[Editor's note: This year, the John H. Macdonald foundation launched national awards for excellence in Canadian University Press student journalism. The Tyee sponsored two new awards: The Tyee Solutions Oriented Writing Award and the Tyee Investigative Writing Award. This article was runner-up for the Tyee Solutions Oriented Writing award. We'll run the winner next week.]

In 1985, in the Montreal east-end district of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, three women with limited money and time found themselves unable to properly feed their families. To cut down on costs, they decided to buy their food in bulk and cook together for an afternoon. They found that this was not only economical, but that it was infinitely more enjoyable to cook in the company of friends.

The idea grabbed the attention of others in the neighbourhood, including local nutritionist Diane Norman, who began working to spread the collective cooking concept. Three years later, there were at least 20 collective kitchen groups in community centres around Montreal. In 1990, the groups formed a provincial lobby -- the Regroupement des cuisines collectives du Québec (RCCQ) -- to co-ordinate their activities and share information. Soon after, Norman set out to encourage other Canadian communities to do the same.

Since then, collective kitchens have caught on elsewhere. Some have survived, while others have died off. But only in Quebec can the collective cooking concept boast a strong movement that sees itself as a path to social empowerment.

A hit recipe

"When you're alone, it's easier to be ignorant of your potential. You don't know your powers, your strengths, what you're capable of," Mélanie Lamoureux explains to me as we sit in the kitchen and eating space of the Ahuntsic Community Centre, where the Service de nutrition et d'action communautaire, or SNAC, hosts its cooking groups.

She continues, "But when you're with a group, you get the opportunity to be fed with the experiences, the knowledge of others." She takes a bite of the macaroni and homemade sausage -- her grandmother's recipe -- that she had prepared with her mother and aunt. Her enthusiasm for healthy and accessible food was infectious -- before I knew it, two hours had flown by.

This is the mindset behind the collective kitchen, which the RCCQ defines as a group of four to six people who meet to plan, shop for and cook meals in large quantities for themselves, and in some cases for their families.

Those who join a cooking group pay a small yearly membership of about five dollars, plus the cost of the ingredients. The only other requirement is that they be from the borough or region from which that collective kitchen works.

At the end of cooking sessions, each person leaves with several meals, about 10 to 15 portions, the latter costing anywhere from 60 cents to about two dollars a each, depending on the interests and budget of each group.

Combine the ingredients

The groups are anything but homogenous.

Though mostly women use collective kitchens, men make up a significant minority. At SNAC, for example, Lamoureux estimated that about 25 per cent of the participants were men.

And while collective kitchens were originally born out of a financial necessity, these groups are not just composed of people struggling with a limited budget. Indeed, there are many groups that cook organic food together, vegetarian food, diabetic-friendly food or even baby food.

Moreover, organizers like Lamoureux often try to incorporate people of different cultural or social backgrounds, which leads to a richer experience and education about food.

"Anyone you can imagine in society, you see here at the collective kitchens. The more diverse, the more rich the groups are, the more powerful they are," she said.

Mix thoroughly

With increased media coverage of food issues in the past few years, many now realize the value of eating a healthy meal. But fewer people than before actually know how to cook. For these people, a collective kitchen can be a place to learn skills and practice new recipes.

While, as of 2004, there were officially 1,350 collective kitchens under the RCCQ, Guyane Marcoux, the director of promotions and development at RCCQ, estimated that the number has since doubled. In the Lac Saint-Jean region, for example, the number of collective cooking groups has jumped from 15 to 60 in the last two years. In other places, there is a waiting list to join a cooking group.

"It's crazy, we've never been this busy," says Marcoux with a laugh. "We're a victim of our own success."

Yet in the rest of Canada, and the United States, collective cooking has garnered some successes, but not to the same extent as here in Quebec.

Bring to a boil

I spoke with Rachel Engler-Stringer, who conducted her doctoral research at the University of Saskatchewan on collective kitchens in Toronto, Saskatoon and Montreal.

She found that in Saskatoon, mostly lower-income groups or people with mental illness benefited from the collective kitchen model. While there is a central lobby group similar to the RCCQ in Saskatchewan, it is desperately underfunded and understaffed.

In Toronto, collective kitchens mostly focus on new immigrant populations. There is no central lobby group and very little social aid coming from the government. There, volunteer-staffed kitchen co-operatives have a very low probability of surviving longer than a year, she found.

In Montreal, however, the RCCQ has five fully-paid staff members and receives funding from both Centraide -- the province's largest charity network -- and the government. With a strong central lobby, these kitchens can work for increased funding from the provincial government while working to create unity and offer support for struggling groups.

Uncover and let simmer

As was the case for many social and community programs, the nineties proved to be formative years for Quebec's collective kitchens.

"In the '90s, the political atmosphere was very different in Quebec," Engler-Stringer says. "The government was relatively progressive compared to other provinces." She pointed to the Ontario of the 1990s under Conservative Premier Mike Harris, where almost all budgets for social aid programs were cut in some form.

"But here in Quebec, they were getting more funding -- money for supplies, for space. They were building community organizations in Quebec, whereas in Ontario, they were destroying them."

Jean-Marie Chapeau, a planning and development officer at Centraide's allocation department, said the organization gives about $100,000 to the RCCQ directly, which goes toward supporting emerging kitchens and better-equipping old ones with quality cooking utensils.

Chapeau said that much of the success of the collective kitchen movement in Quebec could be attributed to the RCCQ.

"They do tremendous work to encourage the development of new groups, especially in the more challenging places, like the West Island," he said.

Serve with social change

As collective kitchens began blossoming across the province during the '90s, RCCQ's members felt the need to identify themselves more accurately. At their 2000 General Assembly, the RCCQ, realizing there were certain traits found in successful collective kitchens that did not exist in those that failed, adopted five standard values: solidarity, democracy, equity and social justice, autonomy, and respect and human dignity.

Lamoureux, of SNAC, explained that these values play out in the social cooking atmosphere of each group and that participants are encouraged to apply the values to their everyday lives.

"We try to live these values in our lives. We can use them to solve problems, for organization, interpersonal relationships, decision-making, planning. It's an empowerment -- it's a concept we talk a lot about, but it's not something that's well-understood by the citizens. Through RCCQ it's easier to appropriate the concepts."

Marcoux, of RCCQ, has noticed results.

"I believe, now, that food is only a pretext. When I started here, and began working with new kitchens, it became so obvious that people came for one reason, but that they stayed for another," she says.

Beyond any food bank, beyond any social welfare program, a community kitchen enables people to lift themselves out of isolation, poverty or loneliness. As Lamoureux told me:

"You can experience a situation that lets you be conscious of your talents, strengths, knowledge, and changing your collective cooking group but also your family, your work, your neighbourhood and your society. Then you can say to yourself: 'Yes, I can change my world.'"

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