by Paul Ho, Litchatte Writer
Coming out of Covid, we will hopefully, soon be attending lots of potlucks again. I wrote the following essay a few years ago and forgot about it until recently…and hope to be applying the skills and wisdom I remembered at some tasty upcoming dinning events.
I consider myself a pot luck veteran, having attended hundreds of them over the years. Being a vegetarian, I always bring something I can eat myself, because there’s a good chance that my item might be the only veggie item on the table. One of my vegetarian friends told me her strategy is to eat most of her own dish before she even goes to a potluck. I too, sometimes eat a salad first to fill up on something healthy so I won’t be starving when I get there and wind up getting bloated by eating too much rich, calorie-heavy food.
A lot of people bring overly creamy food to pot lucks which I don’t like, or dishes full of beans and garlic which can be very gassy for a social gathering, so I select my items carefully. The first time I pass through the pot luck line, I take very small portions of whatever looks like it might be interesting. There’s only so much room on a dish, so I tried to plan carefully, looking up ahead in the line to see what might be coming up.
I am quietly trying to determine which food I like best before I come back for a second pass at the line to load up on my faves. I know that if I take a full plate of food the first time through, I’ll be stuck with it and it’s hard to tell how something will taste just by the way it looks. If my plate is already full of food that I’m not going to eat, it will be difficult to go back for a new plate with everyone watching. It would make me look piggish and wasteful. And I certainly don’t want that as my potluck image.
On the other hand, I have be careful they don’t run out of the best dishes before I can get back to scoop up some more. There are usually a lot of people backed up on the line and if the dish in question is extremely attractive, it might all get eaten by the time I return to get my larger second portion. In fact, the best dishes are almost always gone very quickly, so I grab my share of the “beautiful foods” on my first time around. You see, all this takes planning and finesse.
If I were going to administrate a potluck, I think I would ask everyone to label their food and list ingredients. Anyone who has been to a lot of potlucks, knows that much of the time spent moving through the line is about trying to figure out what the various items actually are and what they are made of so that you won’t inadvertently take something yucky and be stuck with it.
If there is meat in a dish, we veggies won’t eat it and if it overly spicy, certain guests should be duly warned because a lot of people can’t tolerate hot food. Others have food allergies and you could even kill someone by feeding them an item that they are allergic to. If it was up to me, I would have people fill out little ingredient cards and put them in front of each dish. This would let everyone know what’s in them so the guests wouldn’t have to intuitively figure out what to take and what is better left alone as they move slowly through the line.
There are also some interesting mathematics around potlucks. Suppose thirty people attend a potluck and they each bring enough food for eight people. If each portion makes up 25% of a meal (a conservative estimate), then each guest will have brought enough for two meals per person, giving you a total of sixty meals whereas you only have thirty people to feed. So a lot of food is going to be left over, no matter how you “slice” it.
Then, if the most desirable foods get gobbled up first, (and you know they will), you will have enough of the least desirable leftovers to create thirty more meals that have to be packed up and stored, or somehow distributed.
In other words, you have lots of leftovers that no one really wants and you have to figure out what to do with them. When dinner is finished, people usually refuse to take their own food home for fear of looking selfish or because they already have tons of it at home. You, the host, are left to deal with enough extra food to feed thirty people, and to make things worse, it is food that that nobody wants. In the end, it has to be disposed of somehow by the exhausted host who also has to clean up the bulk of the mess although there may have been some superficial attempt at cleaning by some of the guests before they give up and sneak away.
Then there are always minor problems like not having enough serving spoons around the house for thirty dishes, the difficulty of maneuvering drinks back to their seats without spilling them and having desserts which require separate plates and utensils to schlep around. The thirty serving dishes that the food came in also have to be returned clean to the guests before they go home. All of these problems have to be managed successfully before you can collapse on the couch clutching the remote in your hand after an exhausting evening.
Potlucks are fun and the food can be delicious, but just like politics or relationships, they sometimes require difficult and complex manipulations.
Cover Image – Clipartsuggest.com Share a meal or a tasty comment with Paul or Litchatte Editor Murray Ellison in Dialogue Box below and we will respond in a timely manner – Bon Appetit!
by 
