The reason these things aren't free is because people have to work to provide them for us. There are farmers, water purification workers, electricians, engineers, oil field workers, etc. These people can't work for free.
All sorts of things are free that other people have to work for. We typically pay them through taxes (yes, technically that means we are still paying for them and so not "free", but the load can be distributed adequately throughout society). If we can have public schools, we can have public other stuff.
Obviously you need to consider everything case by case, like how do you deal with people who consume extraordinary amounts of electricity or such, but it's not ridiculous
a priori to expand the "basic necessities" category to include more things.
Also, I'm with 'chew on basic income, but that's probably harder to implement directly that just free food.