I’m sketching another photobash, this time a scene of a solarpunk kitchen, and I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss an opportunity to include something cool.

My current plan is for this one to be a kind of summer kitchen (like old farmhouses around here used to have) which doubles as a three season porch. I think a lot of the elements could fit a normal kitchen, but some will compliment each other well with this design so it might be a good place to start (and it fits my theme of reexamining older ways of doing things for opportunities to reuse).

My current list of elements:

  • a Tamara Solar Kitchen -style oven cooker

  • A glass wall (and bit of roof) for growing plants and overwintering sensitive fruit trees

  • A solar hot water rig on the roof

  • Some sort of plan for compost (currently just a resealable bucket on a counter, but for those of you who know more about composting, I’m happy to build in your dream system)

  • A sitting area since people always hang out in the kitchen while you’re cooking anyways.

  • Maybe a parabolic grill set up outside, we’ll see if that feels redundant.

I feel like I’m missing a bunch of opportunities, so if you have any ideas, now’s a great time to add stuff

  • schmorp@slrpnk.netEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    • Human powered kitchen appliance

    • How do we keep food cold? If we don’t want to run freezers (high energy use!) we have to get our canning and curing game in order.

    As you mention, the Tamera kitchen is more of a summer kitchen thing. Portuguese summers can be nasty wet and cold. In Tamera they seem to have solved this by going more private in winter and retreating to their smaller private spaces. This seasonality is something I also discover in my own recreating of small-scale farming, and it will influence my appetite, working hours, choice of activities - so I’d say (the rediscovery of) seasonality is a central part of solarpunk. With seasonality comes greater sustainability. Summer vs. winter houses or even villages were a thing in many cultures.

    • JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.netOP
      3·
      1 year ago

      Thanks! Those pedal powered designs actually seem pretty practical! They remind me of a grinding wheel my dad used to use to sharpen knives and axes - I was always amazed at how well it worked for the minimal effort of the pedal.

      Thank you for giving me the right words to describe seasonality! - and the scope of impacts on your life. I’ve been thinking that a properly solarpunk society is going to have a lot of cultural differences from modern life, originally I’d been thinking mostly a different pace, with less desperate urgency in all tasks, less emphasis on always finding another way to make money because money means safety and stability and basic dignity. But I think it’d probably be a lot more than that, and I think adjusting our lives to the seasons (where applicable) would be a big part of that - and part of what would make solarpunk cultures extremely varied and unique to their immediate surroundings. Wonderful world building potential in seeing how location, weather, and the existing resources, like infrastructure, technology, and reusable parts, shape each community.

      • schmorp@slrpnk.netEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        Wonderful world building potential in seeing how location, weather, and the existing resources, like infrastructure, technology, and reusable parts, shape each community.

        I’m surprised at how exciting I find it to treat my good old ‘hippie freak life’ not only from a real-world but also from a world-building perspective. I am currently trying to get back to writing myself but still tend to sometimes fall back into regarding art as a kind of ‘second-rate activity’ when it’s actually central to life from an abundance perspective, and actually makes abundance possible. So picking up a pen, pencil, musical instrument after seeding, planting, harvesting and eating not as a frivolity, but as a much needed part of the equation. People want stories always, and we so urgently need to drown out the corporate narrative and the hero narrative, and it’s fun to create stuff.

        I appreciate that you are taking the time to collect ideas around the real-world stuff. It’s cruel to create a beautiful utopia and then the science doesn’t add up and everybody just gets free energy or wealth out of nowhere (a bit fake, like living in Norway or Switzerland maybe?)

        So please keep asking, and writing!

        • JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.netOP
          3·
          1 year ago

          Thanks!! I figure solarpunk societies should be very consensus-driven, so these depictions of them should be too! Folks here have some awesome ideas! Plus it’ll hopefully be good discussions, and worldbuilding fodder

          Good luck with your writing! All my attempts at solarpunk come out a bit too postapocalyptic right now but I think I’m getting closer as I work on these pictures. I think we need more solutions-focussed scifi and art to help get people thinking about other ways life could be done. Seeing it demonstrated, even in fiction, really helps I think

          • schmorp@slrpnk.netEnglish
            4·
            1 year ago

            a bit too postapocalyptic right now

            Haha I have the same issue.

            Here’s one of the first limits of ‘everything has to be local’ I came up with in my somewhat too post-apocalyptic society, once we’re talking kitchen stuff: where do you get your salt from when you live inland?