Transcript Cooking Solo: Complicating Off

Cooking Solo
Off-Campus Culinary Independence and Identity
By: Liam Harley
Recipes for Personhood
Cooking Solo
Building off of work by David Sutton that identified the ways that
cultural traditions are created and maintained through intergenerational
cooking experiences, I sought out to explore how cooking knowledge is
gained without the advice of others, especially one’s parents. I started
studying my friend Sarunas’ cooking habits after he moved off-campus
and began cooking for himself. My research evolved to answer the
deeper question: How does Sarunas form and perform his identity while
he cooks by and for himself?
Research Methods
I worked with Sarunas first because our friendship gives me access and
immediate trust in the ethnographer/interlocutor relationship, and
second because Sarunas only recently moved off-campus and has begun
to cook meals for himself. To conduct my research, I primarily used
participant observation: I accompanied Sarunas as he went shopping,
chose recipes for a meal, cooked for himself, and ate his food.
Throughout the process, I asked questions about why he chose certain
ingredients or recipes, what he thought about while he cooked, or how
he thinks the cooking is going. I took notes in his kitchen while he
cooked, analyzed my notes to find patterns, and finally applied my
findings to see how Sarunas is formulating and performing his identity
while he cooks.
Although Sarunas is cooking by and for himself, he does not cook independently.
Sarunas draws from a variety of resources that influence what and how he cooks. Below
is a “recipe” that resembles the thought process that Sarunas follows during the cooking
process.
Ingredients (Resources Useful for Sarunas)
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Memory
Web Recipes
Advice from Friends
Green Discourses
Health/Nutrition Information
Cooking Skills/Available Kitchen Tools
Food Cost
1. Choose a recipe: When choosing a recipe, Sarunas might make stewed chili because it’s
a specialty of his father’s and reminds him of home. Sarunas might make a quiche with
assorted vegetables because it is healthy. Sarunas also scours the internet looking for
recipes that intrigue him but he first has to check if the recipe is easy enough for him to
do (after all, Sarunas considers himself to be a novice.)
2. Go Shopping: Sarunas usually shops at Uncle Dean’s Groceries, a nearby grocery stores
that specializes in organic, locally sourced produce and prepared foods. Sarunas checks
labels to make sure that his ingredients are both “healthy” and “sustainable” by his
standards. Although these ingredients can be twice as expensive, Sarunas considers the
extra money he spends to be worth it. He says that we aren’t really cutting costs by
cheaping out at the grocery store. “We pay for it in other ways.”
3. Cook the meal: Although Sarunas always pulls up a recipe to use from the internet, he
deviates heavily from the recipe’s directions and ingredients. This deviation is active:
Sarunas likes to add or subtract ingredients that he likes and believes won’t alter the
recipe very much. These deviations are often based off of his memories (adding more
spice because that’s how his dad made chili), advice from friends (replace butter with
coconut oil in pie dough for a vegan dough), or user comments from online (substitute
kale for spinach in his veggie quiche). Although the recipe is there as a reference for
Sarunas, he relies more heavily on his preferences, memories, and advice.
Cooking and Identity
When Sarunas deviates from the recipe, he is not only
experimenting with the food but formulating his identity as an
independent adult. By cooking beef chili, Sarunas connects himself
to his family in Lithuania, putting his preference for vegetarian food
aside for the maintenance of his father’s recipe. Sarunas cooks with
local, sustainable ingredients because he considers himself to be an
eco-conscious individual who prioritizes environmental costs over
financial ones. As Sarunas deviates further and further from the
recipes, he claims ownership of the dish as an expression of himself
and his learned cooking skills.
This type of identity formation is significant for anthropology as a
discipline because it demonstrates how identity is formed and
performed during an everyday process like cooking. The study not
only demonstrates how Sarunas configures a meal from a variety of
available resources without the guidance of an expert, but also
demonstrates how Sarunas can gain a better understanding of
himself during the process of cooking. Like all of us, Sarunas is a
social person who lives on his own but not isolated from discourses
about food, nutrition, and the environment. These discourses shape
the food Sarunas cooks as well as the type of person Sarunas makes
and remakes himself to be.
Bibliography
Sutton, David. 2014. Secrets from the Greek Kitchen: Cooking, Skill, and
Everyday Life on an Aegean Island. Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press.
Liam Harley – [email protected]
Anthropology of Food (AY464)