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Reviews Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary? Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting

Getting Hooked on Quitting

Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous

Is College Necessary?

Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear

Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters

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How to become a potluck person

A guide to hosting — or showing up to — the modern potluck without the awkwardness

Published March 15, 2026 12:03PM (EDT)

When I hear the word potluck, I am transported, with a kind of olfactory immediacy, to the basement of my grandmother’s church. It smelled faintly damp — a mingling of industrial carpet cleaner and coffee that had been sitting on a warming plate too long. Curiously, I don’t remember the food itself in any particular detail. This is unusual for me. My memory for pleasurable meals is normally quite precise; I can recall a great pasta or a particularly good kiss with disconcerting clarity. But the potlucks of my childhood blur together into a kind of beige collective memory.

What remains instead are the categories. Aluminum trays of pasta bakes: lasagna, baked spaghetti, manicotti, stuffed shells. Big bowls of iceberg lettuce dressed in Italian vinaigrette. Brownies and bars cut into careful squares. Woven baskets filled with Parker House rolls or Hawaiian rolls. Tables that seemed to sag gently under the weight of carbohydrates.

The atmosphere, however, I remember well. The swish of polyester skirts in spring pastels — lavender, mint, butter-yellow — as the women of the church organized the spread. A few older veterans stepping outside to the parking lot for a cigarette, gazing across the cracked asphalt while someone inside reserved them a plate. A soft-faced teenage boy with flaxen hair playing the upright piano while a small orbit of youth-group girls gathered nearby.

The food was not intended to be memorable. That was not its purpose. The potluck functioned primarily as a social technology — a practical, edible reason for people to linger........

© Salon