PUBLIC KITCHENS

Evening Post, Volume XCVII, Issue 142, 18 June 1919, Page 6

PUBLIC KITCHENS

BETTER AND CHEAPER FOOD

MINIMISING SERVANT PROBLEM.

Various speakers at the recent Dominion Town-Planning Conference made reference to the desirability of establishing communal kitchens in the larger centres. Most of those who touched on the question were women, and they based their arguments in favour of such kitchens largely on the difficulty of securing domestic servants, claiming at the same time that household expenses would be reduced, appreciably by the adoption of the principle.

The proposal is not as new or ws revolutionary as it might appear to some people at first glance; in fact, a Government official, the Secretary of Labour (Mr. P. W. Rowley) advanced the suggestion in his last annual report. In discussing the impossibility of securing domestic servants, Mr. Rowley said that one solution was the establishment of communal kitchens in some of the ci.fef centres of the Dominion. These kitchens, he thought, should sonis enterprising business, people take the ■Jia.tter up, would prove of advantage to many classes of the community. During the war many such kitchens were establish.*! !,i» Bngland, and' economists of the first rank claim without hesitation that they not only cut, down waste and inefficiency, but also promoted the health of the communities in which they were established. Such was their success, in fact, that every | effort is being made to retain them when war conditions have disappeared entirely. It is in America, however, that the central or communal kitchen has made the greatest advance. In Monrovia,. California, with a population of 4000, for instance, the food is cooked at a central shop, but there is no delivery, each patron calling or sending for his meal. Even under this somewhat primitive arrangement it is claimed that the cost is less for the individual family than under the old system. This shop is only one of many such premises established in different American towns. Paradena., Cali-. fornia, is the scene of another experiment. There a large hotel accommodating 500 guests has adjoining it seven acres of bungalows heated with the hotel's central heating plant and with the tenants supplied from the hotel kitchens. The real end to be aimed at in a small town is the establishment of a •central kitchen, and in a city the opening of many . kitchens in different neighbourhoods. At these kitchens the meals of the townspeople would be prepared according to orders, and would then be delivered in heat-retaining vessels. The success of hot food containers, by the "way, was established during the war, for at the front the rations were usually cooked in the support lines, placed in the containers, and carried to the' men in the front line. From these containers the food always emerged most palatably hot. It may be many years before New Zealand cities adopt the communal kitchen scheme, but the fact remains that it is by no means the experiment that many people have been inclined to consider it. .