开云体育

I am currently trapped in a hotel in Himachal Pradesh. At present, we are on the upward slope of the First Wave of the CoVID-19 pandemic. This will be a phase of my life I look back on in a very specific light, I'm sure.

Curiously enough, we were on our way to Sikkim to finally "settle down" after over a year of traveling. This means that, although we didn't make it, we do have a couple desk-fulls of computer equipment and one solid library shelf of actual dead-tree books. One thing we do not have is our own kitchen. This is unfortunate during a highly contagious pandemic but every morning as I stand anxiously over the pot of chai in our shared kitchen, I find myself pondering over the properties of kitchens a great deal. Here are some of those thoughts.

I mentioned in the Canon thread that I think Bertrand Russell's In Praise of Idleness (the book of essays, not necessarily the title essay) is well worth a read. In it, he discusses what a world of automation and fully-distributed workforce might look like. At the time, women were largely not members of the workforce but Russell was prescient enough to take the equal participation of all adult members of society for granted -- to him, it was only a question of time. He envisioned societal clusters not unlike the gated communities so prevalent in India today. However, rather than gated versions of the nuclear family spliced with traditional Asian multi-generational households, he wasn't focused on the family unit. Instead, he was specifically interested in child care and food preparation.

The Kitchen is a cradle of mental and physical health. It is obviously where raw ingredients mix to form the nutrient-rich meals that keep us alive. Any of us who have indulged in unhealthy diets as a part of adult life understand the immediate and frighteningly acute value of healthy food. Let us define adulthood as the time beyond that window of life between the teenage years and the late twenties when the body can survive on almost any garbage input as long as it is majority carbon-based. Perhaps this sensation can act as an approximation of adulthood itself: Eating trash makes one feel like trash. But the mental health provided by the kitchen is more than a direct consequence of reciprocity between the brain and the gut. The kitchen is where the best house parties finish, at 4:00 AM. The kitchen is where your mother let you taste half-finished-but-sufficiently-sweet dessert preparations. The kitchen is the physical origin of waffles and dosas (or other cultural equivalents of complex carbohydrates which demand the constant attention of the Kitchen Master). The kitchen is where my brother's classmate with a far more traditional country upbringing took a beating with a large wooden spoon after eating an entire "Jethro Bowl" of his mother's fresh-picked raspberries.

I find it almost impossible to cook for one. When I'm alone, I tend to prepare food as if it were for a family of eight then reheat and repurpose that preparation over the course of three or four days. I've found I'm not alone in this. Dinner is where we discuss the day with family, meet a blind date, take a business meeting, encounter new friends with old. Not all food is social but it's natural for us to consume the majority of it that way. Russell suggested that these tendencies lend themselves to communal meal preparation and communal dining, by default. He wasn't suggesting doing away with personal kitchens or making communal meals mandatory for a small colocated society of people. He simply felt that people would gravitate toward this were the option presented.

In Russell's vision, the adults of the community share responsibility for managing the kitchen, buying groceries, and preparing the food. There exists a hacker village (of a sort) near Igatpuri known as U Ba Khin Village and in that village they have a variation of this. While I'm still not sure what I think of a village built exclusively for Vipassana meditators, I do like the idea of a shared kitchen and dining hall. They have hired the cooking staff, I believe, but some of the shared kitchen principles remain the same: communal eating, specific meal times, healthy food.

In a proper Hacker Village, it seems a communal kitchen could serve a wide number of purposes. If I think about our time at the fortyfourforty cabin over the past eight years, a massive amount of time goes into food: keeping the right masalas, managing dry and wet goods, keeping a balanced diet, using vegetables at an opportune time, trying to bake things over an open fire, timing our trips to get propane refills (a standard propane canister is much smaller than an LPG cylinder), and so forth. When a larger number of people show up at the cabin, the one place we all centre on is the kitchen. If I fantasize about the next building we'll construct, it's a comfortable shared kitchen with a huge window to the ocean view.

There is a huge urban appeal these days in spending long periods of the day working or reading a book in a cafe. The space often shares parallels with a shared kitchen: the smell of books, the smell of food and coffee and tea, the smell of fresh-baked bread, the murmur of other people, comfortable furniture, and perhaps a window into the kitchen itself. Warmth. Comfort. If I think of a concrete instance, say the upcoming hacker village near Salem in Tamil Nadu, I'm increasingly convinced that a shared kitchen may prove to be one of the most valuable pieces of social infrastructure. A community of four houses probably doesn't merit a cafe... but it could very well merit a kitchen.

Of course, here in the hotel^H^H^H^H^H^H homestay we are facing a different set of issues during the CoVID-19 outbreak. A shared kitchen is actually a bad thing right now and there are design elements which can either exacerbate that situation or take pressure off. The most important are the lessons we learned while volunteering in the kitchen at Dhamma Suttama (a Vipassana centre between Montreal and Ottawa). This was a large commercial kitchen designed to feed up to 200 students. I was surprised initially when we were told not to dry anything. There were plenty of towels. The reasoning was to avoid cross-contamination. Canada is almost always under the weight of one strain or the other of the flu virus and this lesson from the health authority was strictly adhered to: Let all the dishes air dry. This comes in my mind every time we clean up after preparing or eating a meal. Use plenty of soap, rinse thoroughly, air dry, clean all the surfaces with disinfectant. As an added design bonus of air-drying, the drying rack and storage of utensils becomes a singular concept and we've found it surprisingly comfortable to make daily use of a shared kitchen smaller than most kitchens we're accustomed to.

In an early hacker village (again, let's say the hills outside Salem) it will benefit the community to centralize other expenses as well. The kitchen is a huge energy sink, between the stove, the fridge, a water purifier, and potentially a kettle or other appliances. Centralizing this can really help to get a small village off the ground if the residents are keen to stick to self-generated energy like wind and solar. Perhaps not in Tamil Nadu, but further north (and definitely in Canada) it is helpful to have some sort of heat both for water and the physical space. Depending on the season and the temperatures, passive heat can do wonders here: Solar hot water is better than ice-cold water in the sink during wintertime and passive solar with a large, south-facing window (remember the kitchen I'd like to build at 4440?) keeps the indoors of the kitchen warm and comfortable. Passive can also include insulating materials. The Japanese Vipassana centre has huge insulated flasks where they keep hot water and hojicha for anyone, 24-hours-a-day. An individual kitchen may not merit a 10 litre super insulated flask of hot water but a shared kitchen might as this would certainly reduce fuel costs over time.

If a hacker village were in full swing right now, the shared kitchen is obviously not an ideal default while trying to keep social distance. However, if someone in the village were to fall sick, the shared kitchen potentially provides a space large enough to cook meals for them, separately, and deliver food to their house in the situation where they don't have someone to take care of them. In times like these, a shared ktichen becomes the "covid kitchen" and it can be treated with the same preference for over-cleaning and high levels of sterility that a commercial kitchen would be.

In many ways, I wish we'd gotten one of these projects* off the ground just a little earlier. A hacker village might perhaps be the best place to ride out a pandemic. This is another topic entirely, but it feels as though the desire for a home -- and for many of us, a Home Base -- is really a sensible impulse that deserves a lot of consideration in terms of minimums: Just what is a Minimum House? How quickly and cheaply can we build one? Ten? A topic for another day.

Stay safe everyone. Use plenty of soap.

Love,
Steven

* One of the year-round, home-base villages. Fortyfourforty exists... but you wouldn't want to spend a winter there yet. :P