KITCHEN RECIPES

In her book Feminist International: How to Change Everything, Verónica Gago looks at the kitchen as a site of assembly, a situated apparatus of collective intelligence. The site of assembly she described coincides with the physical space of the domestic kitchen, the soup kitchen, the street where women take their pots out and cook collective meals in a public display of defiance. Rather than merely spaces of food provision, they are where the feminist strikes were cooked, where «a feminist diagnosis of the crisis is elaborated through the struggles of women, lesbians, travesties, and trans people» (Gago, 2020, pp. 140-142; p. 201).

Food has the capacity of (re)negotiating our kinships and reflects our ways of thinking, making and relating. In the production, provision, and consumption of food, questions of labour, intimacy, sociality, and resistance unfold. The gendered division of reproductive labour, amongst other dynamics, has deeply shaped the built environment, not least through the production and provision of food. Historically, food provision has fallen upon the female parent under capitalism. The nuclear family apartment or house prevalent throughout the Western world illustrates and produces this: A couple’s bedroom, a number of children’s rooms, a living room as a communal area, and a small kitchen for one person to prepare food for their family/economic unit.

Moreover, places of food production, provision, or consumption are also spaces of social interaction and have the power to influence and shape cultural practices. Anita Mannur points out that, under neoliberalism, food stigmatizes, isolates, and marginalizes communities of color, immigrants, single people and queer people. She insists that neoliberalism is «a force that structures multiculturalism in ways that celebrate normative forms of difference». Instead of multiculturalism, Mannur proposes the question of how food can be used to illuminate how radical publics and intimate spaces of belonging are created for non-normative subjects (Mannur, 2022, p. 10). Numerous examples have shown that food and its associated knowledges, such as recipes or craftsmanship, offer a specific site for racialised groups to become organised, form communities, and build collective resilience through the economy of food. A kinship beyond the nuclear family model is practiced through such food practices, granting them the potential to revolutionize established power dynamics and discriminations. 

In this article, foods and their architectures will provide entry points into rethinking these structures and dynamics of power. Each of the following micro-stories show a case where gender and the production or provision of food have led to a reshaping of the built environment, which in turn provides insight into the socio-economic conditions of its production. In the analysis of this reciprocity between food and its socio-economic contexts, our hope is to illuminate architecture’s central role in dismantling the unequal care regime that is based on the alleged normality. 

1. Canned Seafood / Galician Seafood Industries

Since the beginning of the 19th century, Galician shellfish gatherers and canners have been predominantly feminine. Women are responsible for the gathering, treating, canning, selling, and managing of the seafood, along with other industrial duties related to production. Nowadays, the fish and shellfish canning industry produces 352,000 tonnes of sea products a year, which are exported worldwide. It is an industry comprising approximately 15,500 workers, 70% of which are women. When looking to shellfish gatherers, numbers are lower, with around 7000 workers, 84% of which are women. As shellfish gathering and canning in the north of Spain became a progressively industrialised form of labor, it also became deeply intertwined with care labor. The scheduling of working hours, for instance, is not only adapted to the market and industrial procedures, but also to domestic chores. Timings are flexible and malleable to accommodate personal needs. This blurs the limits between productive and reproductive labor. 

This feminization of the sea food canning industry happened at the same time as the binary labor and gender division between labor performed offshore by men and the one performed by women on land. Due to this normative gender dichotomy, the labor that took place on shore became progressively economically precarious, illegal and unregulated, but also flexible and adaptable to reproductive chores. Despite jobs in the seafood processing industry being considered secondary and less valued jobs, the fact that offshore jobs demanded men to be away for long periods of time allowed women to take responsibility within society, thus empowering them over time.

However, it was not until the 1990s that the shellfish gatherers and canners started to be organised legally and unionised, and they achieved working rights. Most of them selected this job either because their mother used to do it or because it is a convenient job that is able to accommodate family life and other personal needs. 

