poets in the Soviet Union would take on small jobs like being a janitor
imagine opening an app and you see the local soup kitchen and pet sanctuary as listings
the soup kitchen posted an event for lunch and you hit "volunteer"
you help pack boxes and get a meal
your labor directly benefitted someone
your social credit increases
In a way soup kitchens make a lot of sense. Why have 40 people go home and spend an hour making dinner when you can just make one huge dinner for 40 people?
"Go home" being the difference I suppose
i like the idea of community kitchen-cafeterias where chefs rotate in and out of and volunteer. they can use locally harvested foodstuffs when in season or use excess daily overages from the local food distribution stores. just a cool place to hang, eat, and chill when you don't want to cook or are too tired or it isn't your thing. you can take home a meal if you want.
You could do a thing that's a combination of a Soviet Stolovaya and a modern Ghost Kitchen (which I guess is just a Ghost Kitchen with a large cafeteria) where local cooks can trade use of the kitchen space. The problem with Ghost Kitchens is that they're being used by food delivery apps to undercut restaurants and drive them further out of business, and it's ultimately self-defeating because the whole business model is unsustainable, but they could be repurposed with a modicum of public financing.
Yeah even Kropotkin proposed that the bulk of cooking would be done in large community kitchens and that families would take the food home and customize it to their taste with like different spices and accoutrements or whatever.
That's a cool idea for the 1800s but I think we can still have restaurants under communism no?
What's the distinction? Large community kitchen serving food, seated indoors, doesn't sound too dissimilar to a restaurant?
Because it's this utopian forced social communization thing that just rubs me the wrong way. Like the soviets tried communal kitchens and people hated it.
So much of the fantasizing revolves around us living in twee little smurf villages. I like living in the city. I like having variety in my restaurant options. And why can't we keep these comforts?
communism with american characteristics, anyone can set up a small joint
Restaurants work fairly well in Cuba. It's something you have to apply for and obviously you can only have one. If basic needs are met by welfare, then small business tyrants lose their power and can operate something like a restaurant. After all, some people enjoy going out to dinner and not having to worry about preparing food themselves, I don't see why that has to change if it's a sustainable system.
Not that we should copy everything they did, but the USSR already did this with Stolovaya, which were a lot more than simple soup kitchens.
So basically like school cafeterias. I can get behind that being more normalized for quick and healthy meals. Use this as fast food when you're too lazy to cook.