To answer your rhetorical question, it's due to the breakdown of a communally-organized economy into larger enterprises and hierarchies by the powerful. Capitalism is one such force. Many cultures developed communal food-making as part of daily life, particularly those that organized into bands of a a few hundred. You'd grind grain with your compatriots (sometimes with gender roles, though not bourgeois Christian gender roles), make fires, create good food, and have a very nice time socializing with your family and friends.
Communal public spaces and associated activities of these kinds have been excised fairly completely under capitalism. Sure, there are parks, but there's no communal cooking area for every 40-50 people around the city. You probably don't even know most of your neighbors. You might be very far from your family despite not really wanting to be, largely for economic reasons. The goals of your life have been oriented around independent living and achieving it through wage slavery, not spending time with the people physically near you.
Anyways I like your idea you should totally reinstitute communal food preparation with your neighbors. Get a big-ass pot and make chili, bring bread, make a salad, and everyone's happy.
Capitalism has taken it to an extreme, but I'm thinking of a communal, ritual kind of practice of preparing food together every day, which I think ran into conflict with peasants' need to consistently work the fields. I'm not aware of any feudal cultures where everyone's food was regularly prepared communally, but I'm happy to be corrected!
I want to do this with my roommates but no one wants to share ingredients and we don't eat together :sadness: makes me sad, I just want to make Mac and cheese for everyon
Start by making a ton of mac n cheese and offering it to them — if you can get one person on board, turn it into a Mac n cheese party in a common area and have them help you pressure your other roommates into joining for a bowl
I did this with my fellow local activists/revolutionaries for about a year and a half, up til lockdown. We have comrades in another city who had weekly dinners, and said that from their experience, the potluck model was very inefficient, because it was more taxing, everybody had to put something together and felt a bit of guilt if they didn't. They told us that 2-3 people cooking for everyone was better. The majority of the time it was me directing it, and I often wanted to make something new and exciting or something that used up a plentiful ingredient. Often I'd revert to guaranteed crowd-pleasers like pizza or quiche, or my friend would make a Thai curry.
3-5 work-hours would feed 12-20 people, occasionally even more, sometimes with leftovers. Even with the most costly ingredients, the cost per serving was well under $2.
If you have friends and/or neighbors you think might be interested, start just inviting 2 or 3 over for a meal you prepare. Make it clear that you want it to become a sort of casual rotation, from each their capability. Then start inviting more people, and scale it up. The act of asking is the hardest part; I was lucky to have a pre-made group already.
why
Same reason the car industry exists. Capital creates inefficiencies from which to extract profits.
People own cars that sit idle 98% of their operational lifespan. Why do this when mass transit and shared ownership would be more resource efficient? This resource waste is what is sold by the car companies. How? They make the market for it (buying and gutting mass transit, advertising, lobbying, etc.).
This principle applies to other less wasteful, more communal solutions too. Cooking, shelter, healthcare, states.
This tendency to create inefficiencies in a system in order to extract profits is an emergent property of capitalism. It's not even consciously pursued for the most part.
There's probably a snappy term to describe this phenomenon, but I'm a lib and don't read theory.
Stuff like that used to be common back when immigrants and native (as in born in the us) workers lived in cramped city streets with no real privacy, and no room in their apartments but for sleep. You kinda had to communally cook or do whatever. Doors and windows always open, everything shared in a sorta impromptu collectivization.
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Food is incredibly subjective when it comes to taste. If you wan food exactly how you like it then the only way to get it is by cooking it yourself. Also, food allergies.
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Organizing and maintaining something like this is a lot of work, making food for yourself whenever you need it instead of whenever you have to do it because of a schedule is preferable for a lot of people, even if they have to do more cooking.
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How do you even organize it? Do you exclude people who can't cook? Do they pay money so someone else does it? That's already how it works, professional cooks make food, and then you buy it to eat. You basically reinvented ordering takeout.
That's not why. You can totally make a government-run cafe chain funded from the budget without the profit motive. But, just like with any other program that would benefit only the working class, there's no billions of dollars in profits, so no one is going to lobby this thing into existence. The only way to do this is by having a whole bunch of people with political will, and we don't have that.
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My roomates and I did this throughout college. Nothing like someone cooking a japanese style curry with some veggies for like $1.50 total cost to me. I would usually do chili to contribute.
Nowadays I have enough money that any time I want to grill something big (a lot of burgers, some whole fish, a rib roast, etc.), I invite a bunch of my friends for a free meal.
Maybe try volunteering to cook for a soup kitchen near you though. They kind of specialize in large scale cheap but filling recipes.
California signed AB-626 which allows people to cook food for other people in their kitchen and give it to other people (somehow this was illegal before). New York and a few other states also signed a similar 'Cottage Food Industry' provisions.
It was illegal in London. There is an entire diatribe in A Christmas Carol wherein Dickens goes on a rant about how they tried to pass a law banning bakers from leaving their stoves unlocked on the Sabbath when closing up to allow poor folks to use it for warmth or cooking as working class families did not have access to cooking stoves. They already couldn't work or sell on Sunday, so they let poor people use their stuff, these laws, championed by Andrew Agnew who Dickens publicly called out, would mean the poor couldn't even eat on their one day off.
