Community Kitchen Caldas - eating inexpensive and healthy meals together!

At Samskruti Builders we believe in community kitchen and community gardening as a source to build, nurture and strengthen the community. Here is the concept explained!

Community Kitchen Caldas - eating inexpensive and healthy meals together!

Inspired by the community food bank concept, Community Kitchen Caldas (CKC) is an extension of the idea but focused around the activity of cooking through a community farm, community kitchen and community canteen, with the benefit of bulk-purchasing and bulk-consumption. The menu and recipe is derived from locals and experts collaboratively to create a healthy menu with local tastes, targeting malnutrition for women and children. The result is a pool of CKC members enjoying inexpensive and healthy meals.

Community Cooperative

CKC operates like a cooperative, with joining members putting in hours for the work involved (farming, cooking, maintenance) in exchange for close to cost price of food that is bought in bulk, farmed on the community garden, and cooked by members on rotating basis. It is a center of community building around the act of cooking.

Health and Malnutrition

The extra component of the CKC is the input of recipes from local residents and health experts, especially for the target of women and children malnutrition. The health or nutrition experts would spend time at first on the field understanding the issues of malnutrition, working with local residents to create recipes and eating habits that could remedy the condition. Such recipes are then shared in an open-source format and cooked in bulk (reduce cost) in the community kitchen. The health or nutrition experts can be on ground initially, but over time the can operate more remotely from Bogota (7-8hrs drive), Medellin (5-6hrs drive) or even overseas with investment of communication equipments.

Growing your own crops + bulk-buying

Urban agriculture in Havana Cuba has tremendous success, the lack of foreign imports becomes an opportunity for local farmers to adopt organic methods of fertilizing soil and using compost. The idea is that with more and more member support, the community garden scale can grow to cushion fluctuating food price and reduce cost, but more importantly, tailor the need for the problem of malnutrition with the right crops together with bulk-buying of food (enabled by food bank).

Entrepreneurship

This could become a scalable model to affect more people, and the local management opportunity becomes a channel to build entrepreneurship through the management of this local cooperative. Logistics, finance, marketing are all essential part of this cooperative to ensure success as a social business.

OpenIdeo Collaboration

During the week of consultation we have updated our base scheme with the following:

Cookbook

Using the combined efforts of health experts and local recipes, the result can be combined into a physical or online cookbook that would be sold to support the operations of the Community Kitchen

Cooking Fuel and Cooking Equipments

Using a centralized setting, the efficiency of better stove and better fuel can be utilized fully to reduce the cost per meal. Biogas is an option where bio-waste from either community toilet or community kitchen itself can be converted into cooking fuel in an anaerobic tank. Low tech and inexpensive improvements such as Rocket Stove could also be used to reduce fuel consumption by maximizing stove efficiency.

Community Chefs

An ideal training ground for community chefs that would have potential national exposure and repeated training with local community and health experts, these could either be family members that are already cooking for their families everyday, or they could be young aspiring chefs from the local regions.

Individual Farming Plots

Small plots could be assigned to families to have ownership of the plots, cultivating a collective culture of farming using shared resources of both tools and knowledge, and also can tailor the crops produced based on needs and preferences and monetary value.  

Community Kitchen Vendors

Vendors could rent stores next to the community kitchen to produce processed healthy food such as fruit juices, yogurt, etc. They could reap the benefit of bulk-buying from the Community Kitchen operation, and also getting all the traffic from CKC members.

Ecosystem of Materials

Bio-wastes from the Community Kitchen and Community Gardens operations could be transformed back into compost / fertilizers / biogas. The centralized grouping of waste allows for efficient upcycling.