To talk about the reality of shellfish gatherers and canners’ is not only interesting due to their labor structures and industrial heritage, but also due to their deep understandings and interrelations with the ecological systems they form part of. Their structures of kinship go beyond the human and intersect with animals and matter. They are usually seen as feminist ecological practices. Cultivating and gathering clams is not an easy process. It is a fragile ecosystem which has been kept for generations thanks to ancestral knowledge. First, the small clams called seeds are collected; then, they are put in bags so that their growth can be monitored. Once in a while, they are cleaned and taken care of. When they are the right size, they are planted on the beach, which has been previously cleaned and freed of predators. It is a task that has to be done collectively, with shifts, to monitor the babies and control their growth on the beaches. The gatherers also follow a rigorous timing and quotas to protect the species from being over-extracted, which will ultimately affect their growth in the future. Also, the shore is taken care of to make sure that the sand and the salted water have the correct properties. Therefore, it is an ecosystem which humans form part of in a shared but fragile equilibrium. Galician clams grow because they are cultivated and eaten; a whole feminist economy of subsistence exists thanks to them. Additionally, seas and sandy beaches are cleaned and nurtured through the action of the shellfish gatherers and the shellfish themselves. 

This reminds us of material kinships, referencing here the book titled Material Kinship Reader, and the question that Clementine Edwards and Kris Dittel raise in it: «What does it mean to acknowledge one’s closeness to, enmeshment in or even kinship with the material world?». Material kinships are based on commitment and the acknowledgement that everything is connected. In order to ‘make kin’ with something material, you have to take care of it, repair it, and maintain it. Similar to shellfish gathering, there is also an ecological and social impact of material kinships, as the notion of making kin with a thing is also a clear invitation to interrogate relationships with and connections to the world at large which, hence, has an emancipatory potential. As Joannie Baumgärtner poses it, «If kinship usually fortifies the ways and conditions in which we inherit the world, then shifting its integration and performativity might allow us to change how we inhabit it» (Baumgärtner, 2022, pp. 50-73). Affection can be expressed in diverse ways and the possibility to make kin with a non-human entity is nothing new, as it has a long tradition as an important component of our ancestors’ knowledge of the world. 

However, material kinships have been diminished or overseen within capitalist societies that reinforce the notion of the nuclear family, devaluing all other understandings of kin. This is especially so if we talk about making kin with a clam and making kin with it in such a way that is not related or, at least, not just related with consumerism and the monetary value of those things. Interestingly, when talking about material kinships, our own materiality as creatures made of ‘stuff’ is often forgotten. Iron in the blood, in a rock or in a structural beam, we share —but not always see— the patterns of our traces in the world and our similarities with a clam. We are all participants in the rhythms of our planet. The ways in which we configure what is outside or not alien to us might be a first step towards rethinking kinship, but also, recognizing that material kinship is only a new name for something as old as humanity. 

2. Tofu / Caséo-Sojaïne

The history of Tofu’s Western reception is intertwined with the 19th century’s colonial violence in Asia, resistance of the working class, and othering of the gendered Asian body. Tofu’s political role does not only come from food’s representation of collective cultural roots in general, but also from its global circulation that transgresses boundaries of bodies, genders, and sexualities, as well as national and continental ones.

The year 1908 marked a significance for Tofu’s visibility in Europe and North America, when the Usine de la Caséo-Sojaïne, a soy factory, was established in France by the Chinese educator, promoter of anarchist doctrines and activist, Li Yuying. The factory was located at 46–48 Rue Denis Papin in La Garenne-Colombes, a few kilometres north of Paris. It manufactured and sold Tofu and other soy products, such as bean-curd jam, soy coffee, soy flour, and biscuits. Based on found archival images and floorplans, the factory building with its brick façade housed a production line that merchanized tofu making. The production is linked with and supported by Li’s study and research on soybeans at the Pasteur Institute in the Sorbonne University, during which he saw the great potential of soybeans to counter hunger and malnutrition in countries such as China (Chen, 2013a, p. 44).

