Empowered to cook: The crucial role of 'food agency' in making meals

Appetite
Amy B TrubekJacob Lahne

Abstract

What makes an individual, on any given occasion, able and willing to prepare a meal for themselves: that is, to cook? As home cooking has increasingly become the focus of public-health, nutrition, and policy interventions and campaigns, the need for a better understanding has become apparent. It is clear that cooking is not merely a matter of mechanical skill or rote training; beyond this, it is difficult to explain why similar individuals have such different capacities for setting and achieving food-related goals. This paper proposes a new paradigm for cooking and food provisioning - termed "food agency" - that attempts to describe how an individual's desires form and are enacted in correspondence with social environments: broadly, agency emerges from the complex interplay of individual technical skills and cognitive capacities with social and cultural supports and barriers. Drawing on a close reading of anthropological and sociological research into cooking, the authors propose that an individual's ability to integrate such complexity in regard to provisioning - to possess 'food agency' - is crucial. This argument is supplemented by empirical case studies from a large body of ethnographic observations and interviews with home...Continue Reading

References

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Citations

Dec 16, 2020·Canadian Journal of Dietetic Practice and Research : a Publication of Dietitians of Canada = Revue Canadienne De La Pratique Et De La Recherche En Diététique : Une Publication Des Diététistes Du Canada·Kristen SimondsJune I Matthews

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