Mission: everyone eats

Status: experimental profile. Not part of Cookwala Core. See CORE.md section 10 for what is normative today.

Cookwala's ultimate goal is to help end world hunger. Every part of it points that way:

• the standard, the free index and the reasoning engines;
• robots and appliances;
• the marketplace, extensions and federation.

Together they help people eat, including people who cannot afford to. They also let food organizations, governments, food banks, community kitchens, businesses and volunteers run one federated, global feeding workflow: a digital assembly line from surplus and supply to a hot, safe, culturally right meal.

Cookwala does not replace humanitarian organizations or their judgment. It is shared infrastructure: open, free and interoperable, so their work scales and connects.

1. Why a cooking protocol matters for hunger #

Hunger is mostly a problem of coordination and cost, not of a lack of food in the world. Food is wasted in one place while people go without nearby. Kitchens sit idle while others are overloaded. Donations don't match needs. Cooking knowledge for cheap, local, nutritious food isn't where it's needed. Cookwala attacks each of these gaps:

2. How people eat even when they can't pay #

• Pay-it-forward and sponsored meals: Offer(type: sponsored_meal | donated_meal), Pledge(kind: funds) expressed as meals. Payment always stays in the program's own donation channel.
• Surplus rescue: grocers, restaurants, caterers and farms publish surplus. Hubs and community kitchens see it in their cook_from and feed plans.
• Community kitchens and food banks run Cookwala hubs (free software), get free recipes, planning and safety tools, and receive pledges.
• **Budget mode very_low** and the week_saver and relief presets make families' own food go further: rationing over a horizon, stretching proteins with legumes, pantry-first cooking, energy-saving methods.
• No-cost access: the index, CLI, knowledge packs and reference hub are free. There are no API keys and no fees for programs.
• Dignity and privacy: beneficiaries are never tracked. Needs are aggregated counts. No personal data enters the protocol.

3. The global assembly line #

 SUPPLY                         COORDINATION                         PRODUCTION                 DELIVERY        LEARNING
 farms, grocers, restaurants ─┐                                      community kitchens,
 (surplus + donations)        │  ┌─────────────────────────────┐    school kitchens,          distribution   impact reports,
 donors (funds as meals)      ├─►│ Relief allocator            │──► caterers, robot kitchens ─► points,     ─► recipe & plan
 robot operators (capacity)   │  │ needs × pledges × kitchens  │    (Cookwala hubs running    schools,       feedback,
 transport, cold storage      │  │ min-cost flow + MILP +      │     sessions with robots     camps, homes   CookBench
 volunteers                   ┘  │ CP-SAT per kitchen          │     and/or people)
                                 └──────────────▲──────────────┘
 NEEDS: programs publish aggregated needs ──────┘   (WFP-style programs, food banks, schools, governments, NGOs)

1. Programs (relief.schema.json#/$defs/Program) declare area, ration standards, policy packs, kitchens and what they accept.
2. Needs come from programs (aggregated people × meals × window × place × diets).
3. Pledges come from anyone: food, surplus, kitchen and robot capacity, transport, cold storage, volunteers, fuel, equipment, funds-as-meals.
4. The allocator (intent: relief_allocate, run by a program's coordinator hub or a shared coordinator) solves three things: Output: Allocation with assignments, production plans, coverage and gaps. Gaps become new calls for pledges.
   • Network flow: min-cost flow / MILP over supply nodes → kitchens → sites. It respects use-by windows, cold chain, transport capacity, kitchen capacity and ration standards. The objective is max_people_fed, max_nutrition_per_cost, min_waste or equity_first (programs set priorities with their own vulnerability criteria).
   • Menu per kitchen: the feed optimizer, using what actually arrives.
   • Schedule per kitchen: the CP-SAT planner across robots, people and equipment.
5. Kitchens execute normal Cookwala sessions, with CCP logs. Robots are optional; lowTech guided mode works with people alone.
6. Delivery is coordinated through events (cookwala.relief.dispatched / delivered) and existing logistics partners.
7. Impact reports are published openly and feed the learning loop: better recipes, better plans, lower cost per meal.

Federation means no single operator is required. A national food bank network, a city's school-meal program and a disaster response can each run their own coordinators, and still exchange needs, pledges and recipes through the same protocol.

4. What this asks of each participant #

5. Guardrails #

• Food safety at scale is non-negotiable: the same safety gate and CCP rules apply, and mass feeding gets stricter cooling/hot-hold rules via humanitarian.* policy packs.
• Humanitarian principles: humanity, neutrality, impartiality, independence. The protocol has no feature for excluding groups. Prioritization is set by the program under its own accountable criteria.
• Do no harm: no beneficiary tracking, no profiling, no data sales. Aggregated data only, with sensitive fields never leaving a hub.
• No commercial capture: sponsored placement is always disclosed and never shown in relief allocations. Programs are free.
• Cultural and dietary respect: halal and other dietary packs are hard constraints. Recipes come from local cuisines and local ingredients.
• Honesty about scale: Cookwala is coordination infrastructure. Ending hunger also needs funding, peace, agriculture and policy, which are outside any protocol.

6. First steps toward the mission #

1. Ship the open index with the fifi.cooking and World Cuisines catalogs (free, multilingual, halal-checked, local ingredients).
2. Build the feed optimizer, the relief mode and lowTech guided mode, and test them with one community kitchen.
3. Pilot with a food bank or community kitchen network: surplus pledges → kitchen → impact report.
4. Publish the humanitarian.sphere policy pack (expert-reviewed) and HXL export.
5. Invite humanitarian technologists to the steering group (GOVERNANCE.md), and present at humanitarian data forums (OCHA HDX community, Humanitarian Data Exchange).
6. Robot kitchens pledge capacity once V2/V3 recipes and hubs are proven.