College and Community Bread Ovens
In each community of the early American tradition, settlers would first build a blacksmith shop, next a community bread oven, and then a church. Society needs a second 5000 Thousand Year Leap as it were and community bread ovens may be the first step toward restoring today’s communities and even advancing them beyond historic peak performances.
Personal relations in physical and virtual communities today are pitiful. Seldom do people know the names of their neighbors, let alone familiarity with who people really are or what they think about common concerns. Social interactions are not fully responsible for today’s community problems but could be responsible for fixing them. Several inventions such as the travel, communications, and gadgets of convenience are fundamental causes, causes that have even deeper foundational sources. Still, we are where we are and must do something to regain community composure before our challenges become even more unwieldy.
Abigail’s Oven is a prototype solution for what we would like to see occur in communities everywhere. Building a cutting-edge oven and learning to cook in it as a community will be a fundamental part of the college experience and students will be expected to help communities also gain this old tradition and to collaborate with communities as new scientific understandings and technologies develop to support revitalizing community cohesion and success.
See some of our progress at AbigailsOven.com.