For the twenty-seventh year, in a hundred municipalities in Quebec, thousands of people are highlighting the pleasure of participating in a collective kitchen. The rise in food prices, higher than inflation, is hurting many households. Already weakened, they are the most affected, because these households devote a large percentage of their budget to the purchase of food. As the food budget can be compressed, the quantity and quality of food purchased prove insufficient to maintain basic needs.
This worrying situation encourages the Regroupement des cuisines collectives du Québec (RCCQ) and its members to claim the right to eat with dignity. Always flouted, it is high time to guarantee the right to food in Quebec.
Collective kitchens take on their full meaning and become an essential means for economically vulnerable people with precarious status. However, this activity is not only for the latter, if the savings it generates are significant, the human benefits are even more so.
Social impact
Available to everyone, across the province, collective kitchens have an undeniable social impact, both individually and collectively. They are real vectors of change by promoting openness and discovery. By bringing together people with different cultures of origin, gender identities, experiences and life trajectories, they support living together. They succeed in reducing social inequalities and allow encounters that are sometimes surprising, always enriching. Thanks to these moments of solidarity, the whole of Quebec society is embellished. They nurture the creation of links between people and contribute to their integration into communities, both urban and rural. Cooking together, joining a group, also means sharing values of solidarity, autonomy, respect, dignity, democracy, equity and social justice.
By preparing enough meals for several people, collective kitchens help to reduce the food waste that often occurs when cooking together. Surpluses can be frozen or gifted. Nothing is lost, everything is shared!
Gatherers
Finally, the collective kitchens allow the development of the participants by helping them to acquire various skills and by encouraging them to take charge of their own food and that of their family. By pooling their knowledge and skills, they learn together and, for many people, break their isolation. Sharing and transmission are at the heart of each meeting. In pleasure, laughter, secrets, benevolence and friendships, people improve their health (physical, mental and economic) and therefore, collective well-being.
If people join a cooking group for any number of reasons, they stay because it’s the funbecause the encounter with the other fills the being as much as the fridge.
This is the recipe for the collective kitchen.
” At first, I went there to cook and feed my family better, but now it’s more than that, much more than that! With the girls in my group, we became friends, we go out together, it’s great! »
Shoshanna Cohen, participant in a collective kitchen group at the Center d’entraide Racine-Lavoie in Saint-Eustache
On this March 26, 2023, in joy and sharing, we celebrate the twenty-seventh national day of collective kitchens and we will celebrate it for a very long time, inflationary context or not. Because collective cooking is so much more than cooking!
Photo provided by Josée Poirier Defoy
Josee Poirier Defoy, President of the Board of Directors of the RCCQ