Making Dinner

How American Home Cooks Produce and Make Meaning Out of the Evening Meal

Roblyn Rawlins, David Livert

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781474252560
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Öffentliche Landwirtschaftspolitik

With a vast selection of foods and thousands of recipes to choose from, how do home cooks in America decide what to cook – and what does their cooking mean to them? Answering this question, Making Dinner is an empirical study of home cooking in the United States. Drawing on a combination of research methods, which includes in-depth interviews with over 50 cooks and cooking journals documenting over 300 home-cooked dinners, Roblyn Rawlins and David Livert explore how American home cooks think and feel about themselves, food, and cooking. Their findings reveal distinct types of cook-the family-first cook, the traditional cook, and the keen cook -and demonstrate how personal identities, family relationships, ideologies of gender and parenthood, and structural constraints all influence what ends up on the plate. Rawlins and Livert reveal research that fills the data gap on practices of home cooking in everyday life. This is an important contribution to fields such as food studies, health and nutrition, sociology, social psychology, anthropology, gender studies, and American studies.

1

Making Dinner, Making Meaning: Cooking, Family, and the Self

Consider the following evening meals prepared for their families by two different home cooks, one in the Middle Atlantic and one in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States.

Melissa’s Sunday dinner menu:	Cheese Pepperoni Crackers Fresh baby bell peppers
Peter’s Wednesday dinner menu:	Cheese Salami Bread Pickles Fresh fruit

In the cooking journals they completed as part of our research into the meaning and practice of home cooking in the contemporary United States, Melissa and Peter reflected upon their dinners of cheese and sausage. Each considered the meal to have been a success, and each enjoyed preparing dinner that evening.

Melissa is an art teacher who cooks for her husband and their eight-year-old and ten-year-old children. She is a home cook of the type that we describe as a drudge. She does not enjoy cooking yet nevertheless does it out of a sense of obligation so that her family can eat a home-cooked meal together. Often only Melissa and the children are together at the dinner table because her husband gets home from work later in the evening. He enjoys cooking more than she does and often does much of the preparation in the morning so that she “just has to throw it together” when it is time for dinner. In her interview, Melissa stated, “I hate cooking.” In the cooking journal, when asked how much she enjoyed cooking on the nights she did so, her answers indicated that she didn’t enjoy it and did it only out of necessity: “Not much, but necessary; not at all, but had to.” However, after serving the dinner described above, Melissa noted in her journal that she did enjoy preparing the meal that evening: it was “great, no cooking!” She also thought that the dinner was a success because it was “easy” and “different.”

Peter works in sales and cooks for his wife and their eight-year-old daughter. He is a home cook whom we assigned to the types of family-first cook and keen cook. As a family-first cook, his cooking practice is highly motivated by a sense of care for his family. He takes a lot of pleasure in preparing good meals they enjoy eating. He also is a keen cook who enjoys building his already above-average skills and knowledge about food and cooking. In his cooking journal, he labeled this menu a “French picnic.” Peter explained that a friend of his daughter was the family’s guest for dinner that evening and “she loves Paris, so we did it French style.” He judged the meal to be a success: “They were very happy … it was well received and enjoyed by all.” He enjoyed preparing and serving the meal, although he did note in his journal reflections that it was all prep work to make an attractive presentation and no actual cooking.

So we have two home cooks who enjoyed making two almost identical dinners, but the meanings they made out of those dinners were strikingly different. To begin, the social context of the meals differed: in one household, there was a guest for dinner. Peter, along with almost all the home cooks in our study, varies his cooking when hosting dinner guests. He typically sticks to a short list of standards when entertaining guests, with the addition of one or two “special” dishes selected to please particular guests. In this case, the guest was a Francophile young girl, so Peter prepared a meal that he thought would please her.

