Community kitchens and ecofeminist care ethics in practice

Alice WillattUniversity of BristolDepartment of Management

How can an ecofeminist ethic of care provide a resource through which to understand the ethico-political practices of a community kitchen?

Part 1: Setting a context a doctoral participatory action research project with a

community kitchen based in the South of England Participatory Action Research & Ecofeminism

Part 2: Exploring embodied care in the context of the community kitchen Fostering interconnection, building and sustaining relationships Embodied care & the role of food Challenges and tensions involved in carrying out care practices Connection between the local/particular & general/”bigger

picture” Care as a form of resistance

The Community Kitchen Started by a group of environmental activists in the late 2000’s with the

aim of addressing food poverty, fuel poverty, social isolation and food waste

Volunteers cook a community meal once a week in a community centre using collected surplus food from supermarkets and local shops

The meal is free and open to all, often attended by people living in vulnerable housing, people living with addiction, people who have been effected but welfare and benefit cuts, refugee and asylum seekers, people from neighbouring community.

In the past they have also had a vegetable/herb growing patch in the community centre to supplement the surplus food they collect

The community kitchen is also involved in and caters for other food waste educational activities/events in schools, farms, local communities and runs pop-up surplus food cafes.

The community kitchen is now part of a larger charity that has a network of community kitchens across the UK

The connections between ecofeminism and action research

Action research: a participatory and democratic approach to social science research that focuses on creating meaningful social change (Reason and Bradbury, 2006:1) which involves promoting environmental justice and acknowledging the

relationship between humans and nature (Mary Brydon-Miller & Anne Inga Hilsen, 2015)

The goal of action research is to contribute to “the increased well-being—economic, political, psychological, spiritual—of human persons and communities, and to a more equitable and sustainable relationship with the wider ecology of the planet of which we are an intrinsic part” (Bradbury and Reason, 2001: 2).

Ecofeminism is both “deconstructive (reactive to current injustices) and reconstructive (proactive in creating new forms of thinking and doing” (Lahar, 1991:36).

Learning history method – producing a series of collaboratively written narrative documents that address the tensions and challenges that have emerged between the national charity and local community kitchen

Part 2: ecofeminist care ethics & community kitchen practices

The Community KitchenRobert (founding member of community kitchen): “It’s about creating a culture and community around food… there was a diverse bunch of people involved, the things that unified us all would have been a passion for food and a good food system that nourishes both the environment and people that eat it. There was a big focus on food supply and food production and what that means in thinking about, you know, re-envisaging that…there was a kind of common consensus for a model of food generally that was less focused on, you know, large production and, you know, capital gain and more focused on looking after the land. A sustainable system, a system that is beneficial to everyone that is involved in it.”

The community kitchen as a space that fosters interconnection

The desire to foster interconnection and relation amongst different groups and people involved in the community kitchen

To build a network or web of caring relations around food/food provisioning Connection between, volunteers, guests, the community centre,

local community, the larger network of community kitchens, other organizations and groups responding to social/environmental justice issues

Building, sustaining and nourishing networks and communities around food in the local geographical area – “creating a community around food”

The community kitchen as a space that fosters interconnection

Anna (volunteer): “There was this one guy who was like ‘oh your bike is broken’ and he went and fixed up my bike for me. So, you start to get quite attached to the people you see every week which is a really big part of it. Like we are not just a restaurant, where we are like ‘right, here is your food’, it’s about building relationships as well as just providing a meal”

Tom (guest) describing the environment of the community meal: “Its not just ‘I’m here, be grateful’, you know, its like ‘you are human beings and you’re part of something’, you know, so it’s not just like, ‘here let me just fill up your plate’, it’s talking to people and making them welcome… I think maybe it could mean a hell of a lot to people other than just having food. You know, it’s taking care of them, it’s not just taking care of your food needs, its also about humanising people.”

Phillip (volunteer): “So when the meal was being served we would kind of say, everyone out of the kitchen now and we would have one person in there who was the “manager” for the day. We wanted it to be.. You know, there is no reason why we should have people in the kitchen eating separately from everyone else, we should all be there having a meal together… there was sort of a deep rooted sense that the meal should be enjoyed together and that was really the glue that bound the whole thing together.”

