Visiting Twin Oaks Community as a Vegan

Posted by Rosalie Wind on Oct 19, 2011 in Food, Nutrition | 0 comments

Twin Oaks began as a small income-shared community in 1967 in Louisa, Virginia, a small town two hours away from Washington, DC. They sustained themselves by selling their handmade high quality hammocks, and more recently by selling their community-made packaged tofu. The successful tofu line has been sold in stores and used in restaurants throughout the east coast with flavors like fine and Italian herb, along with their “More Than Tofu” line of prepared spiced tofu and their new “Soysage” line, an almost undetectable substitute for sausage. The members have to work an average of 42 hours a week, the work ranging from laundry, cooking meals, repairing buildings, working in the garden, shelving the numerous community libraries, working with the tofu and tofu related products, and making hammocks. Their organization stops nowhere; every week the community creates a daily labor list of who will make bread and granola for everybody, who will do the community laundry, and every task that needs to be done and by what day.

The community’s openness stems from its year long visitor program: A new group of visitors stay at the community for three weeks, immersing themselves in the community’s norms and rules. The visitor group cooks, cleans, gardens, joins groups and activities, helps make hammocks and tofu, and spends time with everybody in the community. By the second week, the visitors can request certain types of shifts or what activities they want to be a part in, and the labor schedule assigner can almost always oblige. My three-week stay at Twin Oaks gave me opportunities to understand the infrastructure of Twin Oaks, and why the people and their camaraderie make the community thrive.

A small portion of the community's garden.

A place for over one hundred residences, Twin Oaks ranges in diversity, nationality, age, and sexual preference and orientation. Their welcoming environment provides comfort to all of those with special diets: vegan, vegetarian, gluten free, and no onion, garlic, or oil eaters. The community eats lunch and dinner together every day, meals that result from a continuously busy kitchen. The cooks clearly indicate every food with common allergen labels: “gluten-free,” “vegan,” “spicy,” even “ginger,” “low oil,” and “no salt.” Packages of tofu, loaves of fresh bread, huge portions of homemade granola, and fruits and vegetables straight from their garden appear in the public kitchens and refrigerators. Members will often let visitors help cook, adding to the community’s open policy and love of helping, sharing, and working for each other’s well being. On my fifth night at Twin Oaks, a kitchen manager put me in charge of making cornbread for everybody, which made me feel welcomed and trusted by the community.

I felt perfectly at home as a vegan at Twin Oaks. I never had to explain what I could and could not eat, and I especially did not have to explain why I choose to eat the way I do. Because people of all radical life choices live here, they have created a decidedly non-judgmental environment. In a community where members take full responsibility of the mental, physical, and emotional health of each other, it becomes perfectly acceptable to live vegan, gluten free, raw, or any special diet you live with or choose to follow. Fresh and homemade foods get created for every meal; vegan waffles and biscuits for brunch on Sunday, falafel and hummus on Monday, and beef and veggie burgers with potatoes on Tuesday, the rest of the week’s menu filled with tofu, fresh pita, bulgur, pasta and rice, even cakes and cookies. It does not end at food either; members sometimes make fresh squeezed juice with cantaloupe or watermelon.

A typical member or visitor at Twin Oaks has shifts in the garden throughout the week, seeding and harvesting food that goes straight to the kitchen and into their next meal. Bread and granola get made and then eaten almost minutes later, and if you want to add parsley or mint to your lunch, the herb garden manager can pick leaves straight from the plant. Many members work in the “Tofu Hut,” learning how to clean, make, and package vegan and vegetarian tofu and “Soysage,” being proud of the locally made and organic vegan food that Twin Oaks provides. Cow’s milk drinkers can get their dairy from the community’s barn, and members harvest eggs every morning from their own chickens for egg eaters. Depending on the season, about fifty to sixty percent of Twin Oaks community’s food comes straight from the farm.

I enjoyed my three weeks at Twin Oaks, learning the natural processes of watching food’s beginnings, middles, and ends. Their organic practices represent the community’s virtues of hard work, and cooperation. Their complete tolerance makes vegan eating extremely easy, and also makes you appreciate the “safe” place for people of all kinds that they have created.

Please visit the Twin Oaks website at www.twinoaks.org to see what the community signifies and stands for, and definitely visit http://vegnet.net if you seek vegan or vegetarian communities. If living in a shared community interests you, please visit www.ic.org, or the Fellowship for Intentional Community.