For most of us, cooking is more or less a solitary event. Kitchen stoves, office microwaves, and dorm room toaster ovens fry, zap and roast our turkey sausages and hot pockets. The Food Network beams braised duck and truffle polenta recipes into our living rooms while we hurriedly transcribe their instructions. It hasn’t always been this way… Long before the advent of automated heat we gathered around fires to cook our food and share our stories. Cooking was communal. That was the beginning of civilization says Ray Werner, a seventy one year old baker activist and community oven evangelist in Pittsburgh– “the day we decided to stay in one spot, to grow grain, to harvest it for flour, to abandon the nomadic culture of hunting and gathering.” Werner takes collaborative collective cooking very seriously. He believes cooking together brings communities and neighborhoods back to life. Baking as block party? Werner is out to rebuild Western Pennsylvania one loaf at a time. Werner’s first community oven convert, Braddock Pennsylvania’s Mayor John Fetterman, didn’t need much convincing. Fetterman presides over a city in desperate need of infrastructure. And a restaurant. This past January the city’s only hospital closed and with it the city’s only ATM and sit-down restaurant– the hospital cafeteria. How can a city create infrastructure when commercial capital and social capital are staggeringly low? For Fetterman, the answer was build it themselves. “I bounced the oven idea off John about two years ago, and he wanted to build it on the spot,” says Werner.
Build Ovens, Build Community
March 10th, 2010 by Diana
via GOOD by Kyla Fullenwider on 3/9/10
