Starter Kit. Idea 113 of 500. Cluster 5
Ayurvedic cookery schools, since the food is the half of the treatment nobody exports
The mechanism, from the book
Ayurveda is a system of medicine the world already recognises and seeks out. The demand is there; what Sri Lanka needs is more of its own names, known and asked for abroad.
The first step
Cook one Ayurvedic lunch in your own kitchen for four paying guests, found through a guesthouse owner nearby, and explain each dish and spice as you go. Charge a fixed price per head that includes a printed recipe card. Ask each guest whether they would book a full day, and whether they would buy the spice mix to take home. Their answers set both the course and the product.
- Who pays first
- A visitor who has eaten Ayurvedic meals during a stay and wants to learn to cook them at home.
- What leaves today
- Visitors go home with a memory of the food but no recipes, no skills and no spice packs, so the value ends the day they leave.
Ask first
- Department of Ayurveda. Ask which practitioners could teach the food side of treatment.
- the area Medical Officer of Health. Ask what hygiene standard a cookery school kitchen must meet.
Check before you spend
That teachers are qualified, that no health claims are made beyond what is proven, and that the kitchen meets hygiene expectations.
Find out these three numbers
- What will a guest pay for an Ayurvedic cookery course?
- How many treatment centres would send their guests?
- What do ingredients cost per student?
A comparison from the book
Sri Lanka. Chapter Five
"One is a meal. The other is a story they will tell for 30 years"
A meal is gone, but a cooking skill goes home with the guest.
The test
Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?
From the appendix of Why Not Sri Lanka? by Dr Maheshika Halbeisen. The idea and the mechanism are the book's; this kit was written for the site.