In addition to differences in the social context of the cheese and sausage dinner, Melissa’s and Peter’s personal orientations and approaches to cooking diverge, as do their cooking skills and knowledge. While each dinner was judged by the cook to be a success, these evaluations were based on very different orientations to and feelings about cooking and food. Peter’s approach to making dinner as a family-first cook can be seen in his attribution of the meal as a success. He felt his “French picnic” was a success because his wife, his daughter, and her friend enjoyed eating it. As a family-first cook, what is most important to him in his daily task of making dinner is caring for his family, making them happy, and keeping them healthy by providing good food that they like to eat. As a keen cook, Peter’s mediated knowledge of French cuisine and culture enabled him to make his dinner of cheese and sausage and accompaniments, which appealed to Melissa simply because it was easy and different, into a special “French picnic.” In the pages that follow, we demonstrate the complex ways in which the meaning that home cooks attribute to their cooking and to the meals they prepare is shaped by the intersection of their self-identities, orientations, abilities and aspirations as home cooks and by the material, temporal, cultural and social contexts in which their cooking takes place.

We are not here primarily interested in the product of making dinner—the evening meal ready to be eaten—but in the process of making dinner: the decisions, the aspirations, the emotions, and the perceived outcomes experienced by home cooks as they go about their daily tasks of preparing the evening meal. Doing home cooking is a complex, fluid, contingent process that includes planning, provisioning, preparing, and finally serving and eating. Home cooks vary in how they think and feel about cooking and about themselves as cooks. These personal factors in turn shape how different cooks respond to the material, temporal, cultural, and social contexts in which they make dinner.

The study

The idea for this book began eight years ago on a sunny summer Sunday morning. We had been having a delightful time that weekend, hosting friends at our home on the banks of the Delaware River. The house party included a professionally trained chef, a professor of culinary arts, a food studies professor, an academic researcher, two kids, and ourselves, one a professor of sociology and one of social psychology. We had kayaked and canoed on the river, gone out for breakfast, played chess, harvested wild mushrooms (a gigantic haul of chanterelles), gone for walks, read, celebrated a birthday with homemade cake and cava, laughed, and talked. And we had cooked and eaten, very well indeed. Sunday morning plans included coffee and the New York Times. We were drawn in to the magazine section by Erwin Olaf’s striking photograph of an upscale home kitchen whose cook had apparently suddenly abandoned the food and tools, now festooned in cobwebs and insects and falling into decay. Another photograph depicted a high-end refrigerator filled with boxes and cartons of take-out pizza and Chinese food. In the cover article, “Out of the Kitchen and Onto the Couch,” acclaimed food writer, critic, and activist Michael Pollan took up the increasingly familiar lament of the “decline and fall of everyday home cooking” (Pollan, 2009a). Pollan quoted food-marketing researcher Harry Balzer, whose firm has been tracking home cooking since the late 1970s and who claims that the amount of time Americans spend cooking at home has decreased, while their use of already prepared foods has increased. Pollan juxtaposed these trends indicating a lack of interest in actually doing cooking with the increasing popularity of watching others cook on television. It was, like all of his work, at its base an impassioned screed against industrial food and eating without care, well written and provocative.

But although easy to swallow in its familiarity (isn’t criticizing home cooks the comfort food of many a food writer?), what Pollan was serving up that morning didn’t sit all that well with us. We know a lot of people who do cook at home, maybe not every night, and maybe using some prepared foods, but nevertheless they do cook. And we know people, family and dear friends among their number, for whom cooking at home—being a good home cook—is vital to their sense of who and what they are and whose cooking adds meaning and value to their lives. We also knew that there was not a great deal of empirical research into the practice and meaning of cooking at home in the contemporary United States. This book was launched that day by the river, drinking coffee, eating frittata and bacon, reading, and talking with friends.

What counts as cooking?

When we have presented this research in various venues, we have often started our presentations with a discussion of the salami and cheese dinners that we use to open this book. And we have always gotten responses along the lines of “but that’s not cooking” or “that’s not dinner.” In Deciphering a Meal, the anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote, “I need to know what defines the categories of a meal at home” (1972: 62). Forty-five years later, what counts as family dinner and what counts as cooking is still a question without a simple answer. For example, the participants in Wolfson and colleagues’ (2016) focus groups defined the practice of home cooking as falling along various points on a continuum from all scratch cooking to any food made at home. As Amy Trubek has recently noted, “the emergence and pervasiveness of the modern food industry in all corners of the United States has deeply complicated the apparently simple question of what is and is not home cooking” (Trubek et al. 2017: 298).

