Cooking in daily life

Cooking and eating is an important part of our life, and therefore gets a lot of our time and attention. Existing empirical research on food and eating culture shows that cooking is primarily a social activity, closely connected to memories. These memories can cause culinary nostalgia, the emotional longing for a dish from the past. By means of dishes as cultural artefacts and traditions, cooking bonds people and strengthens their collective identity. This collective identity can be specified into a personal cooking related identity, which can be used to distinguish oneself from others. In the process of cooking, the kitchen forms a liminal space where nature meets culture: ingredients are turned into dishes with symbolical meaning. By taking an exploratory approach, this study analyses the liminality in the act of cooking, which is used as a means to relate to the world. This qualitative research focusses on contemporary cooking culture in Western society and attempts to give an insight into the twofold liminality in cooking: liminality in time and in place. The research question is: ‘To what extent and in what way do selecting and cooking dishes provide a way for people to relate to the world, within the context of daily life?’. During 10 semi-structured, in-depth interviews, 12 Dutch and non-Dutch respondents, most living in and around Rotterdam, were asked about their habits and thoughts on cooking. The results are analysed and structured by means of thematic analysis, resulting in two main themes: cooking in relation to time and cooking in relation to place. Because of the liminality in cooking, the interpretation of time and place becomes indefinite. Cooking aided respondents in structuring their time and helped them to make sense of the vague concept of time. Through time related associations, cooking structured the hours in the day, the days of the week, the seasons, and phases in one’s life. By using cooking as social time, especially in the weekends, cooking for others helps to create and sustain social relationships and encourages social bonding. Furthermore, it is used to discover and make sense of the world, by discovering other places and their related cultures through cooking adventures. It helped respondents to get a sense of place and define their own place in this world. They related to the world in the way they valued awareness of the origin of their food and the sustainability of their cooking habits. Another way in which the respondents related to the world was by adjusting their cooking habits to the place they were in, it determined and limited one’s cooking options. In contrast to most existing anthropological research on cooking, this research focussed on food and cooking culture in Western society and concentrated on present-day, contemporary daily cooking. It has explored the field of liminality in cooking and distinguished the themes of time and place in the process of relating to the world by means of cooking.