Embodied care: The role of food in fostering interconnectionSarah: “so when you’re kind of cooking together, you’re in the kitchen together, it’s about sharing really, it’s about all mucking in and all sharing in creating something and creating something as a team is always a really really wonderful thing and then when it all comes together at the end it’s like ‘oh wow, this is great, we made this’ and then when it comes to kind of sharing the meal with people, it’s just, it’s definitely a really good ice breaker, because can you imagine right, get a group of people, some know each other, some maybe don’t, say ‘ok, everyone sit around these 10 tables and talk’. Would anyone find that fun? …but by having a plate of food in front of you it means that, yeh, you’re kind of, you’re immediately sharing something, you’ve got something in common, it kind of, it just puts everyone on a level playing field, it means that if you’re not necessarily sure what to chat about, you’ve always got something to chat about, you can just chat about the food and whether you like it and whether it’s a bit too spicy. But yeh, it definitely, I guess it’s because eating is something that we all need to do, it’s so basic and like, I think, maybe, it’s beauty is in the fact that it is very basic, it’s not something that people should need to choose to do, some people do have to choose whether to feed themselves or their children or whatever, which shouldn’t happen. But, yes.. we all need food to survive.

Challenges and tensions involved in carrying out care practices

Understanding care practices as being constantly negotiated and contested The tensions between the principles and practices of the local community

kitchen and the national charity

Hannah reflecting on her experience attending a conference that was run by the central charity:“one guy called the people that came [to the community meal], what did he call them.. ‘clients’, which is just gross. It’s like what? There are such barriers. I just thought there was this really big barrier between the central organisation and us.. I don’t know what I would call the people that come, even service users is so clinical… it was just very depersonalising I think. I just felt none of it has like, you can’t quantify this but when I have a think about it I just feel like there was no heart in what was said, it was very lacking in care and very, I thought it was very aimed towards marketing ‘the brand’. You know, ‘this is our charity brand and this is how you sell the brand into your communities’. I mean, that is sort of like what we are trying to do, get more people to come, but what a way to talk about it. I just shut down from it, I couldn’t relate to it.

Seeing the “bigger picture”: connecting the local to the general

Local & General &

particular “bigger picture”

Volunteers spoke about how their embodied experience and involvement with the community kitchen helped them to understand “bigger picture” issues relating to the socio-economic system, social inequality and environmental injustice

Lorna (volunteer) talking about food waste statistics:

“I think early on when I was involved in the community kitchen and went to the pop ups we used to get shown films about what the community kitchen do, which I found really useful in fact. Really motivating… They had lots of stats that are just sort of mind blowing; I guess that was another key motivation for getting involved. There are these big scale [food waste] stats, that you can’t really even think of what that means in practice but then yeh, doing the collections sort of like the trailers and trailers full of food we collect from what is six or seven stores in the neighborhood on one morning, it just… [laughs] it’s that much and that’s such a miniscule portion of the city, yet alone the rest of the country or, yeh, it’s crazy when food waste is talked about as an issue I feel that most of the information I get is as a consumer, and you realise a lot of the problem, the majority I think it is, is that most is wasted before it even gets to the supermarket or at a supermarket level. So you just come realise that actually the problem is much further up the chain then you realise.”

Seeing the “bigger picture”: connecting the local/particular to the general

Anna talking about a game the community kitchen designed and created for educational events:

“…we made a game called twisted which showed the unsustainability of the food system. It was a world map and there were spots for each, over each country in the globe from where different food came from. One was a lamb for example, from New Zealand, pineapples from South America or whatever it was. And you spun the wheel and kind of ended up in knots and then collapse because that’s what happens in the food system or what will happen in the food system. It was a good game because on lots of levels it could be received by different people so very small children could play it as twister and wouldn’t really know what was going on but could still access it. But as you go up the years you can explain it a lot more and you can think about the questioning and what's going to go on around it.”

Connecting the local to the general through embodied experiences

Care as a form of resistance Many volunteers identified the activities and practices of the

community kitchen as part of a broader political agenda that seeks to resists and challenge: atomisation and individualism the moral logic of the market the idea of the individual as self interested and utility

maximizing

Care as a form of resistanceAlice: Can you talk about what you believe to be the role of the community kitchen?

Sophie: “Well, it comes at the end of a long line of terrible problems and we just kind of mop up a bit at the bottom and try to tell everybody about all these problems that are going on. Umm.. but which sounds like a drop in the ocean, it sounds like, like what's the point? But actually in that little drop there is a lot going on and it is changing attitudes on a really small scale and it is showing people what this problem is, which is often hidden because we don’t really see the fields of carrots that get wasted or the people in other countries who have no land and things like that. So, it feels small but it's umm, it's kind of opening people's eyes I suppose to those things. And also giving people food who need it and trying to.. it doesn’t address poverty in any way at all but it helps in the immediate. To help people to.. yeh.. to have a meal that day and to meet somebody else and become a little bit less isolated. It doesn’t deal directly with separation, the problem with separation or isolation in society or individualistic attitudes and stuff but it does have a little bit of help in that way. There is somewhere for people to go. To start changing that, it’s a kind of starting point for lots of things, a spark. Yeh, and something positive in a whole sea of crap, which is really nice”