Every community brings individual to be part of something bigger. But, what happens when you add the power of language food to the one of creating a community?
Cooking together is one of the emblems of staying with the others and sharing.
Community kitchens are one of the ways of doing that. They are a group of people, meeting on regular basis (once a week, twice a month, there is no fixed rule) cooking together.
The beauty of this activity is that it is totally volunteering and not based on making business from it.
How can community kitchen enhance the sense of belonging and alleviating the feeling of isolation?
Actually, there are many ways in which it happens:
- sharing is caring and cooking for ourselves and for others is one of the sweetest way of caring;
- learning and teaching something new to people who want to learn, while staying together and getting to know each other;
- sharing responsibilities and growing;
- learning to just enjoy the moment of a lunch or dinner together;
- some good habits, like Comida in Milan.
Community kitchen: sharing is caring
When having a regular meeting with a group of people to work on a project or doing an activity together, there a sense of involvement.
Doing something with someone is something nice that creates a feeling of sharing.
Cooking with the others and for the others is an activity that creates a community, where everybody takes care of the others.
This is the power of community kitchens: they do not happen in a community, they build a community. A community of people who gets to know each other and take care of the needs of the community.
Learning from community kitchen – and teaching as well
In every community there are people who can do something better than the others and people who want to learn. This is not about competition, but about sharing experiences and learning doing something by more experienced people.
Think about the first time you cook risotto on your own place by boiling rise. Then you saw a person preparing it in a very different way and it was tastier. You just learnt something new or something different from what you were used to.
Being in a community is a never-ending learning process and community kitchen are a perfect example for this!
Sharing responsibilities in a community kitchen
Cooking, experimenting, sharing cooking ideas and recipes, eating together is funny.
But then, who cleans?
Not everything is always part of what we ideally imagine as funny, but there is always a way to make it interesting: by doing it with the others.
When having lunch together there is always a division of the tasks (link to intercultural night article): once we do something funnier, the other time something we enjoy less. It is part of the process and, moreover, it is something we can learn from.
Life is made of enjoyable moments but also of moments we need to work on.
Enjoy the moment of having a meal together
There is no much more to say about it.
Sharing meals with others creates connections, food is a hook to talk about ourselves and to enhance our sense of belonging to a community.
Community Kitchen and the project of Comida Sociale in Milan
It was 2020 and everybody in Italy was stuck in their own flat, with no possibility to see the others and socialize.
We all know, that was a period where the feeling of isolation became stronger for some people.
Some organizations (Mutuo Soccorso and Rob De Matt) joined their forces and with the collaboration of others brought to life the project of Comida Sociale (https://www.mutuosoccorsomilano.it/comida-sociale/)
Comida Sociale has been, since 2020, a community kitchen preparing meals for homeless people.
This project works on two sides.
On the one hand, helping volunteering to be part of a bigger project and alleviating the feeling of isolation, that could be particularly strong at the beginning of lockdown in Italy;
On the other hand, providing meals to homeless people, that became harder in a weird situation like the one we faced in March 2020.
In conclusion, community kitchen enhance the sense of belonging by bringing people together and by making them part of something bigger: a community.
