On the outskirts of Austin, Texas, a place called Community First! Village has become pivotal to the city’s plans for addressing homelessness in the city.
The village is now filled with hundreds of tiny homes mostly reserved for people coming out of chronic homelessness, but it is expected to grow to thousands of homes within the next few years.
As Lucy Tompkins reported for Headway in January, among the distinctive features of the community are its shared outdoor kitchens. They are both a practical accommodation to maximize the number of tiny homes that can be built, and a way of ensuring that neighbors are drawn into the community and not isolated in their units.
In May, Susan Shain reported for Headway on the rise of free school lunch in the United States. “More than 21 million American children now attend schools that offer free meals to all,” she wrote, “a tenfold increase from 2010.”
In addition to improved health and educational outcomes for the children, the free meals also freed up money and time for their families. The growth of free lunch programs had been given a significant boost during Covid lockdowns, when schools became critical to feeding families across the country.
Since Headway started three years ago, our quest to explore progress has brought us again and again to matters of the kitchen — places where people make food for themselves and one another. While the food itself gets plenty of consideration, the kitchens that make it often go unseen, despite the quietly gigantic impact they have on our lives and neighborhoods. Now, in a series of visual essays from Headway, we are training our lenses on kitchens and the people who inhabit them.
A kitchen both shapes and reflects its culture. The individual choices we make in our home kitchens have an outsize collective impact on the world — food is the single biggest item occupying landfills nationwide, for example, with the largest share of it coming from households. Meanwhile, commercial restaurants can both change and stabilize the character of neighborhoods. And industrial-size kitchens in places such as schools and prisons feed entire communities and train and employ cooks. As cities adapt to forces like extreme weather, food insecurity and the housing crisis, changes in how we gather and live will very often emerge first in the spaces where people come together to make food.
Kitchens offer windows into not only yards and farms and gardens, but into systems of agriculture, energy, water and waste, gender divides, patterns of migration, matters of labor and health, processes of development and displacement.
It’s no surprise that kitchens touch off some of our most protracted fights.
One famous debate set in a kitchen offers a window into how much American households have changed in living memory.
It was July 1959, and the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union had entered a brief new phase of temporary openness — Khrushchev’s Thaw. Having succeeded Joseph Stalin as the leader of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev was making a tense attempt at peaceful coexistence with the United States.
The Soviets and the Americans had agreed to exchange exhibits showcasing each country’s cultural and economic systems — a joint and explicit propaganda campaign. The United States sent Moscow a model suburban home, cut in half, so television cameras could show the interior.
Richard Nixon, who was then vice president, traveled to Moscow to tour the American exhibit by Khrushchev’s side. In the kitchen of the model house, the two men had a polite but contentious back-and-forth about the merits of their respective societies. The Kitchen Debate, as it would come to be called, revolved around the philosophical, cultural and political differences between the two nations.
Convenience and innovation were the implied stars of the U.S. exhibit. The ’50s had ushered in a new vision of handy timesavers in American cooking — boxed, canned and frozen ingredients and meals ready to drop into pans and plates and, before too long, microwaves. Large changes were afoot in global food systems. Fast-food restaurants were beginning to change the landscape, and the concept of the drive-through was just taking root. Americans were marketing not only their culture to the Soviets but entirely new ways of relating to food.
But where Nixon hailed convenience, Khrushchev derided waste.
“Your American houses are built to last only 20 years so builders could sell new houses at the end,” Khrushchev said. “We build firmly. We build for our children and grandchildren.”
“American houses last for more than 20 years,” Nixon rebutted, “but, even so, after 20 years, many Americans want a new house or a new kitchen. Their kitchen is obsolete by that time.”
If the debate was judged by how global culture shifted in the ensuing years, Nixon won. The lifestyle America was marketing made strides all over the world. But it’s striking how differently Nixon and Khrushchev’s arguments land today, in an era dogged by concern over grocery prices, plastic waste, planned obsolescence and supply chains.
As Headway explores the march of progress, we wanted to consider how kitchens are changing again, as well as anchoring communities through change. We decided to begin with one of the places that played an instrumental role both in shaping the kitchens of the 20th century and in marketing the lifestyle they reflected to consumers worldwide: Southern California.
The cultural and geographic diversity of the greater Los Angeles area and its proximity to the national breadbasket of the Central Valley make it a fascinating frontier for kitchens on the forefront of change. Like many of the nation’s immigrants, many of America’s cuisine traditions have come through this city — cultures from around the world, from Japan to India to El Salvador, have shaped Los Angeles’s kitchens.
The first three stories in our series all focus on businesses that define or redefine their neighborhoods.
As you consider these stories, we want to ask you about the kitchens in your lives — both those that make food for you and those you make food in. What do our kitchens reveal about the shape of the society around them? How should they change to reshape society for the 21st century?
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