A Psychology of Food, Cooks, and Cooking 1793634742, 9781793634740

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A Psychology of Food, Cooks, and Cooking

A Psychology of Food, Cooks, and Cooking David Livert

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2024 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Livert, David, author.  Title: A psychology of food, cooks, and cooking / David Livert.  Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This book reviews psychological research and theory to illuminate the ubiquitous human behavior of cooking in both professional and domestic kitchens, drawing on the author’s twenty years of experience examining both types of cooks”— Provided by publisher.  Identifiers: LCCN 2023037486 (print) | LCCN 2023037487 (ebook) | ISBN 9781793634740 (cloth) | ISBN 9781793634764 (paperback) | ISBN 9781793634757 (epub)  Subjects: LCSH: Cooking—Psychological aspects. | Cooking—History. | Food— Psychological aspects. Classification: LCC TX652 .L496 2024  (print) | LCC TX652  (ebook) | DDC 641.501/9—dc23/eng/20230920 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023037486 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023037487 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Chapter 1: Why a Book about the Psychology of Cooks and Cooking? Chapter 2: Learning to Cook Chapter 3: Time to Cook



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Chapter 4: The Role and Identity of a Cook



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Chapter 5: Thinking about Cooking: Choices, Planning, and Creativity 85 Chapter 6: Feelings about Cooking: The Key Roles of Motivation and Affect

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Chapter 7: Personality and Leadership in the Kitchen

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Chapter 8: Cooking Skills and Confidence Chapter 9: Cooking Changes References Index







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About the Author



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Acknowledgments

Many acknowledgments are in order. First, my gratitude goes out to the thousands of participants who have taken part in my research on cooking. Those individuals who gave me a bit of time include chef students, kitchen employees, culinary education staff and faculty, and domestic cooks. Thank you, too, to the chef instructors who opened their class to me, executive chefs who opened their kitchens to me, and those domestic cooks I have observed while they created dinner. Thank you to Pennsylvania State University, specifically the Lehigh Valley campus, for constant support for my work, including Anibal Torres Bernal. Hats off to colleagues Kevin Kelley and Nicole Ryerson. I thank the editorial team at Lexington Books for their professionalism, guidance, and patience. Thanks also go to anonymous reviewers for their wisdom and insight. Thanks to my students who were true colleagues, including Kate Byrnes, Sage Christopher, Donielle Holloway, Jan Humza, Tashina Khabbaz, and Angelina Roccamo. Time to thank friends who have been such a source of support and encouragement to me over the years, including Daniel Aguera, Beth Aretsky, Scott Barton, Wendy Chan, Andrew Chang, Pauline Cullen, Greg Fatigati, Julie Gallagher, Bob del Grosso, Andrea Heinly, Christope Hill, Megan Jesse, Jacob Lindsey, Alison Mathis, Anne McBride, Brian McKenzie, Spike Mendelsohn, Dan and Molly Pearson, Krishnendu Ray, Anne Reid, Geoff Reyes, Scott Scotese, Will Sears, Robert Valgenti, Jon Zearfoss, Willa Zhen, and Sharon Zraly. Thanks to Rich Roberts for his collaboration and friendship. Sadly, Jack Glidewell and Charles Kadushin are no longer with us, but I will never forget the friendship and support of these two incredible social scientists and menches. Also gone are Jerry Fischetti, King Phojanakong, Charlie Rascall, and Pete Walker, as well as my dear brother, Bill Binkley. vii

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A reminder to Andy Arrow that he set my whole focus on kitchens in motion. Thank goodness he worked for Orion and followed me to New York. Thanks to Susan Wright for opening the door. Thanks to the scholars and researchers who were willing to bring me along, including Andy Beveridge, Kay Deaux, Howard Ehrlichman, Vita Rabinowitz, David Rindskopf, and Len Saxe. Thanks to Susan Mohammed for her guidance and collaboration. Thank you, Tracey Revenson, for your incredible guidance, support, and friendship. Finally, special thanks go to Kathy Merget and Michael Pardus. Kathy has been a guiding angel for two decades and a wonderful collaborator. What can I say about Michael Pardus? Thanks for many years of brotherly wisdom, great food, and a good deal of cheer. Here’s to juniper berries. I dedicate this book to the other two human members of my household: Sammy Livert and Roblyn Rawlins. Sammy makes my world bright every day; he is an incredible kid who will become a caring and wonderful man. Summing up my love and gratitude for Roblyn Rawlins is difficult. Roblyn is my life partner, teacher, friend, domestic cook extraordinaire, love of my life, mother of my son, and collaborator. Spending my life with you has been a blast.