The Tofu factory was also an income for Li to finance political activities. In 1906, Li co-founded the World Society (世界社) at 25 Rue de Dalue, which promoted anarchism among Chinese people and served as a hub for Chinese activists in Europe. The World Society found its relocation at 393 Wukang Road in Shanghai in 1929 and established the World School in 1936 (Wu, 2024). Li planned the Diligent Work-Frugal Study program as a way to bring young Chinese people to France, whose studies would be financed by working in the factory. This first Work-Study program brought 120 workers to France. The program instructed them in Chinese, French, and science. Li aimed to empower these worker-students in becoming knowledgeable citizens who, on their return, would become models for a new China. A lot of them have later spread anarchy and communism in the Chinese territory. In the shadow of colonial violence since the Opium War, these seeds of revolution have incubated many activists, schools and organisations (see Chen, 2013b; Dirlik, 1991). 

Since this transnational food activism, which Caséo-Sojaïne architected, tofu has appeared on the dining table in Europe and North America. Branded as a vegan high-protein substitute to meat, tofu’s popularity is also haunted by isoflavones, a group of substances that occur highly in soybeans. The molecular structure of isoflavones gives them distinct biological activities, including their ability to act as phytoestrogens, mimicking oestrogen in the body. Although isoflavones are much less potent than the female oestrogen, tofu and other soy products were seen as dangerous, capable of feminizing the male body and disrupting its gender and sexual behavior. In 2009, Men’s Health magazine published the article «Is this the Most Dangerous Food for Men?» by Jim Thornton, stating that, despite tofu’s high protein level, when male bodybuilders consume tofu, their testosterone levels drop, which then causes lower semen quality, low libido and muscle mass, mood changes, and many other side-effects (Thornton, 2009). This resulted in the term “soy boy”, a pejorative term for feminine men, which draws a direct connection between soy, asianness, and a non-normative masculinity. 

In Testo Junkie, Paul B. Preciado refers to the term molecular revolution as «contaminating the molecular bases of the production of sexual difference, with the understanding that these two states of being, male and female, exist only as political fictions, as somatic effects of the technical process of normalisation» (Preciado, 2013, p. 142). He has sketched out a pharmacopornographic regime, in which visual pornography and pharmaceutical products combined dictate 20th-century sexuality. In an age obsessed with nutrition and how substances affect and produce our bodies on a molecular scale, Tofu is not, but rather becomes a feminizing racialising agent, long after it was invented. 

The patriarchal gender binary perpetuates itself in the cultural constructs of food. In the case of tofu, its transmisogynist alienation runs through racialisation; that is, the Asian male body, for the sake of being seen by the Western gaze as more feminine, becomes the counterpart of a masculinity that is inherently white. 

Borrowing from Gayatri Spivak’s famous text Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988), this text proposes the question: Can the Soy Boys speak? If the story of tofu bridges the multiple political struggles that seem only loosely related, can the site of tofu be re-radicalised in bearing a utopia that is decolonial, working-class, trans-feminist, anti-racist and pan-Asian? 

3. Tea / Teahouses in Chengdu

In Chengdu, the teahouse offers not only local tea that comes in green, white, yellow, or red and is affordable to all, but also a vibrant and dynamic space that reflects the complexity and richness of Chengdu’s urban and social fabric. Wang Di highlights Chengdu’s tea houses as unique sites of public life where individuals from different social classes, occupations, and political affiliations come together. The teahouses function as a miniature of Chengdu’s broader society, where a wide range of activities occur—everything from business negotiations to political discussions and leisurely socialising, hence fostering dialogue and exchange across social groups. Wang Di (2022) argues that this aspect of teahouse culture contributed to the resilience and adaptability of these institutions, enabling them to survive and even thrive amid the social and political changes of the 20th century.

