L: Can you tell me a little more about the kitchen collective?
During the summer, I was a part of this organization… I really didn’t feel like I fit in, because it was too much work, and it was structured, and it was supposed to be horizontal, but it wasn’t. I’m an anarchist, so I don’t like these very top-down, structured things, where the people on the top know everything and they’re doing the most, and the people at the bottom are just ‘Hey, what’s going on?’, just kind of following orders and getting handed tasks instead of looking at the entire picture and picking what they can do best. That is how I like to operate. I’m trying to learn it still, it’s not something I know, but we’re all trying to function like this in my circles I think.
So, the person that used to be in charge of the kitchen collective years ago came in contact with me and my friend Tay, because we had cooked for that organization a couple of times, for 20 people, 25 people, for events, and he was like ‘Hey, I want to restart this, would you be interested?’ We had a meeting with him a couple of weeks later and it really built up slowly.
“We worked with the time and the energy that we had, and I really liked that.”
We worked with the time and the energy that we had, and I really liked that. It wasn’t ‘Now I’m gonna go headfirst into this and lose myself and not sleep’. I really liked that it followed the rhythm of our lives. With everything else that you just have to make time for, like university, and everyone demanding so much from you, this project for me felt like I could do it in my own way with my friend, and we met with this person like once every two weeks and he would just say –
Wait, I’m telling this in a mess.
We were looking for the old equipment of the kitchen, because at some point it was a squatters kitchen somewhere, and now the equipment was spread out through all the squats in Groningen (laughs). So Geert, the person that was helping us out, he made a lot of calls, Tay made a lot of calls, I made some calls, we were seeing where all the equipment was, and it took a while.
We checked lists that someone had left before of the things that we had, where is this, where is that, what do we need? What do we need to throw out, what do we need to buy new, what can we buy second-hand? We needed to make a budget… All these things, but it was never stressful. We started just in the spare time that we had, and the first time that we actually managed to cook for someone was a couple of weeks ago for the Code Rood Biking Action, and it was really nice.
“As an anarchist, I love seeing people function without having someone at the head…”
As an anarchist, I love seeing people function without having someone at the head, and that’s how you realize when people are interested, they really wanna help out, and you don’t need someone that knows everything and that is telling everyone what to do.
As an example: I told a friend about this, and she’s also an anarchist, she’s also vegan and interested in these things, and she was like ‘Let me know if you need help’, and then my friend Tay had to leave early, so I asked her and she helped me out. And the people in the squad where we were cooking, they also lend a hand, they just see you working and they’re like ‘What do you need? There’s some vegetables there, what do you think?’
It’s really nice to see how these things come together spontaneously, and I guess that was also a big lesson for me. I love that I can just do it my own way with the kitchen collective, unlike the organization in which I was before, which was taking so much time for me. I was at the edge of a burn-out, and for the longest time, I didn’t realize how I didn’t identify with it. Giving so much to an organization that isn’t giving you anything rewarding because you don’t feel like your values are there, it’s so draining, and it’s a lot more draining than I thought. I’m so glad that I got out of there and I’m doing my own thing now.
