Bringing Collective Kitchens to England

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Today I noticed Dominic Campbell mention Murtaza Abidi's Community Kitchens project. Basically it’s a new take on Meals on Wheels (which is being stopped in a lot of boroughs it seems). Its purpose is to connect those who need help with people in their local community who can provide it. On a daily, weekly or monthly basis, a designated helper might cook a meal for an elderly person down the road, or do an errand, or just visit. It really reminded me of the Collective Kitchen program we developed with Community Services when I worked for Pride through Play in the late 90s.



Pride through Play was a programme in which a pair of workers would provide programmes for children in inner city areas. This would include games, crafts, cooking, homework club, reading and writing skills, drama, etc. We’d work in conjunction with the police and social services to help rebuild these lower income communities that often had problems with drug and alcohol abuse, wife battery, and child neglect.

Though our remit was age 6-12, we actually worked with ages 2 - 18 and the parents of the children as well. It was the hardest job I ever did (especially as a teenager myself), but one of the most rewarding. I helped a family out of an abusive situation after working with the police to stop a suicide when a woman told her abusive husband she was leaving him. I saw a young boy gain unseen before confidence after one of our social workers gave him his first pair of jeans. From that day onward, he could hold his head high when he walked into school. There were lots of things we couldn’t fix - the families disappearing in the night, the dark circles under an eight year olds eyes, the constant hunger, the smell of drugs on children whose parents would hotbox their house, but I felt we gave what we could and more.

As part of that, Collective Kitchens were developed to teach families how to cook healthy meals for very little money. In my unit, we taught kids how to make meals with a couple of cans and dried goods or something fresh if we thought they could get that.

In some of the other areas, they would have food sponsored by local businesses or the local government, and some would be brought by the families themselves depending on how much funding they had. Once a week, we’d gather in a large kitchen and each family would cook enough of a dish to feed the rest of the families there for one meal each. With 5 families cooking together, you’d have 5 different meals for the week that would be put in Tupperware for the freezer. That way you knew you and your kids could eat at least one healthy meal a day. Not only was it building a community, but it was teaching families how to cook cheaply and healthily and left them with a variety of food. The next week, they’d do the same again. The programme was small but successful, and the kids we worked with became happier and healthier - at least to me.

With everything that has happened over the past couple of weeks, I hope programmes like this can and will develop. Even without government funding, a small food budget could be stretched by a few families working together to provide something better for themselves and their families. From someone, like me, who grew up on a council estate, this can make a world of difference.