Chapter 1

Why a Book about the Psychology of Cooks and Cooking?

This is a book about one of the essential human activities. We engage in this activity tens of thousands of times in our lifetime. This activity serves an essential social function. It is likely responsible for many of the qualities— physical and psychosocial—that distinguish us as humans from our other primate relatives. Of course, I am talking about cooking. Surprisingly, there are relatively few books that use a psychological framework to understand cooks and cooking, despite its importance to our lives. As we will see, psychologists have focused on the consumption process but much less so on the production side of cooking. Was I motivated to write this book because I am an ardent food enthusiast, because I love to cook, or because I was raised in a restaurant or currently own one? No. Not really. Let me share a little bit about my motivation for writing this book. I became interested in cooks and their kitchens initially as a topic for my dissertation in social psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center. I wanted to study the effects of social contact over time. What was unclear to me was where to study this process. I needed a social setting where strangers came together and interacted closely with one another for several months. It was thanks to my amazing friend Andy that I became aware of professional chef training: Andy had a roommate who earned her degree at a top school for chefs in the New York area. When I subsequently met Maureen for coffee in Midtown Manhattan, she described the chef school. It perfectly fit what I was looking for. At the school, chef students—initially strangers—were randomly assigned to kitchen groups in which they took classes together and cooked together for a semester. I also learned about intergroup prejudices. Female chef students were looked down on by male students. In addition, older students were considered not as serious about their careers as those of traditional college age. I had found my research setting. 1

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I spent six months observing, interviewing, and collecting data from a cohort of chef students. I shadowed chef instructors as they performed demos, exposed the students to techniques, monitored production, and directed the aspiring chefs in service and cleaning. I began to realize just how complex and intriguing the professional kitchen was. After I finished my dissertation and started my faculty position at Penn State, I began spending time in restaurant kitchens and interviewing chefs and other staff. I conducted numerous research projects in those settings, studying team dynamics, personality, leadership, and stress. Over time, I recognized just how many psychological processes were involved in cooking in the professional kitchen. Later, I also became familiar with the considerable scholarship regarding the domestic kitchen. Along with sociologist Roblyn Rawlins, we carried out a study of domestic cooks across the United States and explored the many psychosocial processes required for a domestic cook to successfully make dinner. This book examines both domestic and professional cooks to illustrate psychological processes in the kitchen. It draws together existing research in the psychological sciences and, to a lesser extent, sociology, anthropology, and food studies. This book makes the case that, as a basic, influential, and constantly re-created human activity, cooks and cooking merit our attention, theorizing, and research. COOKING IS UNIQUELY HUMAN One argument for the greater attention of psychology on cooking is that the activity is uniquely human. Cooking is the application of heat to meat, vegetables, and starches to render those ingredients more nutritious, tasty, and easily digested. A key part of this process is heat: before induction stoves and microwave appliances, in order to get heat, one needed fire—and not just fire but control of the fire. Otherwise, things burn and people get hurt. To understand how cooking is uniquely human, we should take a moment to consider the emergence of human controlled fire. Note that our discussion of fire, preparation, and cooking draws primarily from the scholarship of archeologists, anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, and paleontologists rather than psychologists (Rappoport, 2003). Controlled Fire and Preparation There is a general consensus that humans uniquely possess the ability to start and control fire. The control of fire represented a significant cognitive leap for humanity, comparable to that of using stones for tools (Gowlett, 2016). Those who have thought deeply about humanity—from Hippocrates to Darwin to

