Many collective kitchens exist in Rotterdam vis-à-vis the dominant industrialized food production in the Dutch port city, with the Netherlands being the world’s second largest food exporter. I began volunteering in one of the collective kitchens in Rotterdam Zuid earlier this spring as I interrogate the social relations within which such community is embedded.

How is food prepared? Where does it come from? Where do the kitchen scraps go? Who are the guests and who the volunteers? Is this distinction necessary? What food future(s) are they envisioning? The inquiry continues while I attend the kitchen weekly, chopping away the abundant avocado and cucumber rescued from the adjacent market.

*Field note by Kevin Lai, research assistant at Utrecht University working on the Open Kitchen solution, a transdisciplinary research-by-design experiment that aims at reimagining new assemblages and uses of urban collective kitchens for the inclusion of diverse communities of human and more-than human agents.