Stripped Kitchen

The building of the kitchen has been a roller coaster of inspiration, mixed with dissolution the last three months. I haven't blogged because building a kitchen with no money is a methodical march with few milestones (except the brilliant volunteer experiences).

School kitchens have been systematically stripped of any bit of equipment that would make them useful for anything but reheating food from the hub kitchen. At the beginning of this project I assumed they did this in a passive capacity, but there is so much that has been taken from this kitchen that i have to assume that their goal was to make all school kitchens completely useless for cooking.
I don't know if the transition happened over years, of if someone just came by one day and took all of the cooking tools out of the place, but I can't cook in there. here's a list of what the kitchen had to cook with when I walked in:
4 blodgett convection ovens, 1 huge steam kettle, a steamer... that's it.
what had been there was a commercial dishwasher (the hookups are there), a hobart mixer (they left the attachments), and I'd have to assume, at one time, a stove and refrigeration.
Even the bare concrete floors make the place illegal to cook in.
and there is no fire suppression system which = no open flames.
Our public schools don't have kitchens, they have reheating stations. Which makes it almost impossible to turn them into working kitchens unless one has what we have, a closed school and alot of time.
The experiment continues...