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Engels—acknowledge the significance of the control of fire (Wrangham, 2016). Just when human ancestors mastered controlled fire is unclear and still contested (Gowlett, 2016). One source of dispute is that it is challenging for archeologists and other researchers to distinguish controlled fire from natural fires. Evidence of controlled fire includes the temperature of the burn and the frequency of the burn (once versus repeated). Another clue to controlled fire is the shape of the burn. In contrast to natural fires, fires in service of cooking tend to have a bowl-shaped structure with different levels of sediments. These early hearths also have evidence of consistent and extended burns throughout the area. Some evidence suggests that fires predate the emergence of Homo erectus, as much as two million years ago. If true, fire may have played an important role in the rise of the first humans. Other evidence suggests the rise of controlled fires during the Homo erectus period (1.5 million years), while even other research claims later genesis of controlled fire (1.0 to 0.8 million years) (Gowlett, 2016). While fire provides light and a rudimentary defense from attackers, its primary role was likely for cooking. (The first hominids emerged in the African savanna, where artificial heat was less important than in later years after humans started their geographic expansion.) In addition to controlled fire, cooking requires some preparation of foodstuffs to be heated. In fact, the development of food preparation activities may have predated cooking with fire. Archeological evidence suggests the use of tools to cut meat off bones as early as 2.5 million years ago (Wrangham, 2009). The fashioning and use of tools requires a number of motivational and cognitive processes, including planning and cooperation, as well as considerable patience. Maybe the first mise en place activities helped make us human? The Emergence of Cooking It is likewise difficult to attribute a specific date to the emergence of cooking. Humans may have opportunistically learned about the benefits of applying fire to food before they knew how to control it. For example, human ancestors may have sampled seeds or other raw foodstuffs that remained after a natural fire or if their habitat burned down (Wrangham, 2009). Such sampling would have made our ancestors aware of the taste of cooked food and the differences in texture of the food. Cooked food requires far less chewing and work to consume. (We’ll return to chewing in a moment.) Let’s discuss some of the benefits of cooked over raw food before turning to the impact of cooking on human evolution.

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What Humans Get Out of Cooking Even before the emergence of macaroni and cheese as a significant comfort food, humans enjoyed a number of substantial benefits from preparing and heating food. What did cooking provide for our human ancestors that still makes it so attractive to us now? The most immediate benefit is that cooked food generally tastes better (sometimes much better) than raw food. Not only do humans prefer cooked food, but a similar preference is also shown by our closest living primate relatives. For example, Warneken and colleagues found that chimps—once they had experienced baked potato slices—were more likely to prefer the cooked version in subsequent experimental trials over raw potato slices, even if they had to wait longer for the cooked food (Beran et al., 2016; Warneken & Rosati, 2015). Ever chew a raw piece of beef or asparagus? How long does it take to swallow? Don’t cheat; you might choke! Cooking tenderizes food and makes it far easier to consume. This is not a trivial benefit. Consider what life would be like for you if you had to chew raw versions of the proteins and plants that you eat every day. In fact, other primates spend a considerable amount of time chewing, with the great apes spending around ten hours a day performing this activity (Wrangham, 2009). You are likely familiar with Charles Darwin, the nineteenth-century naturalist whose voyage of geological discovery and observation of flora and fauna led to his theory of natural selection, one of the fundamental theories (if not the fundamental theory) of the natural sciences. As it turns out, Darwin noted the differences in chewing time as well. Chewing takes time away from other activities, such as hunting or gathering. We have already talked about preparing food such as meat without cooking it. Cooking provides even easier access to foods through the softening of skins and peels or the weakening of connective tissue. Once chewed, cooked food is easier to digest, also requiring fewer calories for the digestion process. We eat cooked food more quickly and digest it more efficiently. Other than the ease and time savings of eating cooked food, it also can be greater in nutritional content. For example, cooking increases the glycemic content of starchy vegetables, providing more energy to the consuming human (Wrangham, 2009). In some cases, cooked food takes longer to spoil. The preservative power of cooking thus enabled our ancestors to travel (carrying food with them), to eat during food shortages, and to trade. Finally, we should also consider the evolutionary benefits of cooking. Specifically, humans must develop certain cognitive skills to carry it out. These include causal reasoning (cooking will make food that tastes good), planning, temporal order, and organization (Warneken & Rosati, 2015). As we will note later, other primates may have the ability to adapt some cognitive