In our view, if our home cooks reported they made dinner at home, they did. We take our definitions of cooking, dinner, and related phenomena from the participants in our study. Our inquiry into home cooking starts by honoring the home cooks’ “working knowledge of her [and his] everyday world” (Smith 1987: 154). Some of our home cooks did make distinctions between “actual” cooking—which they viewed as more technically difficult—and simple preparation of the evening meal, as Peter did when he wrote that his French picnic dinner was all prep and no actual cooking. Virginia, who works as a counselor and cooks for her husband and two young children, told us in her interview that she “cook[s] an actual dinner maybe two or three times a week.” When asked what she meant by an actual dinner, she explained that this would entail “more preparation, no microwave, and we actually eat together.” Kaye works as a staff assistant and prepares almost every meal that she and her husband and two young children eat at home. The family eats out only once a month. Kaye reports that about four times a week, she cooks “an actual meal, not just macaroni and leftovers.” On a night when they decided to make a spontaneous evening trip after a long workday to see the spring flowering trees and needed to cook and eat dinner very quickly, the dinner menu at Jack and Jeremiah’s house consisted of frozen veggie burgers for the parents and a frozen waffle and a banana for the toddler. Jack’s reflection on the meal as noted in their cooking journal was that it was “hard to call it cooking—but it was fine.”

When we speak of home cooking then, we mean the everyday task of preparing and providing food for the household or family, including planning, provisioning and preparing the evening meal, regardless of how much “actual” cooking is involved in the preparation of a given dinner. This definition is in line with that of Anne Murcott (1995): to cook is to do the household task of making and providing food, a task like shopping or doing the laundry. Frances Short in Kitchen Secrets defined cooks as “‘people who cook,’ whether for themselves and/or for others, frequently or infrequently, with great technical expertise or without” (2006: 75). Our approach to defining cooking is also informed by Luce Giard’s (1998) notion of “doing-cooking,” which includes planning for the meal, cooking abilities, and related conceptual tasks, and DeVault’s (1991) concept of “feeding work,” which includes the practical and logistical tasks of making dinner as well as its emotional and relational components. To do home cooking or make dinner as we conceptualize it is to perform all the tasks and activities that make up the work of feeding the family. Feeding work includes planning meals, learning about food and food preparation, deciding where to shop, shopping for food, monitoring the food supplies in the household, preparing the meals, serving the meals, cleaning up after the meal, storing the leftovers, and disposing of the waste (Carrington 1999). It also includes knowing and monitoring the emotional and dietary needs of those for whom the cook cooks.

What are cooking skills?

In the view of French anthropologist Luce Giard, “doing-cooking” or the “nourishing arts” “demands as much intelligence, imagination and memory as those [life activities] traditionally held as superior, such as music and weaving” (1998: 151). How do we conceptualize the skills and capabilities that home cooks employ in their daily task of provisioning, planning, and preparing the evening meal?

We utilize a person-centered rather than a task-centered approach to understanding the skills and capabilities involved in home cooking (Short 2006). A task-centered approach would see making dinner as a range of techniques used to prepare various dishes. However, all practical tasks, such as making dinner, require a combination of mechanical abilities; knowledge; and “tacit” perceptual, conceptual, and planning skills (Singleton 1978). Perceptual, conceptual, and planning skills enable a person to visualize the process of a task, plan and design it, and have the confidence to carry it out.

