Introducing the Lopez Island
Shared Use Community Kitchen
Survey
Click HERE to go directly to the online survey.
A shared use community kitchen is a commercially licensed food processing facility designed to provide entrepreneurs shared access to professional equipment and facilities (and training) to mitigate the challenges of individually bearing the cost ownership.
Also known as “Job Incubators” such facilities incorporate/include educational, logistical, and financial support/components to help startup and existing businesses create jobs. They permit people with ideas for a food product, perhaps an old family recipe or some culinary invention opportunity to explore possibilities without investing a huge amount of money.
Some folks grow big gardens or like to purchase local produce during seasonal abundance and lack the equipment at home to efficiently process their food at home. These can use professional equipment in a shared kitchen to efficiently and safely put food by to for personal consumption or to share.
Shared use kitchens have been created in communities across the country. A shared use commercial kitchen on can create jobs, enhance community food sustainability, and provide nourishment.
The purpose of this survey is to find out how interested people are in creating a shared use commercial kitchen on Lopez Island. It asks if people want to start or expand a food related business, supplement their income, or just safely and more easily preserve their food using commercial grade equipment in a shared use kitchen. It further serves to guide infrastructure investment and equipment acquisition.
The idea of shared use community kitchen/food processing facility addresses five broad categories of opportunity:
1. Job Incubation
2. Community food processing
3. Sustainability
4. Education
5. Security
Job Incubation
Job incubators help people start and grow their own small business by providing shared access to production facilities, business advice, technical training, and financial help. They have been created across the country to help people get started in business. They provide employment opportunities as entrepreneurs grow their business and help people supplement their income by having their food ideas (for example, old family recipes) turned into marketable products even on a small scale.
Community food processing
Gardeners and farmers can grow A LOT of food on Lopez. People already pickle, dry, can, or otherwise preserve their produce at home. A shared use facility permits people to process their food on a larger scale using professional equipment to accomplish this safely and efficiently, perhaps in collaboration with others at harvest-time work parties.
Sustainability
A shared use facility to process local produce provides incentive to grow an increasing variety of foods in greater abundance. In the long term, this biological diversity establishes an inventory of genetic resources (varieties of plants and animals) that could mitigate possible climate changes, broadening the base of foods available.
Also, a diverse selection of produce increases opportunities to create locally unique products and explore new markets.
Education
Learning about safe food handling and processing benefits any student. Learning how to safely produce food products and sell them to the general public permits people to create jobs. Learning to run a business can be carried over to many enterprises. Much like a “garden to cafeteria” program teaches botany and zoology, studies of physics, chemistry, biology, math, economics and other academic pursuits all have a role in learning about safely processing food and providing it to others.
Security
Local jobs based on local production provide economic security. Livelihoods less susceptible to economic swings (construction, tourism) provide social security. A robust diversity of food in production with established infrastructure to handle it is better than money in the bank. We may not always be able to rely on an interstate highway system and global shipping for our sustenance. We live in a time of vast abundance and ready access to high quality durable industrial equipment. It seems prudent to assemble the requisite infrastructure to take advantage of the potential abundance surrounding us.
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Shared use community kitchen/food processing facilities are not a new idea. Other communities have created them; documents and books describing their knowledge gained exist. We can learn from the experience of others.
Resources exist to assist endeavors that bring long-term employment and security to communities. Federal, State, County, service organizations, and private funds have been allocated for just such innovative projects. Also, much support lives in the hearts and minds of community-oriented individuals who have time and skills to offer beyond a ledger’s accounting.
Students, participate in this survey as you imagine how to support yourselves and your families. Whether farming, processing, or marketing this facility could be a part of your future even if you use the skills and knowledge you gain there in another place
Any of us may have an old family recipe or some culinary invention just a legal kitchen away from a livelihood.
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Please consider the survey questions thoughtfully and answer them imaginatively. Until an online survey is created please print a copy, fill it out, and send it in or drop it off at the Vortex. Feel free to write in the margins or add more pages of ideas.
This survey is only a starting point; a way to learn what people would do if they could do.
Click Here to go Survey.
I welcome anyone’s opinion, observation, critique, idea, speculation, or advice.
You can add to a blog. (http://www.chicaoji.com/blog/)
Email me at moc.liamgnull@nehctikderahsdnalsizepol
or add to the “Lopez Island Sustainability Hub, TheLISH” Facebook page
or send me a letter at POB 691, Lopez Island, WA 98261
Thanks for your interest in a sustainable Lopez Island community.
Randall Waugh