#canteens

[probablyasocialecologist]

Public Restaurants?

Why the State Needs to Be at the Table

The question of who is responsible for feeding people — and how — is back on the table. Nourish Scotland has been making the most rigorous case for public restaurants in the UK (and increasingly beyond i) — and Abigail McCall has helped bring that work into wider food-systems conversations, engaging many of us thinking about public restaurants as part of the food infrastructure we need. Their argument is straightforward: food needs public infrastructure, just as transport, healthcare, and education do. We build hospitals because the market alone does not guarantee health. We build schools because access to education cannot depend on what families can afford. We build public libraries, public parks, public transit. Why not public restaurants? Food is as essential as any of these — more so, arguably, since we need it three times a day. And yet we largely leave its provision to market forces that have consistently failed to make healthy, sustainable, delicious food accessible and affordable to everyone.

[...]

If you prefer to frame it in terms of efficiency rather than rights: unhealthy diets cost billions in healthcare spending every year. Malnourished children learn less and earn less. And though this argument strikes me as overly productivist, I’ll leave it here anyway: workers who cannot afford a decent lunch are less productive. And market forces have not aligned profit with population wellbeing when it comes to food. The food industry has been extraordinarily effective at making ultraprocessed, nutrient-poor food cheap, convenient, and omnipresent. Making nutritious, sustainable food affordable has been far less of a priority. That’s not a moral failure of the market — it’s how markets work. Public restaurants are one tool in a much larger set of policies to improve food environments — alongside front-of-package labeling, taxes on ultraprocessed foods, subsidies for fresh produce, stronger school feeding programs. All of this can work together, with public restaurants anchoring a procurement system that sources from smallholder farmers and supports an agroecological transition. What public restaurants add is a physical space where good food is not a privilege.

20 June 2026

[nobrashfestivity]

Unknown, Native North America, Southwest, Arizona, Pueblo, Hopi Canteen 1870 ceramic, slip Overall: 20 x 24.5 cm (7 7/8 x 9 5/8 in.)

[pizzacade]

U.N.I.T. secretly listens to conversations in their canteens if The Doctor is there, just in case they spoiler future events.

The non-Martain ambassadors mentioned in the first page are the alien species featured in The Ambassadors of Death, just in case you didn't know.

From The Gold Archive.

[rose-gold-romantic]

@marvhellove 

This is what I do every year! 

We get together and put on a show that recreates what a USO “canteen” looked like back during World War II. Canteens were places where soldiers could go when on leave for a relaxing night of free food, drink, and hollywood entertainment. (Cap himself does a version of this in his first movie, though he wasn’t well recieved by the soldiers) We recreate a canteen that is putting on a radio show, with a live big band orchestra. Hollywood actors and actresses from across the country would entertain the soldiers at these canteens to thank them for their service, and to just give them a good time. There are comedy skits like Who’s On First, Hollywood Gossip, and we personally have a skit involving some wacky cooks and missing spam and donut dough. Trios of ladies like the Andrews Sisters would serenade the soldiers with their favorite songs, such as “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” and “Oh Johnny, Oh!”, and  A soldier was never denied an opportunity to dance, and ladies from the community would come together to dance with the soldiers and make them feel honored. 

It’s always loads of fun to do every year! We dress up in period-accurate clothes, do period accurate hair and makeup, and put on the entertainment! Lots of swing dancing, singing, laughing, and honoring our brave men and women in the armed forces. It’s always an amazing, beautiful thing to see service men and women stand for their military branch’s anthem, and we’ve even had a few WWII vets come to see the show. There was one man this year that stated that our show brought him right back to the Hollywood Canteen, where he had been entertained as an army soldier back in the 40′s. If I don’t have answers to questions about the 40′s that you may have, I’m sure my director knows and I’d be happy to ask him for you!

[lawyer2ca]

The #Food Safety Standards Authority of #India (@fssai_safefood) has directed Food #Business Operators (like #canteens / #cafeterias / #messes) to obtain the mandatory #FSSAI #licence or registration. - @lawyer2ca . . #Restaurants #Restaurant #Lawyer2CA #growth #MakeInIndia #DigitalIndia #StartupIndia #startup #entrepreneur #entrepreneurship #ecommerce #passion #focused #focus #work #entrepreneurs #entrepreneurlife https://www.instagram.com/p/BnU1iv-lbmO/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=j77rx1kgfiea

[probablyasocialecologist]

Could wartime-inspired restaurants tackle food inequality?

Nottingham will pilot a "public restaurant", subsidised by the government, to offer healthy meals for all.

In the words of senior research fellow Dr Marsha Smith, "we all deserve nice things. Everyone deserves a good, nutritious meal".

[...]

Between World War One and World War Two, civic restaurants - as they were known - were commonplace in Britain.

The taxpayer-funded eateries were formally brought into law as part of the Civic Restaurants Act 1947, which gave local councils the power to establish and run restaurants to provide meals and at reasonable prices.

That followed the British Restaurant scheme during World War Two, initiated by the food minister at the time, Lord Woolton, which provided one affordable hot meal a day per person.