The architecture of the teahouse is central to its social function in Chengdu’s broader society. In the Chengdu Plain, the winter is cold and humid, and the underground water contains a lot of minerals. In response to this climate and geological condition, boiling becomes an essential need to offer warmth and soften the water. Compared to boiling in the domestic kitchens, it was more affordable to buy hot water from the teahouse. The teahouse, therefore, also bears the function of a communal kitchen. It was even customary that women who perform domestic care work bring meat or Chinese medicine to cook in the teahouse. The teahouse was considered as part of the public sphere that is male dominated, and women were technically forbidden. However, the teahouse’s function as a communal kitchen has somewhat disrupted this gendered division of public-domestic binary, linking the teahouse with a network of domestic care. 

The tea house picks up the vernacular construction of Chengdu. Instead of clearly chambered spaces, the architecture of the teahouse, with its open layout, creates a fluid spatial spectrum where the interior, the semi exterior (e.g., the sheltered space under the roof), the exterior (e.g., the courtyard or garden), and the urban are well connected. This layout often incorporates a stage for traditional performance. Some of these performances are sexually explicit and provocative, which makes the teahouse, besides a public leisure programme, also a site where sexuality is publicly disputed. Wang Di also highlights that, in some historical documents, female sex workers also use the teahouse to solicit. 

The social and physical spaces of the teahouses have also offered sites for the production of the identity wandering men in Chengdu, a localised, culturally embedded form of male homosexual identity distinct from the more globally recognized gay identity. The term wandering reflects both the physical act of moving through public spaces in search of discreet encounters and the metaphorical sense of navigating a marginal identity within a society that did not openly recognize or accept homosexuality. Wandering men often did not openly identify as gay in the Western sense, which implies a more visible and politicized identity tied to a broader LGBTQ+ movement. Instead, it is characterized by the strategy of secrecy, mobility across the urban space and a subtle, coded body language.

Petrus Liu points out that the foundation of US queer theory – taking Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble as an example – has strategically relied on exteriorising territories such as China and India (Liu, 2015, p. 22). Building on this critique, this text asks how an understanding of non-normative gender beyond the US-centrism can be approached through reading a non-Western architecture typology. The teahouses offered a semi-public space that allowed for discreet socialization within the broader community. These spaces are not identitarian, but enabled them to interact with one another under the cover of everyday public life, allowing them to maintain their social ties and form networks while avoiding direct confrontation with societal norms and regulations that marginalized homosexual identities. The casual and communal atmosphere of teahouses, combined with the anonymity offered by the bustling environment, provided a conducive setting for these interactions. Moreover, the teahouses’ role in fostering a diverse public life in Chengdu meant that they naturally became sites where various marginalized identities, including wandering men, could navigate their social existence. The teahouse, thus, contributed to the production of the wandering men identity by offering a space where these men could assert their presence, albeit in a veiled manner, and engage with one another without attracting undue attention (Wei Wei, 2012).

4. Breast Milk / Lactation Rooms

Breastmilk is the first and often only food that human babies drink for some time after being born. As a result, a large part of reproductive labor lies with the breastfeeding parent immediately after birth. Historically, in Western territories, practices like wet nursing – the breastfeeding of a child not biologically one’s own – have somewhat loosened this dependency, positioning breastfeeding as a more communal activity that can be shared or – in some cases – delegated. As an alternative for mothers not able to lactate (at all or sufficiently), it soon also became a feeding method of choice. For aristocratic women during the renaissance, for whom it was sometimes considered unfashionable and impractical to breastfeed themselves, it became common practice to pay less privileged women to do so (Martins, 2022). In contrast, in the Victorian age in the U.S, it was highly fashionable for upper class women to breastfeed, and a common subject of portrait photography (Sharp, 2013). From the mid-16th century onwards, criticisms of wet nursing became more common (Stevens, Patrick and Pickler, 2009). Jacques Guillemeau, a French obstetrician claimed around 1600 that «the natural affection between mother and child declines» when it is breastfed by another woman (Wickes, June 1953). Nevertheless, it was not until the 19th century, with developments in the feeding bottle and availability of animal milk and infant formula, that wet nursing went completely out of practice in the West, solidifying the position of the maternal figure as the primary caregiver in the nuclear family (Wickes, October 1953)¹.