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processes to undertake components of cooking but whether they understand the cooking process remains unclear (Beran et al., 2016). How Cooking Shaped Humans There is an emerging perspective regarding the significant impact of cooking on human evolution, both physiological changes and cultural changes. One of the most well-known writers on the subject is Richard Wrangham; I recommend reading his book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (2009) if you are interested in the topic. He notes a variety of evidence that attests to the potential impact of the human adoption of cooking. For example, the reduced need for long-term chewing and jaw muscle strength may have contributed to the reduction of jaw size among humans compared with other primates. Not only are our jaws weaker and smaller than our ape cousins’, but our stomachs and digestive track are also relatively smaller. This change in physiology as humans evolved may be attributable to the reduced need for biting and chewing raw plants and raw meat afforded by cooking. Our brains use a disproportionally greater amount of energy compared to other parts of our body; yes, it is true that you must feed your head. Given that human brains are of greater relative size and density than other primates, some have suggested that the transition to cooked food and the consequent increase in nutrition and ease of consumption may have been responsible for the change. Cooking may have facilitated the expansion of our cerebral cortex—the area behind our forehead that we use for active thinking (Warneken & Rosati, 2015). This expansion makes the transition from Australopithecus to Homo erectus (our direct ancestors). Did we really need to cook before thinking? So far we have noted the substantial positive effects of cooking on humans, perhaps a fundamental building block of society. First of all, someone had to watch the fire and the process: you can’t hunt and gather while you are cooking. Role specialization likely evolved as a result. The rise of cooking also led to a further gender-based specialization in human activities. Owing to their critical role in to breastfeeding and care for younger children, women were more likely than men to gather food in human settlements. As cooking technologies developed, those were more likely to be taken up by women as well. Hunting and interpersonal relations were more likely to be assumed by males (Wrangham, 2009). Reflecting this specialization, a study in 1973 (Murdock & Provost, 1973) found that virtually all human societies had relegated women to the primary cooking role. Ever go camping? When neighboring campers cook, you can’t miss it: the fire, the smoke, and the wonderful smells emanating from the hearth. Cooking food alerts others to the presence of raw food and—once

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heated—cooked food. This situation creates opportunities for food theft and aggression (Warneken & Rosati, 2015). For cooking to evolve, a human’s kin and non-kin had to develop the skills required to sit around a fire and not steal each other’s food. Clustering around the campfire brought people into closer proximity, requiring them also to tolerate one another and to share food (Wrangham, 2009). Those who could share successfully likely had advantages in terms of individual as well as cultural evolution. Is food sharing a uniquely human activity? Food sharing refers to the physical transfer of food from one person to another. Food sharing is actually not restricted to humans. There is evidence of primates sharing their food with offspring and related kin. Sharing with non-kin adults is less common among primates but does occur (Jaeggi & Van Schaik, 2011). As cooked food became a daily occurrence, human food sharing likely emerged and became a universal feature of human societies. Wrangham speculates that food sharing may have even emerged prior to cooking, when meat was cut and other raw foods were mechanically (non-heat) prepared for consumption (perhaps with rocks or tools). Assisting one another to gather food or to prepare food for consumption may be, to some degree, responsible for the human norm of reciprocity, as those who helped may have been rewarded by a share around the fire. Having a surplus of cooked food also may have influenced the development of redistribution practices, further facilitating social organization (Fischler, 2011). For the reasons noted above, cooking is considered to have impacted human evolution and cooked food has become a dietary component of all human societies (Warneken & Rosati, 2015). In his influential book The Meaning of Cooking (2010), sociologist Jean-Claude Kaufmann notes that some of the first alliances between human groups may have been facilitated by sharing food. As Michael Symons has written, although the impact on the world of each cook’s daily routine is “infinitesimal, the results have multiplied into civilization” (2004, p. x). COOKING IS UBIQUITOUS You didn’t need to read this book to know that eating is a primary biological function, essential for our survival. As we have seen, cooking has indelibly impacted human evolution. Satisfaction of our nutrition needs is inextricably tied to the activity of cooking. Every person on the planet must pose the same question and answer it several times a day: What do I eat? This universal question is answered by the cook every day. (Infants and younger children are not so articulate, but they do know when they are hungry.) Culture shapes

