EL COMEDOR DE SANTI: THE ARGUMENT FOR AUTONOMOUS COMMUNITY KITCHENS
September 3, 2020
I arrived to La Chilinga on a chilly Friday morning to find Santi Figueroa busy in conversation with a neighbor who had stopped by to drop off food while he fielded one greeting and elbow pound after another to the growing number of lunch goers. Noontime was quickly approaching and inside a small crew of volunteers were busy finishing swiss chard tortillas, a potato omelette that is a staple across Buenos Aires’ traditionalist bars and restaurants, and pastel de papa, a meat and potato pie commonly associated with a cold winter’s day at your grandmother’s house. This was the first day after many months that the community kitchen was able to incorporate meat onto a menu in a country with a fervent loyalty to beef. People were visibly excited — one man arrived, out of breath, running over to make sure he got his slice of pastel. There were also bright red tomatoes punched down in the oven and sprinkled with salt and oregano and promise of flan.
This is the daily routine at El Comedor de Santi. Every single day, Figueroa and his team open the community center to serve a light breakfast in the form of tea and bread or biscuits followed by a homemade lunch to a growing number of neighbors.
The country has been in quarantine since mid-March and a number of social distancing measures are still in place. The stress on neighborhood community kitchens during a mandatory stay-in-place order that welcomed the quarantine was immediate. According to data released by the city of Buenos Aires, which is home to some 3 million people, the number of residents turning to community kitchens and pantries increased by 40% between the months of March and April. By July, the number of people depending on these vital food services, which provides both hot meals and bags of non-perishables, tripled from 105,000 to nearly 350,000 across 471 city funded community kitchens as of mid-July.
El Comedor de Santi doesn’t fit into that official measurement. The real number of community kitchens feeling the stress of growing food insecurity is unquantifiable, as more spaces like this one launch 100% community-driven initiatives that depend on the benevolence of donations and dedication of volunteers and neighbors. I sat down with Figueroa to talk about the need for community-run spaces, state support with autonomy attached and food as a vehicle to rebuild human connections.
Could you tell me about how this community kitchen project developed?
La Chilinga has been around for 14 years and I’ve been here since the beginning. I’m from here, the neighborhood of Saavedra. One day a friend introduced me to the owners, Dani and Graciela, they are siblings, and they invited me to be a part of this community space. We haven’t separated since. I have always worked with them. Right now, I am in charge of the community kitchen and head security. We have a really good relationship with one another and they have given me the space to run this initiative. We started out with tutoring on Saturdays and gave out milk and snacks, and added another day on Wednesdays. A team began to form that turned into the community kitchen. We started with an olla popular one day and the next day people came to ask for more food. So we gave out what was left over and basically within a week we transformed into a community kitchen. Initially twice a week, then three times, and now we are here every single day giving out food. We have put a lot of energy into the kitchen lately because it is what people need most today and tomorrow and so on. We work with people who have families of 8, 10 or 15 people and we give what we can. What we have that day is what we have. Today we handed out 100 servings in about 35 minutes.
How does this project sustain itself?
The neighbors help a lot. We are sustained by the neighborhood. Everything comes from the neighbors of Saavedra but we have people bring us things from other neighborhoods, too. Some specific neighbors who we have strong relationships with. In the morning, we give breakfast, tea and some bread or snacks if we have some. There is a bakery that gives us their leftovers, and a school that gives us snacks. We are here all morning and then serve lunch. But this is very literally a community project. Yesterday for example a woman gave us 5 kilos of butter, she is a pastry chef and it was a kind of butter that she wasn’t going to be able to use, so we had noodles with butter and today we used it to make pastel de papa [a meat ‘pie’ made principally with ground beef and mashed potato] and flavor the potatoes. We don’t receive anything from an outside organization like what a kitchen that is registered with the city receives. They receive direct support from the government [sic] those are called assisted kitchens. Basically they bring you product, vegetables, to be able to cook the following day. They have their food guaranteed. The ones that are not assisted, like us, it's a struggle. We cook with our struggle. That’s the big difference. We are very militant about the human part of this [sic] about solidarity and teamwork. There are people here that find themselves in economic situations that are temporary. They haven’t always been poor. People with careers. Electricians. Plumbers. But everything went to shit and no one can go out to work. We work with families that come here because they have no other way to feed themselves from one day to the next. Everything is really expensive and there is no work. And all of us that work here are doing this out of solidarity, it’s all volunteer work, everyone comes to dedicate the hours they can and collaborate.
Why do you choose not to be an assisted kitchen?
Here there is no political infrastructure, it is literally a system of neighbors, not a political group. That really distinguishes us. If we worked that way, we’d be feeding everyone the same exact food they make at every other kitchen. The assisted kitchens receive money and other benefits, which makes running one really great, but there is a lack of social context because there is no direct contact with the people. The assisted kitchen follows a weekly diet. They get ingredients that are meant to make specific foods. There is a government social worker that goes from kitchen to kitchen, and she has you cook this or that, control, I’m not interested in that. There are a lot of rules. I think it is much better that we cook what we know and want and understand who we are cooking for. If this were a school, awesome, I would accept every piece of knowledge and recommendation of a social worker, a nutritionist, whoever, but we work with people who live in the street and those are people that want and need something different. They are fed up with eating stew. Stew, stew, stew. Rice stew. Lentil stew. Stew with noodles. Stew with whatever. All legumes. It’s exhausting. I get it though. We are turning down money and ingredients and support.
