The Post-Kitchen Society


Some Immediate Theory
One of the reasons I am so cynical about policymakers and social scientists is that I believe most problems can be adequately solved by those who identify them in the first place. This is to say, by everyday citizens. I believe that sufficiently empowered, in terms of resources, skills, and self-confidence, everyday people can often do a much better job at solving social problems than a state, wielding 'experts'. Sometimes, aggregation and economies of scale are necessary to achieve efficient outcomes (e.g., in healthcare). But there is no reason, in my opinion, that communities of empowered citizens could not chose to organise and share their ideas to formulate a policy approach for a large body of people, just as there is no reason that individuals should not naturally work together, if sufficiently proximate and exposed to the same problems. What I am describing here, in a word, is anarchism.

What I want to do in this post is discuss a specific anarchist approach to an important social problem, the distribution of food. This post might be the first in a series that I want to call Everyday Anarchism. At the moment, I am not too sure (though, I do think my piece on cybernetic cinema shows some aspects of anarchist possibilities for creative activities). But I am quite confident about this: The present crisis, in my country and across much of the world, is not about whether we can continue to meet our needs. We could, even allowing for a significant reduction in wealth, continue to meet our needs, and then some. The present crisis, instead, is about maintaining the illusion that our needs can be met while we all masquerade as atomistic individuals.

We live in a highly interdependent world. You and I are alienated from some much of the social labour that makes our lives possible. We rely on a faceless mass of people, possessive of skills, to function at the most basic level. We are each rendered enfeebled by our interdependence upon others. The illusion that we are individuals is a necessary balm to distract us from this most unpleasant state of affairs. Yet, this should not suggest that interdependence is inherently a bad thing. 'Anarchists', like those foolish right-wing libertarians and anarcho-capitalists, make this mistake too often: that to be interdependent is to be somehow unfree. They square the circle by admitting the most gross of things: that one can be dependent upon another, provided one maintains a state of dominance over the other. This is all very wrong. Interdependence is something we cannot escape, for we are social creatures, and more than that, boundedly rational creatures, capable of only knowing and doing so much. Anarchism, I believe, must always embrace the inevitability of interdependence. In doing so, a certain joy can also be found, a joy that we are not alone, and that by working together, we can achieve remarkable things. The essential difference, then, between our present enfeebling interdependence and interdependence within anarchism is a demand for interdependence to be democratic through participatory and self-organising means, rather than dominating through violence and coercion. If I can convince you to help me do something, and you me, we become interdependent. If I force you to help me, we are still interdependent, but socially, we are better understood as master and slave, employer and employee, rather than citizen and citizen, equal and equal.

The Post-Kitchen Society
As above, I want to focus on the distribution of food. I believe some time must be spent developing an anarchist policy approach to the production of food, too, and while I have some ideas, they are not sufficiently formed in my mind at this moment. As such, I will focus only on the matter of distribution, while acknowledging an important hole in the supply chain of my imagined, post-kitchen society.

Many people live in homes with kitchens. Kitchens are often seen as a pre-requisite for a habital home (though, of course, many different societies have more flexible arrangements regarding the preparation of food, a flexibility that endlessly renews my confidence in some form of post-kitchen future). I recently found myself viewing several different houses in Manchester. Almost all had spent an absurd amount of money (I presume) having their kitchens remodeled. The kitchen, after all, is often considered the heart of the house. This is, of course, closely related to the preparation of food. Food is a biological necessity. But more than that, food can be an enormous source of pleasure for some people. For many, it is a shared activity, something that brings people together. The space in which such important activities are undertaken--the kitchen--has therefore been imbued with a tremendous cultural importance.

There are many reasons, though, why we should seek to build a post-kitchen society. Or, at the least, decentre the household kitchen from the preparation and distribution of food. The first argument is one for efficiency. It is terribly wasteful, and expensive, to have a system of food distribution wherein we each buy our own ingredients, our own ovens, knives, pots and pans, refridgerators and freezers. It is far more efficient to have food preparation happen at a community hub--what I, for lack of a better name, will call the community canteen. Many employers know this. The places where we find canteens are often places that simply could not function if each of us was expected to carry around with us a satchel of food preparation equipment whenever we left the house.

The second argument stems from the first, and is essentially an environmental one. Food waste contributes massively to ill-provisioning of food throughout Western societies. Furthermore, refridgeration units are enormously damaging for the environment, with the chemicals required to achieve freezing temperatures several orders of magnitude more damaging, in terms of the greenhouse effect, than carbon dioxide or methane. In a world of less predictable and reliable harvests, and in need of a curbing of the greenhouse effect, it is questionable how sustainable a world of individual-level food preparation really is. It is also questionable whether individual-level food preparation is even desirable.

This leads me onto my third argument. Food is a source of joy. But for many of us, it is instead a chore, resulting in said joy being cast aside for easy, ultra-processed shit. Food preparation is also a source of socialisation. But for many of us, the social is also abandoned in the chorification of food preparation. Where it is not, it is often only a fleeting moment, say at Christmas. And, in both instances, the joys of food preparation are often reserved only (or, at least, mostly) for those of us who are wealthy enough to afford food of a pleasurable standard, and the time to treat food preparation as something other than a chore. From a Veblenian perspective, modern food preparation, complete with quality and socialisation, may be called conspicuous consumption.