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the cook’s answer: every society has normative or prescriptive methods by which ingredients are to be cleaned, prepared, and cooked (Rappoport, 2003). Cooking is also one of our most frequently enacted social behaviors, transcending its nourishment function to meet interpersonal needs (Stearns, 2019). As Leon Rappoport (2003) notes, “there is hardly any significant social activity or emotional state to which food is irrelevant and there are many, such as parent-child relationships, to which it is central” (p. 21). On a daily basis, humans cook to nourish other humans and maintain social relations. We do this so many times in the course of a year (or a lifetime) that it becomes a learned habit. As a result of the tens of thousands of times we prepare food for ourselves and others, the behavior tends to be relegated to the background. This is one of the reasons that the social disciplines of psychology and sociology have overlooked cooking as an area of focus as it was so repetitive, so ubiquitous, so taken for granted (Rappoport, 2003; Symons, 2004). It is for this reason that I consider cooking so deserving of a psychological focus. The activity of cooking touches each of our lives every day and, as noted earlier, it is responsible for humans becoming human. Reflecting the essential nature of cooking, Michael Symons refers to cooks as the “world’s most important people” (2004, p. ix). COOKING IS SOCIAL: COMMENSALITY Did you know that you have engaged in commensality thousands of times? In fact, you probably will again this evening. Commensality is the social science term for the act of eating together. Eating together requires cooking, some form of preparation. Before we turn to the psychological aspects of cooking, which this book is about, we need to spend some time discussing the importance of commensality. Through theory and research, a broad range of social science disciplines— food studies, anthropology, sociology, psychology—have documented the essential role of commensality in the human experience. Commensality has been described as humanity’s primary social function (Fischler, 2011), the core of sociality (Beeman, 2014; Morrison, 1996), quintessentially human (Kniffin et al., 2015; Wrangham, 2009), a basic social act (Beeman, 2014), and having a central role in every culture (Beeman, 2014). By the way, the origins of the word companion are literally someone one shares bread with (Woolley & Fishbach, 2017). Across the planet, human sharing of food can take on myriad configurations. Commensality can range from eating from the same plate, as one does in certain cultures, to eating the same menu, or to consuming different menus,

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as one might do in a restaurant (Giacoman, 2016). From an etymological perspective, commensality literally means sharing the table (Fischler, 2011), but the act is by no means restricted to tables. Some cultures don’t have tables; circular arrangements of eaters appear to be most commonly found in these table-free societies (Wrangham, 2009). Of course, the table carries considerable weight in Western cultures. We speak of the negotiation table, the children’s table, and having a chair at the table. The archetypal eating group is the nuclear family (Mestdag & Glorieux, 2009). Family commensality likely emerged first. However, ethnographic research suggests that hunter-gatherer societies do share food beyond the immediate family circle according to rather complex rules (Fischler, 2011). Commensality extends to community members in the form of religious rituals, holiday observances, and other celebrations. In agrarian and pre-modern societies, feasts often were held as incentive for participating in the harvest (Spence et al., 2019). In contemporary societies, we frequently eat with our coworkers, and the table in the workplace cafeteria or breakroom becomes an important social space. For example, in Kevin Kniffin and colleagues’ (2015) study of firehouses in a large American city, the dining room served became the main gathering place for commensality, communications, and cohesion building. In fact, his study revealed that firehouses with greater levels of commensality performed better as firefighting units. We’ve been speaking of commensality in mostly positive ways, but we also need to very much acknowledge its potentially negative nature. As we will see, the experience of eating with family, friends, or coworkers is shaped by whether we like them, the social hierarchies enacted around the table, and whether there is active harassment, bullying, or tyrannical parenting. Commensality isn’t always voluntary. Collective, institutional, and coercive commensality occurs among children in schools and daycares, with prisoners in correctional facilities, and even in the enforced collective commensality enacted in China during the Cultural Revolution. In the case of the latter, eating with the nuclear family was replaced by forced assembly for meals in attempts to reduce the power of the family (Jönsson et al., 2021). Commensality as Culture The act of commensality reflects the culture in which it is enacted. All cultures have rules and customs regarding commensality, sharing of food, and table manners (Fischler, 2011). Cognitive schemas and routines for eating at a table (or around a fire) with others are akin to the psychological concept of scripts by Robert Abelson (Schank & Abelson, 1977). They are typically acquired through informal learning and invoked on a daily basis. Think about your script for eating with coworkers, with fellow students, or with your family on