The practice of breastfeeding as individual or communal, as well as the spaces it is permitted to take place in, have been and still are contested, not least because they directly stem from and reproduce the societal position of the breastfeeding (mostly female) parent. What spaces are assigned to breastfeeding has the capacity to either increase isolation or foster community and has historically been the topic of much public debate and shifts in attitude. In the Victorian age, for example, with its increasingly strict social codes regarding female modesty and sexuality, breastfeeding – if performed by the biological parent themselves – came to be seen as something private, which should – like women – be confined to the domestic sphere. The persistent (male) medicalization of childbirth and childcare also further promoted the idea of discretion and privacy. In the second half of the 20th century, the female body was also increasingly sexualized in public discourse, which may have led to public breastfeeding becoming increasingly uncomfortable. Additionally, infant formula was being used as an alternative to breast milk all together. It also has to be noted that, while not explicitly illegal, breastfeeding did and does fall under public indecency in many places in which it is not specifically exempt, and there are still many public disagreements around it². One example, where a breastfeeding woman was asked to cover up in a London luxury hotel, led to numerous political debates and protests (BBC News, 2014).

Despite breastfeeding in public becoming less popular, there were also movements pushing against this. The sexualization of the female body and its implicit confinement in the domestic space was challenged by feminist movements, which also pushed for the normalization of public breastfeeding. The formation of the now globally active La Leche League in the 1950s created a platform for exchange and promotion of breastfeeding, enhancing its popularity³. Since the 1950s, there has been increased research on breast milk. Studies have shown that breastfeeding brings many health benefits to children, and in 1981 WHO and UNICEF released a joint statement strongly recommending breastfeeding as the best way to feed infants for their first 6 months (World Health Organization, 1981). The WHO still recommends this, with breastfeeding alongside other foods for up to two years, or in some cases beyond WHO⁴. With this scientific and political shift, breastfeeding became more and more prevalent again, and the debate over doing so in public intensified. 

Since the 1990s, lactation rooms have been increasing, accommodating parents who want or need to breastfeed or pump milk outside of their private spaces. Much of these were argued for with the reintegration of breastfeeding parents into the workforce sooner after birth. For example, the company Mamava⁵ specialised in prefabricated lactation pods. One of their products is prominently installed at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and equipped with artwork «for parents and children to enjoy» (Avery, 2022). 

Despite offering a welcome calm and clean place much needed for lactating parents and feeding babies, the act of displacing mothers from the public domain into a minimal metal box with no windows to breastfeed suggests that this is something that should not be seen by other people. Some mothers have voiced fears that this might encourage people to ask them to not breastfeed in public but use a designated space instead (Cuneo Keenan, 2015). In this manner, in addition to providing a private space that is sometimes desired to breastfeed, lactation rooms could also manifest breastfeeding as a private activity, further stigmatizing it and cementing the confinement of reproductive/female labor in the domestic space.

5. US Steak roast / Kitchenettes

The compact kitchen or kitchenette is historically related to the Frankfurt kitchen designed by the Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky. In 1926, Schütte-Lihotzky received the commission to work on the Neues Frankfurt, a project led by Ernst May that sought to resolve the shortage of housing after World War I by building affordable apartments. Among other things, there was the need to design a kitchen that could meet most domestic needs without losing too much space and, at the same time, could be mass produced in order to decrease its price; the fordist logic within the home. 

