During the war time, Dutch society suffered from a lack of food and austerity measures were in place. Recipes were the key dissemination of survival knowledge, imperative to teach civilians ways of cooking with limited resources. Soup kitchens (NL: gaarkeuken) were key sites supporting the hungry public during food scarcity. Volunteers gathered around to prepare simple meals out of scarce ingredients, e.g. tulip bulbs and sugar beets. Food resilience became a national matter. The Bescherming Bevolking [en: Protection of the Population] was established in 1952 to organize protection for the Dutch population in future war times. One of its initiatives was designing a mobile soup kitchen that could be dispatched in no time on rails to prepare hot meals for hungry civilians across the country. The Keukentrein resembles a factory streamline production chain where ingredients such as potato would be processed through the linear sequence and prepared as food.

The pursuit of such innovations reveals an anticipatory politic at play, one that imagines advancing technology can become key solution to future crises. Food is essential to the necessary reproduction of society. Public kitchens therefore are key sites reorganizing these reproductive activities for the imagined futures.

In the Open Kitchen pilot, the ongoing archival research on past initiatives of public feeding and collectivized cooking in the Netherlands not only showcases different imaginations of our relationship with food, such an investigation also challenges us to rethink our contemporary food provision: Can community kitchens be more than an austerity measure, but a public luxury to be enjoyed equally by everyone in society? Can it be a consensus in a society that access to healthy food is a right and therefore resources should be prioritized for public feeding programs? Can we imagine a kitchen-full city with community kitchen open in each neighborhood, an infrastructure as ubiquitous as public library and waste bins?