Langar kitchens and collective cooking: tasks, tools and shared provisions

Designing around participation

Foodservice consultant Rajat Rialch describes a revealing difficulty in the Golden Temple kitchen project: a plan that saved labour through automation also removed opportunities for seva. In his 2023 interview, he says the team reconsidered after observing the kitchen and discussing its purpose with decision-makers. Participation was part of the brief, rather than simply an obstacle to faster production.[1]

The resulting account includes seating for vegetable preparation, lower working equipment for people making chapatis, machines supplementing bread production and a conveyor carrying manually washed dishes onward for sanitising and drying. It describes a negotiated combination of people and tools. The consultant’s proposed improvements and account of their implementation should be understood as project testimony, rather than proof that every part of a large kitchen was permanently mechanised.[1]

Different jobs around the same meal

Kamaldeep Singh Brar’s June 2026 reporting quotes manager Satinder Singh Bajwa on cooking in three major spells, so preparation for the next meal overlaps with serving the current one. The reported meal combines dal, vegetables, rice, salad, a sweet dish and chapatis. Volunteers and employed staff perform different tasks; the report specifically distinguishes volunteer work from cooking at the hearth.[2]

It also describes manual bread-making alongside chapati machines, the collection of steel utensils and substantial washing work after eating. Collective cooking therefore includes jobs before and after a pot reaches the fire: preparing ingredients, forming bread, serving successive groups and returning utensils to use. These are responsibilities within a particular organisation, not an assumption that every volunteer undertakes every task.[2]

Ingredients and labour moving across places

At Singhu and Tikri in December 2020, Baruah and Roy Barman documented both village groups cooking beside tractor-trolleys and larger organised langars. Interviewees described provisions arriving from Punjab centres, including Tarn Taran and Ferozepur, and donations from surrounding villages. Their accounts connect food preparation with transport, replenishment and serving away from a permanent gurdwara building. The report identifies named organisations and volunteers at those protest sites; it does not imply that every participating group had the same scale, supplies or division of work.[3]