WORLD'S LARGEST FREE KITCHEN

Langar Hall of Golden Temple

Night View of Golden Temple

In Amritsar, India, the Sikh gather in a Golden Temple to serve an average of 100,000 meals every single day of the year in a kitchen that never closes. Not a single one of them will pay for the food they consume. Anyone can eat for free here, and many, many people do. On a weekday, about 80,000 come. On weekends, almost twice as many people visit. Each visitor gets a wholesome vegetarian meal, served by volunteers who embody India’s religious and ethnic mosaic.

The langar, or community kitchen, found in this temple is the largest free kitchen on the planet, serving literally tons of food from a sprawling complex of white marble and gold. With its crowds swelling to some 150,000 on holy days, this Sikh temple sees more daily traffic than the  India’s most popular tourist attraction, the Taj Mahal.

A meal of this scale is made possible by a cadre of volunteers and an astonishing amount of raw materials: 12,000 kilos of flour,  1,500 kilos of rice, 13,000 kilos of lentils, and up to 2,000 kilos of vegetables. While much of the work is done by hand, a mechanized oven and conveyor belt turn out 200,000 rotis on a daily basis. The langar, as it’s called, never closes—and even late at night, pilgrims will stop by for a meal.

Volunteers working in the Kitchen

The institution of the langar, or free kitchen, is believed to have been started by the first Sikh Guru, Guru Nanak Ji in about 1481 but it was already popular in Chisti Sufis of the Indian subcontinent and it is said to have been started by Baba Farid. It was designed to uphold the principle of equality between all people regardless of religion, caste, colour, creed, age, gender or social status, a revolutionary concept in the caste-ordered society of 16th-century India where Sikhism began. In addition to the ideals of equality, the tradition of langar expresses the ethics of sharing, community, inclusiveness and oneness of all humankind.