Community canteens offer benefits where individual-level food preparation creates problems. As above, it will be much more efficient to centralise food preparation in a community canteen that is accessible throughout the day, and to everyone. This, in turn, would solve some of the environmental challenges. We would not need an enormous number of fridges and freezers. Instead, we would need a much smaller number of industrial units. Furthermore, food waste would be greatly diminished, as food that would go bad in an individual's fridge would, instead, be used several days or weeks before in the community canteen. Lastly, the canteen would socialise the joys of food preparation. Freshly prepared food--even if mediocre by a restaurant standard--would often be healthy and tastier than ultra-processed food. Furthermore, the canteen would function as a third space, giving people the opportunity to meet friends and family, and to share a meal as part of a community, rather than as a self-sustaining automaton.

There are reasonable objections that can be raised to the community canteen. I will get to these. But first, let me lay out, in idealised detail, what I would envision for the community canteen model. Firstly, as above, they would be accessible, ideally within a 15-minute walk for everyone. Secondly, they would be cheap. While I admire soup kitchens and food banks (and see these are essential examples of how anarchism is the foundation of our society, when market distribution fails), I do not believe that a positive anarchist vision for society emerges out of a sticking plaster for the failures of capitalism. In an idealised world, the food would be free. But to actually establish community canteens right now, they must pay their way. I would suggest a 'pay what it's worth' system, enabling those who can pay more to do so, while not robbing those who have little from the dignity of contributing to the reproduction of a community resource. Though, I am not especially worried about money. In a post-kitchen society, people would save a lot of money, as they would not do as much grocery shopping, would not need to buy kitchen appliances, and would not incur the energy costs of home cooking (if they did not want to). Thirdly, the community canteen would have a set menu. This is potentially a controversial provision, but I think it is an important one. The community canteen could learn an awful lot from existing hot food buffets. The model of food distribution is essentially the same. But hot food buffets are run for profit. They seek to be cheap only insofar as they are subject to market pressure, rather than seeking to serve a specific community. Those same market pressures also demand they cater to every whim. This results in large amounts of waste, but waste that is acceptable provided the profit margins are sufficient. While I think a community canteen should aspire to offer variety day to day, I believe it is both economically and socially advantageous to have a common set menu on a particular day (allowing, of course, for dietary variation).

Many of the objections to the community canteen, I can conceive of, stem from the fact that some people value their individual living much more than they value the more communal approach I am advocating. Now, in my opinion, that is largely an ideological illusion. But equally, I believe people should have the freedom to do their own thing. As such, no one would be forced to use the community canteen. If you wanted to have a home kitchen, you still could. If you wanted to prepare your own food, great! If you didn't like the set menu for that day, you could still go to a restaurant instead. Far from shutting down what people can do, the community canteen would instead expand the choices people have around food, resulting in, as above, several shared benefits. To give one example: fewer and fewer homes would have kitchens in a post-kitchen society, resulting in more space (e.g., bedrooms), alleviating some housing pressure. Realistically, today, people cannot live without a personal kitchen. In a post-kitchen society, people would have that choice. I believe a post-kitchen society must maintain opt-out capabilities, else this 'anarchist' society will have just replaced one radical monopoly (to use Ivan Illich's term) with another; quasi-mandatory individual-level food preparation, with quasi-mandatory canteen consumption.

Another argument I can think of is around competition, and in particular, the 'crowding out' of restaurants. If a community canteen popped up in every town in the country, restaurants may be concerned. But in a post-kitchen future, I believe the community kitchen would help restaurants thrive in a way that they currently do not. The biggest competitor to small restaurants, right now, is home food preparation. In a society, though, that sees food as something one goes out to enjoy, there will be more demand for restaurants, not less. Of course, on any given night in a post-kitchen society, most people will still be eating at a community canteen. But a minority of people will opt-out and visit a restaurant instead. People will also have more money to do so, too. The efficiencies of the community canteen would lower the costs of eating in general, and these savings would result in people having more purchasing power. Again, even if restaurant eating were still infrequent in a post-kitchen society, it would be more frequent than in our current home preparation society.

Can We Make It Happen?
I think the community canteen is an idea that is worth trying. This is not just because of the benefits. It is also because it is an idea that many communities could implement right now. It would require relatively little start up capital (provided by local government) to secure a space and establish supply chains. To be sure, running such a large kitchen would require expertise in catering and logistics. But these skills can be found in our communities already. Canteens exist in schools, hospitals, and workplaces. Caterers exist for weddings, conferences, and other private functions. All organisations have people who manage stock levels. Unlike visions of the future that require science fiction technologies, which even if discovered would entail extraordinarily scarce skills, the community canteen is simply an expansion of a food preparation model that already exists, to the scale of the whole community. I could not run a community canteen--I know nothing about the ins and outs of food preparation--but many people, in all communities, could. This is a major benefit of the idea. Technologically, too, we are well equipped. It would not be difficult to create an online booking app to manage daily demand and process payments. Over time, the management of stock levels and the development of menus would benefit from such basic technologies, capturing data and community feedback.