An Introduction to Cooking from my perspective

This table below is a brainstorm from our first tutorial about what activities we could possibly analyse. We looked at the different activities under the following headings, food, paper and plays. Culture can come under all three headings which is why it is on top of the table. All the activities that are in (brackets) are quite difficult to analyse and are quite airy fairy thus they are not really acceptable activities for this course.

Culture
Food – everything that is consumed.	Paper – all the permanent things in the world.	Plays – how we express ourselves and engage with other human beings.
Cooking	Sewing	Facebook
Eating	Writing	Writing with an audience
Shopping	Building – bookshelves	Netball
Showering	Landscaping/gardening	Music and dance
Cleaning	Painting	Reading as a community
Gardening	(learning – education)	Garden tours [gardening]
(Physical Fitness)	(Spirituality)	(Student on placement)
Coffee		Social coffee
		Social cooking
		Sharing culture

The next step in this tutorial was to pick our activity and write information under the following headings:

·         What it means to me?

·         Cooking – my experience

·         What it means to me as an OT?

Cooking
What is means to me?	My Experiences	What it means to me as an OT?
Allows me to have fun	Have been really fun	Life skills
Ways of expressing myself	Time consuming depending on what you cook	Fun
Gives me choice in what I eat	Sociable	Gives me an identity
Quality time spent with others	Experimentation of foods and ideas	Engagement
Gives me control over an aspect of my life	A way to learn from others	Teaching myself and others
Relaxation	I always try what I cook	Forms of assessment
Allows me to be creative	Baking for others	Belonging
Thinking time	Calming and allows me to think	Groupwork
A way to learn from other people	Learning new recipes and ways to cook	Breaking down an activity
Allows me to connect with my past	Don’t have to follow recipes for some meals	Ways for intervention
	Learning new skills	Team work
	Gets better with practice	Nutrition
	Quality time with the family	Responsibilities and roles
	Burnt a few meals	Building rapport

Cooking and its Importance to Me

Cooking is an occupation the one must do in order to survive. We must cook some form of food day in and day out. Green (1986) states [that cooking is] “The gathering of nourishment, however, is not only necessary; it is also endless. Once done, it must be done again. Answering as it does to the requirements of life itself, it can end only with the end of life. The purpose of this activity is to provide for the seeds of consumption: food is taken from the earth, after all, in order to be consumed”. I thought that this quote describes cooking very nicely and it sums up the meaning and the importance of this activity for us as humans.

Simpson & Weiner (1989) authors of the Oxford English Dictionary define cooking as “preparing food or a meal by heating the ingredients, it is heated in order to become edible”. To be honest I find this definition of cooking to be seriously lacking. There is a lot more to cooking than just heating something up and besides not all food needs to be cooked in order for us to eat it. There’s creativity, passion and the excitement of creating a meal that you and others can enjoy. Taste is such an important aspect of cooking; if something doesn’t taste good then you wont eat it.

The Meaning of Cooking to Me

Personally I have my moments with cooking. There are days when I want nothing more than spend the day in the kitchen cooking and then there are days where I just can’t be bothered cooking anything and I have to force myself to do it. Cooking does have a tendency to take up quite a bit of time depending on what you cook and how much you are cooking, but I do enjoy experimenting and having fun in the kitchen. I came up with a few words to describe cooking: fun, expression, yummy and experimentation. Cooking also allows me to connect more to my family as everybody has different recipes for the same meal. For example my mum makes an amazing lasagne but then so does my aunt but her one is richer than my mums. So cooking allows me to spend time with my family learning their wonderful and yummy cooking secrets.

References

Green, T.F. (1968). Work, leisure and The American schools. New York: Random House.

Simpson, J. & Weiner, E. (1989). The oxford English dictionary (2^nd ed). United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.