Dining Halls Now!
For an End to the Privatization of Nourishment
…written in a fever dream…
“Cooking is about putting food on the table night after night, and there isn’t anything glamorous about it.”
—Christopher Kimball, founder of Cook’s Illustrated and America’s Test Kitchen
As an herbalist who works through a holistic lens, I know how central food is to the bodymind. The quantity, the quality, the diversity, the timing, and the consistency of what we eat all matter—not to mention the less tangible dimensions: the cultural, the ritual, the communal.
I’m far from a perfectionist about diet—my own or anyone else’s—but I’ve noticed that people tend to feel better when they eat meals prepared at home. For some, the act of cooking itself can feel grounding and nourishing. More often, though, I think the benefit comes from the ingredients: home-cooked food is simply made from better raw materials than what’s found in most restaurants or processed meals. It also comes from intention. Planning what to eat naturally invites us to make choices more deliberately.
But here we hit the pain point: cooking is labor. It takes time, money, tools, space, and—not to be overlooked—executive function: attention, working memory, multi-tasking, problem-solving. In clinic, when I talk about food, it’s usually not about what to eat, but how to make eating possible at all. We troubleshoot ways to lighten the load: batch cooking, using the freezer or a slow cooker, having easy snacks on hand.
I see how hard it is—it’s hard for me too—and for anyone living with chronic illness, depression, ADHD, or burnout, it can feel downright impossible.
The Individualization of Food
Under neoliberal capitalism, nourishment—like so much else—has been atomized. It’s your job, your choice, your responsibility. The privatization of food is sold to us as a feature of freedom, a marker of autonomy. Any remaining traces of communal foodways survive mostly inside the family, where, in its traditional form, the unpaid labor of women spares others from having to cook.
There are, of course, other ways not to cook within capitalism. You can buy convenience foods or eat out—luxuries that not everyone can afford and that often come at a nutritional cost. For some, these options are practical, even lifesaving. But when they’re not accessible or not desired, we cook—or we try to. And some of us are simply exhausted by how much it takes to pull it off day after day, even when we love food and love cooking.
It’s easy to feel frustration, even shame, at how hard it is to sustain basic nourishment. Healthism and wellness culture only deepen that feeling, naturalizing the expectation that we should autonomously feed ourselves and treating cooking as a moral duty, a test of self-discipline.
We’ve normalized this arrangement so deeply that it feels invisible: an apartment building with thirty units, thirty little kitchens, thirty refrigerators, thirty shopping lists—thirty cooks making thirty separate meals, and thirty dishwashers scrubbing after them. Not literally, perhaps, but close enough.
Why do we accept this as normal?
The Lost Commons of Mealtime
Most of us like to eat with others—and to have meals provided. Many of us like to cook, too, but not always. If you think back, you can probably recall a time when food simply appeared, and you ate it in good company: summer camp, college dining halls, a gathering, a retreat. Places where cooking scaled up and became shared infrastructure. Where nourishment was collective, not private.
I think, too, of the many collective houses I’ve lived in, where even if there wasn’t a formal rotation, meals often happened collaboratively, and you could come home from a long day and find that dinner was already on the stove.
It’s not a fantasy. Most people have lived this way, even briefly—and loved it.
It’s time for public dining halls—accessible, local, and established as a public good. In cities, they could be within walking distance; in rural or suburban areas, clustered around community hubs. Everyone welcome. No payment required.
If that sounds strange, consider: we already have public libraries. We have public parks, public health departments, even public baths in some places. Why not public kitchens and dining rooms? The dining hall fits naturally among these.
And yes, someone must do the cooking. But as Charles Fourier, the early 19th-century communitarian socialist, pointed out, in a cooperative society gastronomy could be a source of joy, not drudgery. He imagined five meals and two snacks a day—“more exquisite than the best that kings can obtain”—prepared by those who love to cook.
We don’t need to adopt Fourier’s full proposal to see his point: when food labor is shared, respected, and freely chosen, it ceases to be exploitation. It becomes participation.
The details can come later: staffing, sourcing, compensation, space. The principle is what matters today.
Dining halls. Dining halls now.
The Dining Hall as Public Health and Collective Care
Dining halls are a collective structure of care. They offer regular sustenance while fighting loneliness and isolation. It’s easier to eat vegetables and fresh food when they’re simply there at every meal. It’s easier to remember to eat when food is waiting, when you look forward to the company and the change of atmosphere. It’s easier to make time to eat when you don’t also have to switch gears, inventory the kitchen, make a plan, and cook. And the pleasure of shared meals—the laughter, the ritual, the pause—feeds digestion as much as the food itself.
Cooking, too, becomes easier and more joyful when it happens in a dedicated space, with good tools, in good company. Labor that feels isolating at home becomes social, skilled, and satisfying.
For those who can’t leave home, meals can be delivered. We did this in the first year of Covid. We can do it again.1
Both conventional and holistic medicine know that food matters to health—but both routinely fail people here. The doctor, aware that dietary change is unlikely under current conditions, mentions it only in passing, then prescribes medication. The holistic practitioner makes diet the client’s responsibility, which verges on cruel when life’s constraints make change unworkable.
Both miss the same truth: what we lack is shared infrastructure of care. Dining halls change the context. They make nourishment accessible.
I wish my clients had a dining hall.
I wish we all did.
Because eating well shouldn’t be an accomplishment, or a privilege. It should be a given in a just, caring society.
Dining halls now!
Dave Meesters is an herbalist at River Island Community Herb Clinic and the Terra Sylva School of Botanical Medicine
And it should go without saying: no one’s coming for your kitchen. You’re not required to go to the dining hall, and private meals aren’t banned.
Autistic homekeeper here and I have rarely been so seen 😩
Something like this was very common in Berlin up through the early 00s, called VoKü or volksküche, usually run by the squats but open to anyone and a plate was usually like 2marks. There were so many you could eat every night at a different squat (many of them were in the big old Soviet era apartment complexes), I don't think many survived though. It was a huge part of the political organizing, too, everyone would be at the voku.