Insights from participatory research reveal that each community food practice requires substantial work to sustain itself. This labor includes the obvious manual work of cooking in a kitchen and weeding in a garden, as well as the hidden work such as writing grant proposals, coordinating between volunteers, maintaining social media platforms, dissemination and communication, and attending network events.

Fig. 1. Often there is an abundance of rescued vegetables from the market, more than the kitchen can consume. This points to the significant amount of food otherwise would have been wasted if BuurtBuik does not step in. Meanwhile, kitchens such as BuurtBuik rely on this market surplus to cut down operation cost.

Fig. 2. Bakfiet [box cycles] are used by BuurtBuik to collect donated food from the adjacent market. It gets full very quickly, requiring the volunteers to make multiple trips, always over-loaded.

Fig. 3. This big gray bin is for organic waste only, which will be sent to the compost bin in the kitchen’s garden. However, the signage is unclear and very often non-organics are mixed into it. In this picture a volunteer is going table to table reminding everyone of the sorting system.

Fig. 4. The compost bin at the back of the garden at Het Gemaal. In this picture there is a mix of fresh cuts.