I have been a food lover/high-end cook for over 30 years. It is by far my favorite hobby. I am not a food snob (famous last words in that I enjoy eating anything that is thought out and well-prepared.
My big issue/rant is all of the Pot Luck lunches, parties etc. at this time of year. Everyone brings 10 times more food than anyone can ever eat. You then end up with all of this left over food that no one wants. And the spread? It’s a total shotgun approach of cuisines and dishes that end up a total mess.
Yet, when I have tried to limit the “bring-mass quantities-of-whatever-you-want” by suggesting a a theme and a sign-up list for main dish/sides/dessert/etc my friends, coworkers, family just end up ignoring it.
Anyway, I realize that this is a losing battle and I just now go along with the flow. I just needed to vent and see if anyone has any suggestions to reduce the waste and confusion of PL parties. Thanks.
I’ve been in charge of a few potlucks at work. Previous gatherings run by other people were what you describe – total shotgun, whatever-I-feel-like, random collection of food. When I took over I instituted the sign-up sheet. They’re always cookouts, with mgmt supplying burgers and dogs and veggie burgers, so a loose theme is already there. Still, I didn’t try to dictate “classic American cookout fare” – if someone wanted to bring guac and salsa and another eggrolls … who cares? But I did have the sheet divided into categories – sides, sandwich fixings/condiments, desserts, drinks, paper goods, etc. That gave plenty for the non-cooks to choose from, while avoiding having 23 sides and no desserts or 8 people bringing potato chips.
The quantity thing can’t be helped, I don’t think. A “batch” of something is what it is, and if you have more than 4 or 5 people bringing things, you’ll have more food than what people will eat. People just take home what wasn’t eaten of their dish. What you CAN do is limit things to one dish per person to avoid the people who decide they’ll bring their famous potato salad AND some chips AND a cake AND some ice …
In my experience, it’s not necessary to tell folks what to bring. In any group larger than a half-dozen or so, it generally tends to average out. And the “too much food” thing also helps to compensate: If fewer people brought desserts than should have, then the folks who brought desserts just take home less leftovers.
What can help, though, is to have a sign-up sheet where everyone writes what they’re bringing, with no quotas. That way, the later folks who are having a hard time deciding what to bring can look at the list and say “Oh, nobody else is bringing baked beans, I should do that”, or whatever.
And the eclectic mish-mash of styles and cuisines is a feature, not a bug. That’s part of what makes potlucks great.
I absolutely hate potluck suppers. Hot food becomes lukewarm. Cold food becomes lukewarm. Good food gets eaten quickly. Some people just bring a bag of ice and mooch off of others. Usually you don’t start eating until latecomers have finished arriving. I have to waste time cooking for someone else even if I’m not hungry.
I’m sure I can think up some more complaints, but that’s good for starters.
Actually, no. Everyone brings enough food for everyone to eat. The problem is that when ten people bring food for ten people, you have food for 100. The numbers aren’t that stark, of course, but that’s the principle.
Not exactly. Typically, they bring what amounts to multiple servings (you want more than three or four people to get some of what you brought) that amounts to two or three times as much as the TOTAL food they can eat.
You need to eat with a better/smarter class of people.
Seriously, though, below is the most sensible approach I’ve seen. The inclusion of drinks and non-food items can go a long way toward minimizing leftovers, and it’s nice to let those who don’t cook make a meaningful contribution.
The excess food problem also depends on the demographics of your potluck. If it’s mostly families, and each family brings enough food for a family, then you’re fine. If it’s mostly single folks (or at least, folks attending singly), and each one brings enough for a family, then you get way too much.
After many, many, many potlucks in my 29 years working with this company, last year I had to call it quits. In the Halloween-through-New Year’s timeframe our office (8 people) had SIX potlucks, each one with increasingly obscene amounts of food. I’m talking enough food to feed several families for a week. It’s nice, I guess, for my coworkers to be so generous, but my gawd, filling every horizontal space in the breakroom–multiple times in the space of 2 months–is just ridiculous. The one positive thing to come from the potluck overkill is that my New Year’s Resolution was to not eat anything at work that I didn’t bring in myself–I’ve stuck to it and lost 15 pounds.
Ai! My department only has about three potlucks a year. This year, due to some unusual circumstances, we ended up with another one, just two weeks before one of the usual ones, and that was difficult enough, since I needed to come up with two different dishes that would work well. I can’t even fathom six in two months.
You’re fine, except for the fact that if there are 20 guests and you bring enough food for a family of 4, then each person gets to eat one tablespoon of whatever you brought (slight exaggeration, I guess).
Consider yourselves lucky. I occasionally attend these singles gatherings wherein people are assigned to bring foods based on the surname initials (e.g. A-K bring main dishes, L to S bring side dishes, T to Z bring desserts). Almost invariably though, people ignore these assignments. We wind up with way too many cookies, chips, and cupcakes, leaving us with a disappointing selection of actual foods.
That’s because a lot of these folks are lazy and uncreative. It’s a lot easier for them to just grab a box of cookies or a bag of chips than to actually create anything. Heck, they don’t even try to bring a fruit platter or anything more interesting. Nope, it’s all cookies, chips, and cupcakes.
We have a potluck on everyone’s birthday. There’s only 9 of us and the birthdays are pretty spread out through the year so it’s not too bad. But I’ve had some co-workers who I really didn’t want to eat what they brought because of some hygiene issues on their parts. Fortunately I no longer work with them… There was one woman in particular after I was in her house I said I’d never again eat anything she brought, her house looked like something out of “Hoarders”.
Church potluck? Score! We do the alpha split thing, and it works out well. Love the church potlucks.
Work potluck? Meh. We don’t have them often, it’s easier to go out to eat. When we do, we have a specific theme and a sign up for what is needed. We do have the one odd worker that brings desserts no matter what the theme is. She thinks she’s the dessert goddess. However, she also has three German Shepherds. Hairy lemon bars… nom. We always take one to be nice, then toss it.
Ugh, work potlucks. Even when you do a sign up sheet and ask people to write down what they’ll bring to avoid duplicates or having all desserts, at least one quarter of the people just don’t fucking bother to bring what they said they would, always with a dumbass excuse. So you still end up with three plates of brownies and 4 bags of chips and some warm flat cola.
It’s always, always a better idea to ask people how much they’re willing to chip in, then collect the money, then get take out Japanese. Everyone’s covered, including vegetarians. The kind of morons who claim that they “don’t eat that raw meat stuff” are probably the kind of people who could make themselves a meal out of potato chips so they can dine off the vending machines.
Potlucks can be good, if they involve picnic blankets and sunshine and people who know their way around a kitchen. Work potlucks rarely involve any of these things and are to be avoided.
in that I enjoy eating anything that is thought out and well-prepared.