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special occasions. How do they differ? What happens when you violate them or they are violated by others? For instance, what do you do first when you sit down at the table? Do you eat dessert first? Such voluntary self-regulation of our behavior in social settings is also referred to as normative. We don’t have to be told to talk softly at a wedding, to smile at a birthday party, or to applaud at the end of a performance; these norms are strongly ingrained in our understanding of those situations. Likewise, societies have norms regarding what is food, its preparation, possible combinations, and sequences of service (Holm et al., 2016). Observe individuals eating together, and you will have a good sense of the cultural location of the meal (Woolley & Fishbach, 2019). (Note that the modern and postmodern era have witnessed a great convergence of cultural activities, with many Western practices superseding others.) The act of commensality can take on substantial symbolic meaning. Think of breaking bread, da Vinci’s The Last Supper, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, or Clemenza teaching Michael how to make pasta in The Godfather (Parker, 2008). Its symbolic meaning is multilevel. As sociologist Georg Simmel has noted, the act of consuming a bite of food is completely selfish: no one else gets to eat that (Symons, 1994). Think about the person who takes the last doughnut or the look on your dog’s face when you eat the last piece of steak. Sharing food around the table effectively offsets this primary biological act of selfishness and converts it into an act of social connection and inclusion. Although you can’t eat the doughnut that I just ate (exclusive), we share the experience at the table of eating together and there is another doughnut available for you (inclusive). No wonder that commensality can be a potent ritual, so much so that in some cultures sharing food is regarded as an act of engagement or even actual marriage (Wrangham, 2009). Commensality as a Psychosocial Process Why is commensality generally such a positive experience around the world? Why does eating together hold the potential for building cohesion and shared commonalities? A number of psychological and social processes have been suggested. Positive Affect The act of commensality satisfies our most basic needs. Susan Fiske has argued that the need for belonging, for affiliation, is the primary human motivator (Fiske, 2004). Human survival has been dependent on group cooperation and participation, thus many also make evolutionary arguments for this need. Eating together satisfies this motivation by a sense of inclusivity to eaters. A few years ago, Claude Fischler and colleagues used a daily

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reconstruction method developed by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman (Kahneman et al., 2004) to compare individual affect when sharing a meal to that experienced when eating alone. Using a measurement known as net affect (positive emotions minus negative emotions), the research revealed that commensality episodes were rated significantly higher in net positive affect than those when eating alone (Fischler, 2011). One source of positive affect during commensality is the food itself. Research by Erica Boothby and colleagues at New York University (2014) suggests that many types of affective experiences are “amplified” with the presence of another person: good-tasting food is perceived as more pleasant and bad-tasting food as more unpleasant in the presence of another person. Even the latter situation—bad-tasting food—may lead to positive affect as eaters commiserate. Food Similarity and Liking Psychologist Paul Rozin, a preeminent taste and consumption expert, argues that by taking food into our bodies we become, in a sense, what we eat (Rozin, 1999). Consequently, eaters who consume the same food around the table become more similar (Giacoman, 2016). Eating the same menu around the table can intensify the positive effects of commensality (Miller et al., 1998). The effect of perceived similarity on closeness is consistent with a robust and longstanding body of research. For instance, we like someone more if they mimic our nonverbal behavior (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999), share our traits (Tidwell et al., 2013), or express common attitudes and values (Montoya et al., 2008). In a series of experiments, University of Chicago consumer psychologist Kaitlyn Woolley (Woolley & Fishbach, 2017) demonstrated how eating the same candy (e.g., Butterfinger) increased closeness and trust between strangers compared to eating different candies (e.g., Butterfinger and Peppermint Patties). Commensality can be so effective in increasing closeness that eating together can lead to jealousy. In a series of experiments, Kniffin and Wansink (2012) asked subjects to imagine how jealous they would be if their romantic partner engaged in a number of activities with another opposite-sex partner (the study was limited to opposite-sex couples). Lunch, late-afternoon coffee, and dinner evoked more jealousy than did email or phone conversations. Want to make someone jealous? Take another person out for dinner. Shared food also creates the potential for future interactions. Imagine you traveled to another city for a conference. After the conference adjourns for the day, you join a group of acquaintances and strangers (but friendly) and decide to go to a restaurant down the street for dinner. Someone orders a really spicy dish for the table so that everyone can try it. The next day, you see some of

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your co-eaters from the night before. You might remark on the spicy food incident, reinforcing the shared connection. Identity Commensality can change the way we think about ourselves as new identities may arise from sharing the table once during a special meal or repeatedly for breakfast, lunch, or dinner (Giacoman, 2016; Scagliusi et al., 2016). Henri Tajfel and John Turner (Tajfel & Turner, 1986) have demonstrated the power of emergent group identities to change behavior. By randomly assigning research subjects to one of two groups, they documented how the subjects quickly acquire an identification with that impromptu group to the point at which subjects will discriminate in favor of their newly acquired group. At minimum, eating together instantly creates group boundaries: those around the table become an in group (diners) and those not at the table another (non-diners). But commensality is much more than Tajfel and Turner’s random groups; we also talk with each other, pass each other food, and share in conversation. Interpersonal Coordination Eating together also positively impacts diners through the coordinated activities of the table. There are the logistics of serving, plating, and passing food around the table, requiring interpersonal coordination and cooperation. Likewise, busing and washing dishes can involve coordinated efforts. Special gatherings, rituals, and religious meals may include singing around the table. Family commensality may involve games or storytelling. Sharing food from the same plate or bowl involves coordination and monitoring of other diners. Think about how you feel when you are sharing chips and salsa and one person eats more than their share of the salsa, leaving only chips! This subtle but ubiquitous form of social monitoring impacts the group of diners. For example, Woolley and Fishbach (2017) found in a series of studies that simply consuming chips and salsa from a shared plate and bowl created more closeness between stranger and greater coordination on a subsequent task than eating from separate plates and bowls. As the authors point out, there are many cultures in which the primary mode of serving food at meals is a shared plate; these coincidentally are cultures that also tend to be more collectivist (Woolley & Fishbach, 2019), a fascinating connection between culture and commensality.

