agriculture and Food Ecology, take advantage of our commercial grade kitchen. We have enormous Hobart mixers, graters, and kneaders, a broad range and oven with 5.5 square feet of grill space. We also have a separate room for dish washing, large pot washing are with three huge stainless steel sinks. Food is prepared in massive quantities.
We cooperatively buy, cook, eat, and clean. The facilities are commercial grade and commercially graded. Health inspectors influence the content and tone of discussion and the open or closed status of the kitchen. Except when we are shut down, the kitchen is open 24 hours a day. All food is shared, except for personal items such as cheese, juice, alcohol, and special ingredients.
Every night dinner for 50 is cooked and served. On Saturday there is brunch at noon instead of dinner. Cooking teams of two or three work for 8 or 9 hours total to prepare a meal. Food waste is a big issue in the Kitchen, and it gets discussed often. Read another submission to find out about "Alfred the Puppet Master", "Rat Wars", and "Food Craft".
Alfred smiles so warmly his eyes seem to shut. His traditional garb is a lacy house dress and slippers, and he wears his key on a ribbon around his neck. At first glance, he seems far from scheming, cunning, and manipulation. However, he is the puppet master.
Alfred is the environmental health and sustainability coordinator. He manipulates our supply of dishware, utensils, and waste receptacles. He is a propaganda master and designs incredibly incisive fliers for our education and viewing pleasure .
With the compost bins, he takes half of them out of rotation and secludes them in the recycling area adjacent to the kitchen’s back door. He appropriates them for non-use by surrounding them with a barricade of e-waste and cardboard boxes. Now there are two tall boys and one half bucket in rotation, and that makes them easier to clean because there are only the three. Also, they fill up faster, and kitchen cleaners must empty them instead of just grabbing another one from the line up.
“Cleanliness is sustainability” is the motto on a self-portrait of Alfred on top of his soap box. It takes energy to clean up messes, and once food 
settles it gets crusty and takes more soap, water, and time to clean. Whatever you’re doing in the kitchen, whether it is cooking for yourself or dinner for the whole co-op, doing a food-prep shift, or even the dishes, all these tasks can be done in a way that minimizes mess, or in a way that makes more mess. "A clean hippie is an eco-friendly hippie".
Alfred selectively introduces and sequesters our dishware and utensils. He is not often caught in the act, but occasionally we will discover a stockpile of bigger plates and utensils hidden away in an unused closet. As time progresses, our dishware becomes smaller and smaller, allowing less food per plate. Only child-sized forks are purchased, but we have an endless supply of chopsticks. The rationale behind this is that smaller plates and chopsticks forces us to eat slower, instead of gobbling vast quantities of food. When we have big plates, the food looks so delectable that it is difficult not to pile high. However, the human stomach is a fixed size. Going back for seconds is better than taking huge firsts and forcing your stomach to stretch.
Also, Alfred despises soup. He inflicts wrath upon dinner cooks who serve soup, because then bowls and spoons must also be used, creating more dirty dishes.
Alfred is the hidden Hand that controls. Once you find out is your puppet master, you still can't blame him for it. The way that he clasps his hand together and smiles, you know that he is behind our dearth of man-sized dishware, but we all know that his intentions are for sustainability.
Other important forces shaping the environment of the kitchen include rat wars and health inspections. Anson, a boarder, has rat patrol workshift late at night. His workshift is to kill rats when he sees them and hunt them down in the wee hours when they are out feasting. There are cartoons of rats bearing shields and spears and wearing armor. Our humorous but grave rat predicament is depicted through fliers and signs.
Anson’s favorite rat story: “I mean I’ve killed two by chopping their heads off with knives we still use” One night a mouse was walking across the kitchen with a trap snapped on its tail, and crawled onto one of the racks underneath a pile of lids, and Anson took the lids one by one, and after the last lid, just went chop. “It didn’t bleed out, it was pretty clean,” he reported. Then he cooked the rat on the vegan side of the grill. Anson has watched them chew through sheet metal and concrete. Lengthy discussions of the various mechanisms of rat extermination ensue.
The kitchen is a space where young adults learn and practice food craft. Some food crafts going on include cooking, canning, fermentation, brewing, and baking.