Of course, Schütte-Lihotzky’s ideas, though considered the flagship of early modernism within the domestic sphere, were neither isolated nor new. In fact, by that time, Schütte-Lihotzky was acquainted with the theories of the North American domestic engineer Christine Frederick, whose book The New Housekeeping, had been translated into German in 1922. Frederick was interested in making the kitchen more efficient for everyday use by applying motion studies and other Taylorist methods. For her, the kitchen was a labor-saving device, where everything was well organized and compact in order to simplify cooking and other housekeeping works. Meanwhile, the story of this paradigmatic fitted kitchen is well known; as well as the influence that Christine Frederick’s theories about domestic engineering, labor-saving devices and efficiency had on Schütte-Lihotzky’s work, there is a side of its North American background that has usually been missed or forgotten. 

Prior to the emergence of the minimal kitchen in Europe, at the turn of the 20th century, the term kitchenette began to be widely used in the United States to describe a kitchen typology that could occupy a reduced space. As an answer to the progressive incorporation of women into industrial labor and the abolition of slavery during the second half of the 19th century, there was the need to redefine care labor. In most US cities, kitchenless housing typologies emerged that incorporated collective domestic services and spaces, such as collective kitchens, but also hotels and apartments started to be widely used for permanent residents. Before the commercial appearance of the kitchenette, it was already common for tenants to improvise their own cooking devices; stoves and other culinary gadgets ended up occupying any corner of the room or space of a closet to allow them to cook from time to time. The reason for these improvised cooking spaces was, first and foremost, economical: being able to prepare meals in the kitchenless house meant considerable monthly savings at the end of the day. 

The increase of canned food and precooked meal suppliers also made these makeshift kitchens more feasible, as their limited options made the preparation of some food almost impossible. Suddenly pre-cooked food turned popular, and certain ailments such as cooked meats – including pork, ham or beef -, cured fish, salted, pickled and sourced vegetables and boiled legumes shifted and became the center of the urban diet. This type of domesticity, based on a kitchen composed of few and minimal elements and, in a sense precariousness, ended up being popularly called Light Housekeeping. As the New York Times claimed, at the beginning of the 20th century, half of New York lived under this system and the other half wanted to live under it. Hotel rooms and apartment hotels with kitchenettes were in high demand, and consequently pricey. The lack of availability and their high price pushed residents to continue improvising kitchenettes in corners and wardrobes. In addition, the progressive substitution of coal with new types of cleaner fuels like gas or electricity, and the appearance of easy to install mobile home appliances further supported the expansion of these small kitchens.

In the midst of all this improvisation, the kitchenette meant the necessary formalization of something that was already happening spontaneously. The kitchenette did not arise so much because of a need to optimize the organization of the kitchen, a typical ‘labor-saving’ or ‘efficiency’ argument, but to meet an existing need in this type of kitchenless housing without the loss of too much space. The rise of this minimal cooking space was in turn decisive in the development of new culinary habits. This can be seen in the emergence of the so called kitchenette books, which collected easy to prepare recipes and offered a wide culinary variety adapted to the limitations of this new kitchen typology. This change in cooking and eating habits also responded to a purely practical issue. The fact that most of the kitchenettes were installed in spaces that lacked a suitable smoke extractor or even a window, made it necessary to come up with a new way of cooking that could avoid the production of smoke and bad odors, something that not only affected the type of ingredients but also the cooking process itself. The cooking habits changed radically and the time spent in the kitchen fell drastically. Meals that usually required several hours of processing suddenly required an average of 45 minutes. The new trend also had enormous consequences for food production and consumption. The lack of storage space meant that food also began to be sold in smaller quantities and on a more continuous basis. The amount of people who lived under these new culinary conditions was such that, towards the 1920s, these new habits came to influence the production methods themselves. For example, large cattle were no longer raised due to a lack of a market. An article published in 1927 echoed this relationship between the kitchenette and the size of cattle, arguing how the dimensions of the kitchen were affecting the size of many consumer items. For instance, the average weight for a roast meat was 5.4kg at the end of the 19th century. In the 1920s, the size considered normal did not exceed 1.36kg. The proportions of meat purchased were smaller and finer, which also meant shortened cooking times. New types of cuts and a whole new nomenclature also appeared. For example, entrecôte cut to be cooked in a kitchenette, was called steak roast, and a quick-cooking bone-in steak was called minute steak.