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Conforming to Norms and Expectations When diners eat together, they either conform to existing norms regarding consumption or deviate from those norms. Conforming to shared norms provides yet another mechanism for establishing closeness between dinners and increasing cohesion among existing groups. The norms do not have to be high society manners; they can be whatever practices are typically observed and expected from diners (Giacoman, 2016). Creation and transmission of new norms around the table—to which diners adhere—also may facilitate the sense of group around the table (Scagliusi et al., 2016). Reinforcing Existing Social Roles Closely related to upholding norms around a table is the maintenance of power relations and hierarchies around the table. Who sits at the head of the table? Who says a blessing over the meal? Who talks or asks questions? Most of us are well acquainted with differing statuses among diners around the table (think about eating dinner as a child). Affirmation of hierarchy and dominance are not necessarily positive aspects of commensality (Spence et al., 2019; Vesnaver et al., 2016). For many adults, childhood commensality may recall tensions and negative memories of sitting around the table. Eating with Those One Dislikes Along these lines, commensality can clearly be a negative experience if one eats with people one dislikes. We often are highly motivated not to sit next to people we find unpleasant or that we actively dislike. If we are seated next to them, then the meal may become unbearable. Interviewing Canadian widows, Vesnaver and colleagues (2016) found that not all of them missed eating with their spouses. For those who had primarily negative relationships with their spouses, eating alone was preferred to their prior marital commensality. We may also recognize that commensality does more often than not bring people together. In that case, we may avoid sitting next to that person we do not like because we do not wish to become closer or to find commonalities with them (Giacoman, 2016). Commensality and Cooking Just as commensality has psychosocial implications for those involved in the activity, cooking does as well. Pilar Cortada’s book Cooking a Home (2015) contains stories and recipes from Syrian refugees living in camps in Jordan that articulates the essential role that cooking can play for those in an extremely disempowered and depersonalizing situation. Cooking in the

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refugee camp afforded the opportunity for the reformation of family and friendship ties at a distance from home. To quote Cortada, “Cooking your own food gives structure over your day, control over your life” (2015, p. 25). Sourcing food in the market is a social activity, preparing ingredients keeps the past alive, and the commensality provides community and conversation. PSYCHOLOGY, EATING, AND COOKING This book is designed to increase our understanding of the cook and the act of cooking through the application of psychological theories and research. We have already illuminated the importance of commensality to the human experience. Of equal importance is the behavior that enables that experience, cooking. There is quite a bit of psychological research and theory relevant to cooking, despite few texts in the discipline that focus on cooking or, for that matter, consumption. Leon Rappoport suggests a few reasons for this paucity of work (2003). First, other disciplines have traditionally dominated the topic, particularly anthropologists. For over a century, anthropologists have studied food production and consumption practices in both primitive and contemporary cultures. I should add that the last thirty years have witnessed a growing body of food and cooking research and theory in sociology. There is also the vibrant interdisciplinary area known as food studies. Work by anthropologists and sociologists includes the following volumes: The Meaning of Cooking (Kaufmann, 2010), Through the Kitchen Window (Avakian, 1997), Kitchens (Fine, 1996), Dinner Roles (Inness, 2001), Secrets from the Greek Kitchen (Sutton, 2014), Commensality (Kerner et al., 2015), Kitchen Secrets (Short, 2006), and Making Dinner (Rawlins & Livert, 2019). Research psychologists have explored issues related to food, but these are primarily limited to consumption and psychopathology (Rappoport, 2003). A considerable number of psychological studies have examined issues such as taste, smell, and topics in human perception. Another body of research focuses on food-related psychopathologies, including bulimia, anorexia, and addictive behavior. Finally, and perhaps most important, food is not perceived as a central problem in psychology (Rappoport, 2003). Food consumption and production are not necessarily considered central to well-being and thriving, perhaps due to their ubiquitous and protean nature. A growing area of concern regarding chronic effects of food insecurity on well-being and lifespan development can also inform how we think about cooking. Scholarly work on food within the discipline of psychology include Psychology of Food Choice (Shepard & Raats, 2006), Psychology of Food

