We’re all familiar with privatisation – government or councils sell off commonly-held assets to private individuals.  This has happened for as long as capitalism has been a force, starting with the Enclosure of common land in UK, and continuing through various major infrastructure assets such as telecommunications, mass transport and water from the 1980s onwards.  The justifications, problems and benefits have been covered many times, so I won’t go into that here, beyond stating that I think the loss to society far outweighs the temporary gain to the balance of payments, and the freedom of choice it allegedly promotes.

My concern here is to look at privatisation at a far smaller level.  I was recently baking a cake for the first time, and thought about how not so long ago – maybe only 30 years – every girl in the land would have learned to bake a cake by the time she was 15 (no, I don’t think that women should per se be baking, while men mow the lawn – this is merely a reflection of Western society in the 1960s and prior, not a wish to return to ‘traditional’ values).  I wondered how many 15 year-olds – male or female – can and do bake a cake now?  In previous generations, it would have been passed down from mother to daughter; not only the knowledge of how to bake the cake, but the willingness to do so.  Further than that, I think about how many other skills previously passed on through family relationships are not so any more.  Home maintenance?  Mowing the lawn?  Growing vegetables?  Even cleaning the house?

And who’s doing those things instead?  Well, we buy the services – who buys a cake, when you can get one from the supermarket for $10?  How many people employ someone to mow the lawn?  I imagine the number who grow their own vegetables is minimal, despite the recent trend in Auckland to DIY.

Anecdotal evidence suggests this is often further rationalised with comments like “I don’t have time”, or “I can’t be bothered”.  This reveals an interesting trend – despite being told we have more free time than ever before, people feel less inclined to attempt these sort of activities.

I’d argue this is no less a privatisation of services than was the enclosure of land in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the sell-off of telcos and buses in the 1980s and 1990s.  Unlike the telcos and the buses though, which are in some places being re-nationalised or at least regulated, how hard is it to bring home skills back out of the private domain and into the commons?  When the knowledge and impetus come from a family member, that impetus can’t be passed on when the parent doesn’t have the skills themselves.  Can (should) this be done in schools?

Kudos to Jamie Oliver for trying to fix this with his community kitchen efforts, which incidentally recently closed down, but I think this is the sort of problem that we can’t rely on celebrities to fix.

This is part of the inspiration for the Community Cooking.