What is the value of something without a price? Each week this question is raised at Karma Kitchen, a volunteer-run restaurant in Berkeley. As an experiment in generosity, guests are given a 0$ bill at the end of a meal. They are invited to pay for the next guest’s meal, and to pay ever amount they choose.
The restaurant opened in 2007 and is volunteer-run, open on Sundays, and is located in a restaurant that allows them to use the kitchen and restaurant one day a week. The food looks amazing (all Indian food), and after guests eat their bill reads, “Your meal was a gift from someone who came before you. We hope you will pay-it-forward however you wish.”
The project is an experiment in generosity and the founder Nipun Mehta hopes that his project will help build compassion and community by people being given the opportunity to “pay it forward.”
The project explores ideas related to the gift economy, where goods and services are given without any expectations of return. Mehta hopes that this and other gift-economy projects he is involved in will create a “shift from consumption to contribution, transaction to trust, scarcity to abundance, and isolation to community.”
The project has expanded to multiple locations in different cities which includes Washington D.C., Chicago, India, and Tokyo.
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http://www.karmakitchen.org/
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