askchapo

people in urban settings to cook their own food

I've already solved this problem in my mind. Got the basics of a system worked out for neighbourhood cafeterias.

You can still cook at home if/when you want to, but you can also attend the local cafs. There is 1 caf per x population, adjusted according to how heavily used they are. You can eat there or pickup (returnable, standardized) tupperwears for a middle ground if you prefer to have private at-home meal. I think it would be a great benefit especially for families. Reduce the amount of time you need to spend at the grocery store, cooking, cleaning, dishes etc. Would overall reduce the amount of food waste at both the individual kitchen and the grocery store level.

The food would be prepared according to healthy guidelines. We also have some sort of accounting for regional availability of foods. The selections would be subject to some sort of democratic control so that people could get food they liked. Regionalism would be accounted for. Some kitchen teams might decide to be extremely specialized in a given cuisine. I'm sure at the end of the days we'd have something that takes things like lent, ramadan, whatever, into consideration.

You don't have to go to your own neighbourhood caf, you can go to other ones too for variety or it's more convenient for you. Maybe there is some sort of reservation system (website/phone/walk-in) so that food can be produced in correct amounts. But extras can always be portioned and frozen for pickup later.

For those who have extremely specific dietary requirements such as intolerance/allergy, religious, ethical, cultural, there can be specialized cafs which they can either attend physically, or if too remote, have pickup/delivery of meals. Delivery could be either at the home or to their local caf. So if you are a tiny minority vegan in a constituency which largely favors vegan-unfriendly food, the vegan kitchen can drop off meals for you at your caf and you can still go to the collective meal with everyone else.

Kitchen teams could do fun events things like swap locations, tours or guesting at other kitchens, come up with contests etc if they wanted to. In a dense urban environment you'd have lots of cafs all over the place so it wouldn't be like needing to travel a long way (unless they wanted to!). In terms of a workplace, I think you could keep some of the elements of kitchen culture that suits a certain kind of person, like competitiveness and showing off, but without it being so toxic and abusive. Because there would be many, many teams in a city, they could sort themselves by work-style preferences. Those who wanted a totally different wokrplace culture could have it.

Also include some way to teach cooking skills, particularly with an eye to preserving cultural styles of cooking. both to other professional food workers but also to whoever just wanted to learn.

This is my delicious dream.