Our person-centered approach to cooking skills includes consideration of not only those mechanical and technical knowledges and skills the cook employs but also the conceptual, perceptual, organizational, and logistical skills used by the home cook to plan, provision, and prepare dinner. This approach acknowledges the emotional and relational capabilities that are central to the practice of home cooking as feeding the family, including the ability to evaluate and to meet others’ perceived physical and emotional needs. The person-centered approach to home cooking skills also directs our attention to the circumstances or context in which making dinner takes place. Our approach considers home cooking skills from the perspective of the individual home cook in terms of actions required, contexts of decision-making, self-perceptions of such actions and decisions, and the reactions and responses of those who eat.

Our approach to thinking about cooking skills is informed by Short (2006) and Trubek (Trubek et al. 2017). In her study of British home cooks, Frances Short argued that the relationship between people’s cooking skills and their cooking practices was not straightforward. She noted that research had paid little attention to people’s attitudes toward cooking, their confidence in their cooking skills, and how they feel about the task of feeding their family. More recently, based upon a decade’s worth of research into home cooking practice, Amy Trubek’s research group has put forth a conceptual argument for considering a “food agency” paradigm in cooking research: understanding how individuals set and achieve their goals—from provisioning to planning to preparing—within complex individual, cultural and social contexts (2017: 297). They propose that this approach “considers how the actor [read: home cook] completing the work employs manual and cognitive skills as well as sensorial perceptions, while also navigating and shaping various societal structures (e.g., time, money, mobility, etc.) in the course of setting and meeting personal meal preparation goals” (2017: 298).

As Frances Short (2006) has argued, making a meal is a process that requires home cooks to engage in activities beyond the home kitchen. Amy Trubek and her colleagues (2017) similarly identify cooking as a skilled practice in relation to social and cultural contexts and constraints, rather than simply a set of mechanical and individualized skills. When we look at cooking with an emphasis on context, we see that the skills needed for successful home cooking include those of professional chefs—albeit likely to a different standard—but they also include organizational, planning, emotional, relational, caregiving, multitasking and time allocation knowledge and skills. A successful home cook may produce a dinner that is technically not perfect but nevertheless is just right for the occasion and is eaten happily by their family. The home cook’s skill set includes the ability to fit cooking around other tasks and activities such as childcare, to use up leftovers, and to plan and prepare food to suit different tastes and dietary requirements and to suit different occasions in family life.

Methodological approach

Our study of home cooks employed a mixed-methods approach. Data were collected via personal interviews with the primary home cook(s) and cooking journals subsequently completed by that cook or anyone else who cooked the evening meal. These complementary methodologies provide insights into how cooks perceived and made meaning out of making dinner while also providing more quantitative data regarding the daily practice of making dinner. The interviews and journals included a variety of open-ended questions that provide rich qualitative data regarding the meanings associated with making dinner as well as detailed depictions of the daily challenge of preparing the meal. Closed-ended questions and scales in the cooking journals provided quantitative data regarding details of daily practice as well as home cooks’ emotions, enjoyment, and motivations. Our use of qualitative data analysis is particularly suited for investigating social processes that have attracted little prior research attention, where the research is limited in depth or where a new point of view on familiar topics appears promising (Milliken 2010). The mixed-methods approach permitted us to explore our cooks’ experiences in their local, contextualized setting and allowed the participants’ voices to define key elements of the phenomenon under study (Rahman 2017).

The study’s methodology was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Pennsylvania State University. Informed consent was acquired at the outset of the in-depth interviews.

Recruitment of the study’s participants

Our participants consist of fifty-one home cooks in forty-two households across the United States. Two sampling approaches were employed to recruit participants for the study. A convenience sampling approach involved recruiting (mostly through e-mail lists) from the following sources: a local community-supported agriculture (CSA) farm, community hospital, staff at both authors’ academic institutions, a Facebook page community of those interested in cooking, and the social networks of both authors. Snowball sampling was also employed: participants were asked during the in-depth interview to recommend others whom we could invite to participate in the study.

When initially contacting participants, we asked for volunteers who cooked the evening meal at home most of the time. Because we were interested in how home cooks balanced work and family responsibilities in light of these competing time demands and logistical challenges, we purposively sampled for home cooks who worked outside the home and for households with children. We specifically expressed that we were looking for all types of cooks, ...