[Stoves] communal canteens

[Nikhil Desai]

Andrew:

1. The economics of eating out vs. at home are, like everything,
contextual. Unit cost of ingredients, equipment, and fuel vary, and so does
valuation of time, premium on eating with others. I learned all that while
growing up, but it was a friend's young son who enlightened me when he came
to NYC for grad studies - "I don't have the space to have three kinds of
oils and store bulk quantities, nor do I have the money. Eating out is
cheaper for many things I like to eat. Of course, I can make rice or
noodles and warm up frozen or canned foods, but the overall economics of
food work out with a balance of eating out and cooking at home." Even I
have now started buying more frozen food or picking up hot-and-sour soup
rather than start from scratch.

2. My emphasis on "collective cooking" or bulk cooking is not from the
viewpoint of the eater's economics - let him "stack" as many or as few
stoves and prepared foods from pasta to home delivery of meals - but on
three other considerations:

a) Some people don't have the time or energy to cook or at least some
items. In the city I come from, a Muslim community with too many elderly
singles started delivering fresh hot breads - and other dishes as desired -
to such people. Turned out some other able-bodied customers also wanted to
save the hassle and time of breads.

b) While some prepared foods have lower nutritional value, the availability
of a larger menu in community canteens can help compensate for what
otherwise is a fairly restrictive diet, especially for women and children
among the working poor in urban areas.

c) From the viewpoint of marketing modern biomass fuels and stoves,
obsessing over poor households whose money and time budgets and
cooking/eating preferences or living/mobility arrangements there is very
little information on, larger users provide a ready market. "Households" is
a Census category, not necessarily a viable market definition.

I have in mind a book on "structural transformations of the food economy -
20th and 21st Centuries". From farm (or water) to table, energy
technologies (irrigation and transport to processing and refrigeration)
have made phenomenal changes in the food economy and living conditions.
This would be a "current anthropology" - as it happens - and I will have to
add in some stories on the role of the big data systems and coming
biotechnologies. If I ever get around to the research and travel.

Mere stoves are hardly the central cooking problem. Fires in the belly are
more important than those in labs.

Nikhil

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On Mon, Nov 20, 2017 at 5:41 AM, Andrew Heggie <aj.heggie at gmail.com> wrote:

> Here is a uk article about the value of subsidised canteens catering
> for some 300 thousand urban poor in India
>
> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-41983359
>
> It's unclear how much subsidy is provided per 5 rupee meal, nor
> whether the comparison with a 40 rupee restaurant meal is realistic.
>
> Both Anil and Nikhil have mentioned  the better economics of communal
> cooking yet in UK I find eating out, even at fast food outlets is much
> more expensive than cooking my own food because even though the energy
> needed per meal cooked will be much lower the cost of premises and
> cooks' labour easily outweighs fuel savings.
>
> Andrew
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