Tell me about the human contact you are seeking out here.
We focus a lot on building a relationship. Without butting into people’s lives either. Understanding where we can or where they want to let us in. The social work we do here is giving a good plate of food and helping people re-accustom themselves to eating. Eating is dignity. The state of food that we are seeing here in the city of Buenos Aires is completely humiliating because they take away your humanity. It’s not just about giving food, it’s about one human giving attention to another. I don’t care who they are, how they are dressed. You have to acknowledge that these are human beings, they are a person, and just like you want to eat a plate of food in your house, they would like to eat a plate of food in theirs. With the donations that we receive, I try to change the menu up. Sometimes we don’t have a lot to work with and so it’s a lot of lentils but when we have food to work with, the first thing I do is change the menu. Noodles, pastel de papa, tomato with oregano, everything made here. It’s simple. Give a plate of food with dignity, that they feel at least in their imagination that they are at home with a nice, white, clean plate, silverware, a glass of juice and some bread, that we don’t just hand them a disposable tupper of food.
The idea isn’t just to fill someone’s hunger.
Hunger, you know, you can fill that with some bread and tea. That’s how you fill a stomach. But to eat a plate of food that is delicious and dignified, that’s not happening everywhere. We want that, that people feel a little bit of dignity, they have enough cruelty in their lives. If we don’t have enough food, we don’t have enough food, we are very aware of that. But if I have something, we are going to make food with a lot of love.
It’s pretty paradoxical. Because while the government provides very needed financial support, the system doesn’t necessarily empower spaces and the people that run them to work autonomously based on their immediate needs. Obviously, no two community centers are exactly the same, and the system doesn’t totally recognize that. They should give out a budget and access to resources and let individual centers manage them how they see fit. This reminds me of a conversation I had with a union leader within Carrefour who told me that a lot of the other union workers had never worked in a Carrefour before. Most of them were academics or career union people. And he wants to change from the bottom up and the people who have never lived the experience at the base, lots of important details get lost and you end up not fully serving the people you are meant to assist. I imagine that there are a lot of invisible benefits or areas you serve more fully where an assisted kitchen misses the mark.
An important thing about these spaces is that we are working with a lot of people who are homeless. It is important to us that people have somewhere to sit. That they can have a moment to sit down, talk, think. In other kitchens, you can’t sit down and eat your food. They give you a disposable plate of food and send you to eat somewhere else as if you were an animal. So you are already poor and they make you feel even poorer. Eating that way is so sad. If you have no other choice but to eat that way, fine, that’s fine, that’s life. We could take a subsidy and serve 200 of those a day and have them go off and eat like some delinquent somewhere, but that’s not the idea. Anyway, since there are so many people that are homeless or living in squats coming here, they don’t have a lot of human contact. They’ve lost a piece of their humanity. Humans are creatures of habit. If you were suddenly transported to a mountain, you’d adapt pretty quickly. The same thing happens on the streets. People get used to living that way. I’m not the state. I know I’m not going to solve everything for them. But if what I can do is give them a hot plate of food, I’m going to do that the absolute best way that I can.
And beyond losing out on that human connection, this way is also a lot more efficient.
If you want to talk about this from a logistics perspective, it doesn’t add up. This is less expensive, generates less waste. We don’t spend any money on disposable plastics. If I give a person living in the street a disposable dish filled with food, what are they going to do if they don’t eat it all? Toss it. How are they going to save that? Where? That sort of thing happens when you don’t truly connect with the person you are helping. We give people a plate of food, if they want a second helping and we have it, we give them a second helping. That way we don’t waste anything.
Considering that this type of one-on-one contact is unusual for the city-backed community kitchens, what is the connection like? Tell me about the relationships that form.
People become involved. We want people to get to know one another and for them to get to know us. This space is particular because we work from a very humane space. That’s the key. We give everything we have, even to the people who volunteer. They get a plate of food, we give them fruit to take home. We have a few volunteers that are or were homeless. People who got involved, who had their crisis, that people didn’t pay any attention to them. They started becoming a part of this and feeling like a part of something in this world. Being homeless doesn’t make you a bad person. The street doesn’t speak for anyone. They want what everyone wants. Just a normal life. They want to feel good and feel like they are a part of something.
I’m sure that involvement is really nourishing the project too. Making it grow in different directions.
Right now we are seeking out someone to help us with some gender specific issues. We’d like the women to have a space and we’d like to provide services like giving out sanitary pads so that people don’t have to beg for money for that. But yes, people become really faithful to this space because they know they are coming somewhere that is safe, that doesn’t discriminate against them, they can bring their stuff and set it down wherever. They feel like a part of this. Right now we are collecting stale bread to make milanesa. People are bringing us their bread, they set aside a little from what they get in other kitchens and bring it to us. Instead of eating it or tossing it they bring it here. We want to make some milanesas with pumpkin puree and we talked about it and people are helping make that happen. There is a certain mysticism.
You really dedicate a lot of time to this project which is totally voluntary. What makes you get up and come here everyday?
Everyone does what they want and can do. I want to be here and I can be here. There are people who donate, people with food businesses that donate. Today we made potato and swiss chard quiches because a woman with her food business donates that to us regularly. There is a cook who stopped his car one day to ask what we were doing. He stuck around for a few hours and couldn’t believe what we were doing here. He is getting more and more involved, he sends us ingredients, he is going to bring some other cooks here to make lunch one day. The people that can’t be with us everyday do what they can. We know that we need to help.