Dickens' covers it here https://www.pagebypagebooks.com/Charles_Dickens/Sunday_Under_Three_Heads/As_It_Is_p1.html
The bakers' shops in the humbler suburbs especially, are filled with men, women, and children, each anxiously waiting for the Sunday dinner. Look at the group of children who surround that working man who has just emerged from the baker's shop at the corner of the street, with the reeking dish, in which a diminutive joint of mutton simmers above a vast heap of half-browned potatoes. How the young rogues clap their hands, and dance round their father, for very joy at the prospect of the feast: and how anxiously the youngest and chubbiest of the lot, lingers on tiptoe by his side, trying to get a peep into the interior of the dish. They turn up the street, and the chubby-faced boy trots on as fast as his little legs will carry him, to herald the approach of the dinner to 'Mother' who is standing with a baby in her arms on the doorstep, and who seems almost as pleased with the whole scene as the children themselves; whereupon 'baby' not precisely understanding the importance of the business in hand, but clearly perceiving that it is something unusually lively, kicks and crows most lustily, to the unspeakable delight of all the children and both the parents: and the dinner is borne into the house amidst a shouting of small voices, and jumping of fat legs, which would fill Sir Andrew Agnew with astonishment; as well it might, seeing that Baronets, generally speaking, eat pretty comfortable dinners all the week through, and cannot be expected to understand what people feel, who only have a meat dinner on one day out of every seven.
Scrooge and the ghost's conversation
In time the bells ceased, and the bakers were shut up; and yet there was a genial shadowing forth of all these dinners and the progress of their cooking, in the thawed blotch of wet above each baker's oven; where the pavement smoked as if its stones were cooking too.
"Is there a peculiar flavour in what you sprinkle from your torch?" asked Scrooge.
"There is. My own."
"Would it apply to any kind of dinner on this day?" asked Scrooge.
"To any kindly given. To a poor one most."
"Why to a poor one most?" asked Scrooge.
"Because it needs it most."
"Spirit," said Scrooge, after a moment's thought, "I wonder you, of all the beings in the many worlds about us, should desire to cramp these people's opportunities of innocent enjoyment."
"I!" cried the Spirit.
"You would deprive them of their means of dining every seventh day, often the only day on which they can be said to dine at all," said Scrooge. "Wouldn't you?"
"I!" cried the Spirit.
"You seek to close these places on the Seventh Day," said Scrooge. "And it comes to the same thing."
"I seek!" exclaimed the Spirit.
"Forgive me if I am wrong. It has been done in your name, or at least in that of your family," said Scrooge.
"There are some upon this earth of yours," returned the Spirit, "who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us." -end
https://www.nwaonline.com/news/2018/dec/21/scrooge-s-accusation-20181221/
When Dickens called the novella a "hammer on behalf of the poor man's child" he fucking meant it
Isn't this more to let small food businesses bypass food safety regulations? Apparently you can't get sick from a bad batch of jam if it was a really small batch and was cooked in someone's kitchen.
It was a bit more wide reaching, it was to capitalize on facebook groups that sell/distribute authentic ethnic foods. A few tech startups have been created from it.
We did this in college. One of us would make a big fat meal for all of us. We all had different schedules on different days so that is how we determined cooking days
Every time we have a gathering, we always cook up some big, vegetarian meal to feed everyone.
The amount of times I've heard some variation of "this is amazing! I don't even miss the meat!" is very reassuring. It's our small way of nudging meat free diets on friends. I can't say it was our doing, but we have had a couple of friends commit to meat free diets since then
Food can be a radicalization tool
I've been doing this with my extended family from time to time too. What sorts of things do you make that have gone over well?
Mexican food is always a hit.
I'm a baker by trade and I can make the hell out of a pizza as well. For 10 or less, I make some pizza dough from scratch with our starter, and let people top them the way they want.
Enchiladas and potato tacos are easy.
Today, my wife and I are prepping 24 vegetarian pasties for a weekend long "vegetarian deer camp" weekend party we throw every year. We get to have all the drunk fun people have at deer camp, all the traditions, all the tomfoolery, no deer get hurt, and you just might learn something. Most people that come aren't vegetarian, but they are for that weekend. I count that as a win in my book
That sounds like a blast! And super delicious too, pasties and other hand pies are some of my favorite sorts of food but can be a little harder to come by where I'm at sometimes. What's in the filling for yours?
Potatoes, onion, carrots, peas, rutabaga, broccoli, mushroom, mushroom gravy normally. We are making our own crust as well with vegetable shortening.
The event is in a couple of weeks, so we are freezing them. I can't wait to be [redacted] amount of beers in and scarfing one of those!
This is one of the virtues of impossible meat. I know it is problematic, but I have gotten several friends to eat a less meat heavy lifestyle after having some communal meals made with it.
Agreed. Sometimes I :grillman: and my friends wanna come over, and I'm adamant about not letting meat onto my grill. I've fed most of them impossible or other "burgers" and it always goes over well. There was one guy who is married to my co worker who bitched about it, knowing full well that was what we were serving. He's not allowed over anymore for many reasons, but it's largely because of his boorish attitude.
I've overwhelmingly had positive reception to only having vegetarian food at our events. If anyone even starts giving me guff, I just remind them that every time I go to a meat eaters cook out, I get told to "just eat the sides". At least my wife and I went out of our way to make a dank entree that doesn't exclude anyone. I'm not shoving tofu steaks with eggplant and sprout salad on the side. It's still good rib stickin' food.
I would love to do this for my friends/close people. Interestingly enough it seems to be very often how things were done historically, as many houses for a long time didnt even have dedicated kitchens. Of course, individual cooking is more wasteful, but does give variety, but still this is something that can be done with more communal food preparation too...
