It’s a first in Côte-d’Or and above all a very nice initiative, the social grocery store Epi Sourire is launching a kitchen library. It allows you to rent kitchen equipment for a day, a week or a month depending on the appliances and the needs. What are the conditions for taking advantage of it? Interview with Thierry Fousset, President of Epi Sourire.
– Christophe Tourne
Epi’sour smile is a social grocery store, that is to say?
It’s an association that offers food aid that is a bit special since people contribute financially to purchases and choose the products on the shelves. Which is a little different from the deliveries of food parcels that are made by other associations such as the Restos du Coeur or the Secours populaire. In a social grocery store, we want people to have a choice in their food. It is an associative, commercial structure, which has clients who come oriented by a social worker for a fixed period.
You have just inaugurated a kitchen library. What is it exactly ?
We first inaugurated a place located next to the grocery store and which makes it possible to welcome people in better conditions. And then the idea came to offer kitchen tools so that people could enjoy them at home, renting them instead of buying them. We often have beneficiaries who have no household appliances at all and for whom, even 100 € of equipment purchases, it is very complicated. Then it is also part of something sustainable, ie why always buy a product when you can rent it for a week, for a month? Everything depends on the device obviously, since we go from the electric plate to the oven, from the raclette device to the yogurt maker. These are all types of equipment related to the kitchen and we are on prices ranging from 1 to 3 € for the loan. It is important that people can contribute financially and then bring the device back to working order.
What is the philosophy of this kitchen library? Beyond the material, there is also the aspect of encouraging people to cook themselves?
Yes, the association is registered in the territory of innovation “sustainable food 2030” of the metropolis. For the past year, we have been studying consumption and improving people’s consumption by trying to promote the use of vegetables and legumes to replace meat. It is also information about different consumption and diet. In the conversations we had with people, there is, for example, a student who explains to us that he lives in a studio or in a room where there is no kitchen, or that his oven has fallen broken-down. He doesn’t know how to do it. The idea therefore came to say that, just as there are brick and mortar libraries in certain towns, why not create a kitchen library to offer people the possibility of accessing equipment without having to buy it? Groupe SEB, which is a local company, responded favorably to our proposal and offered us new equipment.
Precariousness boosted by the health crisis and inflation
This initiative of Epi smile is far from being useless because the frequentation of social grocery stores continues to increase in Dijon, a sign of a precariousness which does not weaken, quite the contrary.
“We don’t control access since it’s still the social workers of the CCAS or the department who send people to us. But yes, we can see that it’s not going down. There was a peak at the first and in the second confinement and today it is no longer falling. We have new populations arriving, foreign populations that we did not have before. Which still poses some problems for us in contact with families and I think that It’s not going to go down. We also have conversations today with people who are starting to get energy bills and don’t have much left to live on.” recognizes Thierry Fousset