No Hutterite Has Ever Chosen What They Eat

A hundred and fifty people eat three meals a day on this colony. That is four hundred and fifty plates a day and a little over a hundred and sixty thousand meals a year, and it has not stopped for one day since this place was built. And not one of those hundred and fifty people has ever chosen what they were going to eat. Not once, at any meal, in their whole life. In this one I show you how that actually works. Where the food comes from, which is mostly not a shop. What the shopping list for a hundred and fifty people is, and why it is shorter than yours is for four. What Hutterite food actually is, since people ask me that more than anything else and the answer is duller and better than they expect. The quantities, which are the part nobody believes. The cellar, and why what we eat in February was decided by somebody else in August. The day the arithmetic doubles and five hundred people arrive. And why there is almost nothing in a bin on this colony, which I did not know was unusual until a woman from town described her own kitchen to me. Then the part I did not expect when I started. I sat down and worked out how much of what goes on that table is actually a decision rather than a given, and I have not been comfortable with the answer since. My husband keeps the books on this colony and has his own channel. SOURCES Lorraine Stevenson, "Secrets of a Hutterite Kitchen," Manitoba Co-operator, 9 May 2014, reviewing Mary-Ann Kirkby — the fifty-two dozen buns on a seventeen-year-old's first bake week, and the rotation of all colony women between seventeen and forty-five. https://www.manitobacooperator.ca/country-crossroads/secrets-of-a-hutterite-kitchen/ Linda Maendel, a Manitoba Hutterite, on how the kitchen rota is actually structured: a permanent head cook, two helpers daily, and four groups of eight women taking the clean-up in turns. NOTE ON HONESTY Most of this video is not sourced to anybody and could not be. It is a description of my own kitchen, by the woman who runs it, and the quantities and the rota are the only parts I can point you to in print. The argument at the end is mine. Nobody has written down the claim that the taste of a colony is the taste of whoever happens to hold the kitchen. It is what I concluded from noticing that dishes my husband's mother made have quietly stopped being made here, and that I am the reason, and that I do not remember deciding. This channel is narrated by a composite character. The voice and image are AI-generated. Everything factual about Hutterite life in it is sourced above or flagged as my own observation.