When tomatoes are in season at the Gill Tract, which is an agricultural research plot managed by the agreoecology department of UC Berkeley, cases and cases piled high with ripe tomatoes must be used and preserved. House member’s connections to urban agriculture plots and urban gleaning (dumpstering) provide the house with a cornucopia of very ripe foods that must be used immediately.
We are fermenting a variety of foods, including Kombucha, which is tea that is fermented by a bacteria and fungus colony. The process produces an effervescent elixir that is touted to have numerous health benefits and promote longevity. At Berkeley Bowl or Whole foods, one bottle costs about three dollars. We can produce it at home for a fraction of that price. One of the qualities that elves (those who live at Lothlorien, a reference from Lord of the Rings), are most proud of their ability to do things themselves and together. Culturing foods requires attention to detail and strict sanitation and hand-washing.
So this is a big co-op, and elves like to party. We socially consume alcohol, but have little money to spend on booze. So, we buy two-buck Chuck, but it doesn’t taste so fine. To remedy the situation, we are producing our own alcohol: apple cider, lavendar-chammomile wine, hard lemonade, mint-green hard tea that is about 4% alcohol, Hazelnut dry wine, and ginger sage champagne that is 12% alcohol. When brewing, we use ingredients that are easy to come buy, cheap, local, and organic. We forage herbs from gardens and dumpster cases of ripe apples and pears. Organic evaporated cane sugar is the main substrate that is metabolized by specific yeasts into alcohol.
The wheat sheaf, produced for Special Brunch
, is a piece of food craft that conveys attention to detail and care. It takes about 6-7 hours to create this one loaf of bread. The time intensity reflects the importance of ritual to elves. When one person spends their time to create something beautiful to share, it helps build or community. When you see it you can tell that it took so much time to make it, and you feel loved. Elven celebrations center on food, community, and the passing of the seasons.
We make vegan buttermilk by adding a couple tablespoons of acidic lemon juice and apple cider vinager to soy milk. Then, we make vegan onions rings- soak the onion ring slices in the vegan buttermilk for fifteen minutes before dropping them into a mixture of white flour, corn flour, salt, pepper, and cayenne. When they are evenly coated, we medium fry them in a couple inches of canola oil. When golden brown, remove the sizzling onion rings, add some fresh ground salt and pepper and fresh chopped parsely from the garden. Creative cooking turns 
mundane bulk foods like flour and onions into delectable vegan meals. We use natural processes like fermentation and sprouting to turn basic ingredients into rich, complex dishes.
Ander’s narrative offers a very straightforward and candid description of the Co-Op kitchens. He describes the kitchen in terms of its processes, scale, goals, and even the power dynamics that govern it. The kitchen, as Anders describes, is very large and in constant use, providing food for over fifty hungry students. Its essence is in its capacity. Anders poses a tension between the purpose of the kitchen and its operation. The kitchen is meant to serve the needs of the boarders, but Anders gives a comic depiction of how this is not the reality. He introduces us to Albert, the man in charge, the overseer of the kitchen and the dictator of its rules. Albert is presented to us as a character that perturbs the natural flow that is necessary of the kitchen to sustain the house. He is a nuisance, someone who restricts trash cans and hides useful dishware. He does this under the guise of sustainability, claiming its all for the best interest of the kitchens cleanliness and sustainability. Anders does a magnificent trick with the comic drawing of Albert, underscoring the innocent and dishonest appearance of the menacing force. Anders then goes on to play Devil’s Advocate, offering rationale for Albert’s rules in light of the evident annoyances they cause, as Albert’s somewhat unreasonable demands irk the house: “Also, Alfred despises soup. He inflicts wrath upon dinner cooks who serve soup…” What Anders does here is represent the Kitchen’s goal of sustainability as something that is easier said than done, and one that requires a level of tolerance and effort on the part of the boarders. But Anders further elaborates upon the commitment of the boarders to their desire for sustainability. He points to how they scavenge for seasonal foods that are brought in en masse, but must be quickly consumed before they waste. He points to in house brewing as a way to save on cash, which is tight, and he points to the step by step process for vegan onion rings. Anyone who will do all that just to have vegan onion rings is not void of passion. And if nothing else, it really is passion that Anders evokes from his representation of the kitchen, which could have so easily been painted as a horrid place. Anders speaks of how the rituals of their food craft gives the “Elves of Lothlorien” their sense of community, and how feeding one another is one of their most frequent expressions of love. Lothlorien Kitchen, House Specialty: Edible Passion.
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