In a debate during the second reading of the Civic Restaurants bill in the House of Lords in March 1947, it was described as "small in size but important in its social purpose".

[...]

"It [the British Restaurants scheme] was one of the biggest public health interventions in the UK, there were more of them than there are McDonald's now.

"They were hugely popular and widely used," she said.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Calls for return of Churchill’s national restaurant service to tackle food inequality

Public diners as seen in 1940s Britain – offering nutritious meals at reasonable prices – should be everyday eating places, says MP-backed r

In 1940s Britain, at a time before fast food and ready meals were staples of the British high street and in a country struggling to deal with the ramifications of war, a popular new restaurant chain was established. It served high-quality meals at reasonable prices, attracted customers from the full spectrum of British society, and grew at a rate of 10 new sites a week at its most popular. The brains behind the operation? The British government, led by the prime minister, Winston Churchill. Churchill’s British Restaurants, a chain of government-funded canteens offering nutritious price-capped meals, were intended to counter inflation in food and fuel prices related to the war, as well as to boost community spirit. At their peak, there were more British Restaurants across the UK than there are branches of McDonald’s or Wetherspoons today. Now a new report is calling for the return of a “national restaurant service” in some form, as a way to tackle contemporary issues such as health inequality, food insecurity and even climate change in the UK. A forthcoming report entitled Public diners: the idea whose time has come, by food policy NGO Nourish Scotland, marks the beginning of a campaign to introduce restaurants as a new piece of national infrastructure, a call backed by politicians and experts. A public diner, according to the report, is a state-subsidised eatery serving quality and ethically produced food at affordable prices. Crucially, says Nourish Scotland, they are neither charity nor a treat, but rather everyday eating places for entire communities to access.

[...]

Last year hospital data showed the number of patients in England and Wales being treated for nutritional deficiencies had tripled in a decade while a January 2024 survey by the Food Foundation found 20% of UK households with children reported experiencing food insecurity. And, Nourish Scotland says, ingredients could be sourced from organic farms, reducing unsustainable food production practices and food waste, and stimulating local economies. Public diners have already been realised elsewhere in the world. In Poland, government-funded “milk bars” (bar mleczny) gained popularity in the communist era as a way to serve traditional home-cooked food at low prices, and remain numerous today. Singapore’s “hawker centres”, market-style community dining rooms, emerged as part of the nation’s urban redevelopment following independence, and bring an array of street sellers under one roof to ensure vendors’ access to ingredients and space, as well as food hygiene standards and choice for consumers. The call for state-subsidised dining in the UK comes amid a growing international movement for public restaurants as key infrastructure.

31 August 2024

See also I Dream of Canteens, by Rebecca May Johnson

[probablyasocialecologist]

There is a space for everyone. A space, a glass of water, and a plug socket.* Chairs and tables and cleaned toilets.

Seeing a book I had in hand but had not yet read, called Slice of Life, The British Way of Eating Since 1945, a female security guard in the British Library let me know that she knew about mass hospitality, about the provision of canteens for all – and not the one where she worked now. “That book must talk about British Restaurants, then”, she said. I said: “what are they?” She said that when rationing was going on and there wasn’t enough food during the war the government set up ‘British Restaurants’ to serve cheap hot food for everyone so that people had enough to eat things like semolina and stew, she could just remember the smell. It was in the 1950s or 1960s. They were for workers and ordinary people and children, she said. She used to go when she was at school in Red Hill in Surrey, and they had died out by the time she went to secondary school. She said yes, the food wasn’t too bad and they were really cheap. She was very keen to tell me about the British Restaurants, very excited; she remembered them fondly. I tried to imagine a British Restaurant now, a government-backed scheme to make sure all comers were fed as a matter of the greatest national importance: I couldn’t. When I spoke to the security guard, I’d just that day found out that while the British Library restaurant does continue to serve filter coffee, its cheapest offering, the new caterer (the third in ten years as none of the private companies can make it work) no longer advertise it, only displaying prices for more expensive coffees, alongside £17 hot mains and £5 cakes. It has phased out filter coffee by now. Then I looked in my book and found that the British Restaurants served nutritionally balanced meals (according to contemporary science) and had libraries and fresh flowers on the tables and gramophones and pianos and felt as if I were reading about a utopian vision of the future like I would see in a science fiction film. Further research in the Mass Observation Archives shows numerous interviews with people who felt delighted at feeling so full, that the food was hot. They served 50 million meals a week in 1945. Lord Woolton, the conservative minister for food, who had asked a socialist friend he knew to design the state-subsidised canteens, called them ‘one of the greatest social revolutions that has taken place in the industry of our country’. Discussions were had in parliament about how the canteens produced astonishing improvements in workers’ wellbeing. After the war Conservatives dismissed them in parliament because they weren’t making profit. The canteens were allowed to decline, then disappear. Now food deserts and food banks proliferate and people do not have enough food to live. It is a strange situation that, as food poverty surges, we forget that we built canteens, once. The wartime memory of eating that has been encouraged to survive is of rationing, of lack, but for many people, there had never been so much hot, filling food. A seat, a table, a glass of water, a plate of food with the calorie density to sustain a life for a good while; the space and the time in which to unfold.