Anybody ever belonged to a more traditional meal-swap group? This is like that, but bigger and you don't actually know who's making your food.
I have a lot of reservations about this, but I find it rather interesting. I guess I like the idea that some people are doing it, but I wouldn't want to sign on yet. Even if you get over the psychological and physical concerns, your food is going to be awfully cold by the time you get it.
Why Home-Cooking From Total Strangers May Be the Future of Food
A few weeks ago in Midtown Manhattan, I watched six slices of vegetable quiche change hands between two women who never even laid eyes on each other.
Leni Calas had cooked the quiche – peppers, mushrooms, asparagus heads, Gruyère – in her kitchen in Astoria, inside a modest yellow-brick house with an inflatable pool and a vegetable patch out front. She’d packed up the dinner with an arugula salad on the side, the dressing in its own little container.
Then on cue, at 4:28 in the afternoon, a bike messenger named Gaetano sporting an Occupy Wall Street T-shirt turned up to pedal the meal to Manhattan. It was 102 degrees outside.
"Can I have a glass of water?" he wanted to know first. He and Calas had never met before, either, although it turned out standing in Calas’ kitchen that they knew some of the same Occupy people.
"Yes," Calas said, as if this domestic scene – the cyclist in her kitchen, the homemade quiche, the carry-out containers traveling the wrong direction – were entirely ordinary. "But you’re going to have to help yourself." She was still folding another family’s dinner into a brown paper bag, the other half of what she planned to feed her own family that night.
Calas recently joined a year-old food cooperative called Mealku that's built on the premise of people who don’t know each other sharing homemade food, with no money exchanged. If you’ve ever belonged to a meal-swap – I cook Monday if you cook Wednesday – picture scaling that up to an entire city, far beyond anyone’s natural circle of trust. Ted D’Cruz-Young, Mealku's creator, says the network currently has a "few thousand" members plus 31 bike messengers in New York City, with plans to expand to other cities later this year. These are the pioneers of the food frontier of "collaborative consumption," the growing niche of the economy where people are sharing instead of buying all kinds of consumables (cars, apartments, tools) in a behavior that seems less eccentric by the day.
On his way from Queens to Manhattan, Gaetano made an additional stop before arriving at the MetLife building in Midtown (there was a bit of delay getting the quiche through the security desk downstairs). In a break room up on the 17th floor, Nicole Horne, a working mom who buys and sells commercial real estate, was waiting to take the food home to her husband and two kids in Park Slope.
This literal food chain, from Queens to Manhattan to Brooklyn, from private kitchen to private kitchen, is meant to skirt the byproducts of the current food system: the top-down regulation, the processed meals, the greasy take-out, the wasted leftovers, the anonymous relationships around everything. Mealku, like a lot of upstart ideas in the sharing economy, has its eye on the much more ambitious goal of rewiring how we relate to each other and the things we consume.
"There are fundamental connections around food we'd like to remake, fundamental connections around commerce and engagement, around participation," says D’Cruz-Young, a 43-year-old former advertising creative with a Scottish accent and a taste for African peasant food (so says his Mealku bio). He knows this sounds intense, and he quickly disarms the sweeping mission with an apt aside. "I don’t know. Maybe I’ve just bitten off more than I can chew."
It turned out, from Queens to Manhattan, that the salad dressing had spilled en route ("we’re still testing the packaging," Karen Lerman, Mealku’s marketing manager, tells me). But Horne later reported that the quiche was fluffy, filling, and reheated well even after a ride on the 4 and R trains. And Gaetano went on to cycle nearly another 20 miles that day.
• • • • •
Four main obstacles stand in the way of scaling up any kind of cooperation around food, beyond the informal leftover swaps between neighbors that have existed for generations.
The first is organizational: How do you sync calendars and cooking plans among hundreds of people or more?
The second is operational: How do you logistically move the food around?
The third is psychological: How do you create trust among so many strangers around something as consequential (and potentially sickening) as food?
The last is regulatory: Is all of this even legal?
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but i would join a cooperative dedicated to providing members with monthly organic food with benefits. 
