Community kitchens in France and Germany: a new form of alternative consumption between the private household and the market sector

Résumé En

Community kitchens can be broadly defined as spaces where people cook collectively and then share a meal. The people who participate are usually non-professional cooks and are not paid to do so. It is therefore a form of volunteering.The history of community kitchens shows the variety of ideologies behind them. In Germany, they emerged in the mid-19th century as a counter-form to charitable organisations. In contrast to this Christian-based food aid, the "Volksküche" (people's kitchens) rejected the principle of "almsgiving" and supported class solidarity among workers.At the end of the 19th century, American feminists advocated community kitchens with the aim of socialising household tasks. They linked women's emancipation to economic independence. Their aim was to enable women to meet and cook together, in order to break the solitude of the home and to gain recognition for the work done by proposing that the tasks performed be paid for by the husband.Today, collective kitchens in France and Germany tend to respond to three issues: food insecurity, the creation of social links and the transmission of food standards and values (local and/or organic food, vegetarianism or veganism).In this short presentation, I would like to present the history of community kitchens and their current forms in order to understand what kind of consumer they encourage. Consumers who engage in these spaces contribute to producing the meals they will consume. The boundary between producers and consumers thus becomes blurred in a space that belongs neither to the household nor to the market sector. Initial observations and interviews conducted as part of my doctoral research show that they see their participation - their volunteering - as a contribution to a broader project that aims to develop social relations in a neighbourhood.