Get a friendly feed happening
Community Kitchens began in West End in Brisbane three years ago and have been happening regularly in local parks, halls, and houses. I chatted to Rosa from CONNECT, a community youth action group, about how to get the community cookin'.
What is a community kitchen?
It's an event where you have lots of food (vegetarian in this case) which people have asked businesses to donate, lots of people preparing the food in a sort of formal cooking workshop fashion, musicians jamming, kids and dogs running round and eveyone eating lots of yummy food and meeting up with other people doing the same. It's a good place for catching up with friends and meeting new ones. Usually the events take place in a venue we have scammed for free because we don't have any money!
Why did you decide to start doing community kitchens?
There seemed a need to help people understand how to look after themselves healthwise it they were going to be vegetarian. A lot of people are very unhealthy vegetarians!
And just basically sharing ideas about how to cook food cheaply/healthily/deliciously!
The other aspect to community kitchen is the idea of nurturing community spirit. This is in response to the isolation a lot of people feel these days within our society. There is lot of lonliness out there because we don't have family and local community support networks much anymore. We really believe in that sort of stuff so everyone getting together for a meal like this is kind of like a big family gathering.
How do you go about organising a community kitchen?
The way we organise community kitchen is pretty basic - first you need a group of people who are prepared to make the thing happen. The more people the better because it means less work. We have a planning group of about six and a couple of others who do bits on the side. We meet weekly until the event.
The first meeting we generally decide a date for the event and ideas for sussing out a venue. We also try and make a list of potential businesses to target for donations.
A week later we meet again and hopefully have a venue booked so we can start publicising it. People volunteer themselves to target places for donations - we go for fruit and vege shops, bakeries, delis, food co-ops, places that sell in bulk, whatever. We aim to get mostly ingredients to prepare meals rather than pre-prepared food. Someone generally makes up posters and flyers which we all distribute far and wide.
By this stage we've got donations pledged from a few places and we organise a bin raid - there is so much excellent food that just gets wasted! We pool together whatever cooking implements we have (people bring their own plates and cutlery) and organise the picking up of donated food for the day before it all happens.
What happens on the day?
We get all the food and other odds and ends together and set up a few tables for people to work at. We've found that it works best if we have a separate table for each dish that is being prepared. People come along and get involved in whatever needs to be done. That generally starts at about three in the afternoon (we've found Sundays are a really good day). By about 6pm most of the food is prepared and people start setting the scene for the FEAST. We've incorporated musicians into the event and they play whenever they feel like it over the night.
It's a really nice thing to ritualise the event by having someone read something out just before the meal begins. We sit around eating and talking and jamming for the next couple of hours then whoever is left helps clean up. It's a really great night.
Created on Fri, 5 Dec 1997 and last modified on Fri, 5 Dec 1997.
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