Unfortunately, the cut of meat was not the only thing that got reduced. Terms such as scientific work organization, labor saving devices and efficiency, began to be widely used in the second decade of the 20th Century after the popularization of Scientific Management. As a consequence, compact kitchens gradually took the value of labor-saving devices -thus losing that of space saving devices-. Kitchenettes started to be publicized, showing their capacities of labor and time saving. ‘The kitchen cabinet that saves thousands of steps’, to give an example, happened to be one of the slogans used by the Hoosier company to announce their kitchen units. The growing interest in efficiency meant that the kitchenette gradually lost its original co-operative character and gained autonomy. Its small size, which responded initially to the dimensions of a closet, took on another meaning. The kitchenette gradually became understood as an instrument through which women were able to carry out domestic tasks quickly, efficiently and autonomously. By the time the Frankfurt kitchen was designed, the kitchenette had already lost all the implications and dependencies with a larger domestic infrastructure, and a type of ‘living where domestic work was professionalized and did not rely on a woman, leading to its decline. 

6. Milk / Bar Mleczny (Polish Milk bars)

As women entered the waged workforce on a large scale during the second industrial revolution across Europe (Bythell, 1993), the provision of care within the nuclear family unit was becoming increasingly strained, as both parents were now away from the home for most of the time. This began to shift the traditional responsibilities of the nuclear family, which had, amongst other duties, centered around food provision, and more communal infrastructures of reproduction began to emerge, which provided a form of social support that helped to lighten and re-distribute the burden of domestic labour, as the dual-wage family became the prevalent model. One example of this are communal eating spaces, either privately run or state led, that provided affordable food for low-income workers and their families. 

In Poland, these eating institutions took the form of Bar Mleczny (Milk Bars), which are still widespread and popular to this day. The first milk bar, Mleczarnia Nadświdrzańska, was established in 1896 by Stanisław Dłużewski, a dairy farmer in Warsaw. These establishments were originally designed to provide affordable, nutritious, and primarily vegetarian meals to the working class, which is why the name Milk Bar originated and persists to this day, even if the food they offer is no longer strictly vegetarian. Recognizing the importance of communal food provision, the communist government started subsidising milk bars, leading to their solidification as infrastructures of food provision.

Alexandra Kollontai, in her 1920 essay Communism and the Family, envisioned a future where the nuclear family would no longer be the primary unit of economic and social reproduction. She argued that the socialization of domestic work—through the creation of public restaurants and communal kitchens—would liberate women from the dual burden of wage labor and household duties. This, she believed, would lead to greater freedom for the working class as a whole (Kollontai, 1920).

Building on Kollontai’s ideas, M.E. O’Brien, in her work Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care, discusses the role of communal kitchens within revolutionary movements. O’Brien highlights the barricades of the Paris Commune of 1871 as an example, where these structures served not only as defences against military forces, but also as communal spaces of social reproduction. By sharing reproductive labor at these communal sites, women were able to engage more fully in the revolutionary activities, thereby challenging the traditional family structure and contributing to a broader social transformation. O’Brien argues that the radical restructuring of reproduction historically lies at the basis of any revolutionary effort. The nuclear family, forming the basic unit of capitalism, must ultimately be abolished in order for change to be possible (O’Brien, 2023).

In the context of shifts towards communism, milk bars can be seen as microcosms of these broader socio-economic shifts. Making it possible for women to be relieved of some reproductive labor and take part in wage labor on a larger scale, they enabled an important move towards a less gendered societal structure. They also proposed an institutionalized state effort towards the socialization of care work.