More Power to the Cooks: A discussion of community kitchens

FoodShare has prepared this toolbox to get a better understanding of how community kitchens affect the communities we live in, the food we eat and our health. We have visited a variety of different community kitchens in Toronto, and have created an annotated bibliography of what resources are already available – both academic and program based – to guide the development of community kitchens programs that help build community.

The Benefits of Community Kitchens

Building Communities

When people break bread, they also break down social isolation. The common thread that runs through every community kitchen we visited, and all research findings on community kitchen programs, is that participants find that the greatest benefit is the development of social support networks.

Personal Health

Community kitchens not only contribute to improved health through the role they play sharing nutrition information, increasing variety in diet, and providing information around food safety issues, they also play an valuable role in improving health through building community.

Community kitchens provide an ideal environment to share ideas around food. This can occur spontaneously or in a more structured way. However it occurs it provides the opportunity to talk about the issues and how individuals can play a bigger role in building their communities.

Income

Bulk-buying and the development of skills around cooking healthy on a budget are two ways some community kitchens can increase access to healthy food. However, many community kitchens do not emphasise bulk buying and many community kitchen participants arrive at a community kitchen with well-developed skills in the area of smart shopping. From our brief review of community kitchens in Toronto we have found that community kitchens have a complex interplay between issues of food and income.

Community kitchens provide a way for an individual to enjoy a free or low-cost meal in a friendly, non-stigmatising environment. The more frequently a community kitchen is offered the greater the impact it will have on reducing a participants’ food budget and increasing food access. The other more long-term impact of participating in a community kitchen may be the development of food skills that can lead to employment. Also some participants may gain greater food skills and nutrition knowledge that help to stretch limited food budgets.

Agriculture

Community kitchens often cook with fresh foods, especially fruits and vegetables, and build awareness of the benefits of eating more sustainably. Community kitchens can support local food producing initiatives by purchasing from directly from local food producers or from local food buying clubs. The less food is processed, the fewer miles it likely travels and the greater the chance that it is locally produced – all of these factors can contribute to a more sustainable food system.
Giving power to the cooks

From our visits to community kitchens we saw how they are responding to a variety of realities in the community, most importantly, social isolation and inadequate income to access healthy food. Each kitchen is working within its own context but what they all have in common is community building. FoodShare sees community building as integral to community food security and to health. Food secure communities are ones in which all community residents obtain a healthy, safe, culturally acceptable, nutritionally adequate diet through a sustainable food system that maximizes community self-reliance and social justice.

If the success of community kitchens is only evaluated on their impact on income it can oversimplifies the complexity of lived experiences of food insecurity. A common critique of community kitchens, and often many other community-based programs. is that they reduce pressure on governments to make the fundamental changes necessary to achieve social justice. But for individuals community kitchens build social support networks, and self-confidence, and thus can have a huge impact on health and food security. Self-empowerment is an integral part of a grassroots food movement that will be able to create the fundamental changes needed at the individual, community and policy to create community food security.

Introducing the case studies

Each community kitchen case study profiles the programs background, target group, goals and operation. We ask several questions about each case study so that program developers and policy makers can explore what makes a successful community kitchen.

Kitchen Profiles

- Access Alliance

- Mustard Seed

- Latin American Women

- All Saints

- Good Food at Home