A Frankfurt newspaper published parts of an upcoming governmental Concept for Civil Defense last autumn as a first update here in Germany since 1995, the conversation piece of the report being that all households should keep a reserve of 10 days of food supplies and five days of water in case of a “development that could threaten our existence and cannot be categorically ruled out in the future”.

Somewhere between an awkward paranoia and a street smart “why not”, my partner and I went for the latter. As a side note: there were two jars of ravioli but we already ate one and it wasn’t really an emergency. Also, the plum juice was originally bought for an episode of constipation, and the Miracle Whip is in parentheses because it was not meant for the Emergency Pack and nobody really wants to eat it anyway. Anyways, the collection of jars and cans now sits amongst folded kitchen towels and an assortment of electric cords that also claim they may come in handy one day.

Half a decade ago in my other hometown of Helsinki I was often faced with other types of preparedness. The early 2010s kicked off a powerful era of new self-made urban movements in the Finnish capital. A true trailblazer was called Restaurant Day, a day encouraging anyone to go wild with a one-day pop up restaurant without a single form filled out. The idea was one of positive resistance to sanitary legislations and the general complexities of setting up shop, improving attitudes towards small businesses, and reclaiming public spaces.

The first Restaurant Day in May 2011 started from a Facebook post asking “what if anyone could set up a restaurant for a day” and quickly manifested as 45 one-day oases of food, drink and laughter held in homes, parks, street corners and offices. In spite of hiccups of upbraid here and there, the event could not be stopped and it exponentially started to resemble a new national day, now held four times a year to hit all seasons. (If you have been to Finland in February or November, you can guess that smiley communal activities are not a given year-round.) The mayor gave his blessing, the concept received all kinds of awards and contributed to more international country brand efforts than pretty much anything in near memory or sight. The May 2014 edition hit a peak of 2724 restaurants in 35 countries, perhaps still to be surpassed.

Restaurant Day managed to make a huge shift in how Finns see their environments. The phenomenon showed a new mass of people just how obvious it could be to, well, do fun things together. It is easy to describe Restaurant Day through concepts of design thinking, bottom-up prototyping, self-built cities or whatever the current trend words are for making spaces into places. Fast forward six years from the start of it and our communities are living through more globalized problems than the bureaucracy of a single country. But can a sandwich bar operated via a basket lowered from the third floor window hit the spots of wicked problems like migration and ecological disaster?

Maybe we can combine the collapse-awareness of the Emergency Reserves and the fun-fun-fun of Restaurant Day by sending out a simultaneous message to ourselves: We can influence our surroundings and we can question any status quo handed down from the top. We can train to deal and be creative with scarcity and home-made everydays before there is no other choice. One-day Restaurant Day eateries have already popped up in refugee centers, and a spin-off project in Helsinki brought daytime dances to senior homes – showing that food and fun can indeed unite groups of people. We can invite a stranger in before they knock on the door. We can see what and how we are able to share, and feel good about ourselves as independent builders of society – crisis or no crisis. As the esteemed empowerment architect RuPaul says: “Honey, if you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love somebody else?”

Perhaps we need all of this: the canned peas, the smiles over sandwiches. A need to be ready: for fun, for disaster, to talk to your neighbor, to get over yourself, to fight over-the-top sanitation laws, to feel resilient without relying on political parties or restaurant chains to define how to live, how to interact, how to come together. In the meanwhile, I’ll even keep the Miracle Whip – maybe I can test out all the ways to use mayonnaise and pop open a stall on our home street to, hmm, spread the love.

- Simo Vassinen