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(Lyman, 1989), Psychology of Food and Eating (Smith, 2002), Psychology of Eating (Ogden, 2010), Psychology of Eating and Drinking (Logue, 2013), How We Eat (Rappoport, 2003), Hedonic Eating (Avena, 2015), and Why You Eat What You Eat (Herz, 2018). Many of these texts include content from a number of psychology subdisciplines (including sensory perceptual, cognitive, and personality) to provide scientific insight into the topic of food consumption. However, food consumption and food preparation (cooking) are very distinctive behaviors. Let me share some of my motivations for focusing primarily on cooking. Obviously, there would be little consumption without cooking. There are a few extant works that engage the immense body of psychological research to articulate the experiences of the cook and the behavior of cooking. What is needed is scholarship that organizes and summarizes the large and diverse body of research in psychology to better understand the billions of times each day that we prepare food and the cooks who engage in this global behavior. A PSYCHOLOGY OF COOKING The influences on how and what we cook are multilevel: they range from what’s in our head (e.g., thinking, memories, skills) to the macro influences on our cooking (e.g., geospatial, sociocultural). Every cooking decision we make is influenced to some degree by the physical, social, and cultural contexts in which they are embedded. For many, Urie Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological or general ecological model has provided a useful framework for understanding contextual influences on individual behavior. Bronfenbrenner’s model (1992) is best represented as a set of concentric circles starting with the innermost circle representing the person and intrapsychic influences, nested within macrosystems consisting of social settings, those nested within mesosystems, and those nested within larger macrosystems. Bronfenbrenner also includes time as a nesting factor. As a result of our research with home cooks, Roblyn Rawlins and I (2019) developed a somewhat different framework that describes five domains of influence on cooking choice, moving from the macro (cultural and societal level) to the intrapsychic (inside our head). I’ve drawn on both in developing the conceptual approach to the psychology of cooking. Cooking Behavior Cooking behavior can start with planning meals and obtaining ingredients (usually via a trip to the market). Cooking behavior includes preparation

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for cooking and then manipulation and heating of ingredients to produce the desired dish. Finally, we might include eating and clearing the table as cooking behavior. The cook’s thoughts, feelings, and physiological reactions during these activities are also subsumed in the circle. Cooking behavior is influenced by both the cook and the cooking situation. We should note that the cook and the situation also impact one another. The Cook Each cook has a sense of their own skills, cooking identity, and experience of cooking that can shape their cooking behavior. Individual differences in terms of personality traits, cognitive approaches, motivations for cooking, and emotional experiences likewise influence cooking. The Cooking Situation There are four influential aspects of the situation in which the cook carries out the meal. These include material influences, temporal influences, eaters, and motivations for the meal. Material influences on cooking decisions refer to both physical affordances and limitations as well as non-physical resources (i.e., financial). Cooking requires designated space and the kitchens in which we cook shape what we can cook within them. Through much of history, kitchens were built as areas detached from housing so that they could disperse heat and, if there was an uncontrolled fire, not burn down the homestead (Kneafsey et al., 2021). Victorian kitchens tended to be set off from dining, reflecting the gendered sphere of influence. In the twentieth century, kitchens became more connected to the dining area. This trend continues with contemporary open kitchen designs. Eating occurs in multiple areas within a domicile, but the kitchen does not stray. In professional kitchens, a specific location and function (what you cook at a specific workstation) are strongly connected (Mosko & Delach, 2020). Cooking choices are also constrained by what equipment is available and accessible. You can’t deep fry in a microwave, and toasters are not good for poaching fish. The reliability of (as well as our facility to operate) equipment further demarcates our cooking options. The lack of financial resources can also impose material limitations on cooking choices. How much we can spend on food shapes what we can buy, which has implications for quantity, nutritional value, and taste. Where we can afford to live impacts our accessibility to food markets. As a material constraint, financial scarcity may also impact our motivations when we make cooking choices: when we are working with limited funds, we may be less

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likely to take chances with foods that might be rejected by those we cook for, as we feel we cannot afford to waste food. Temporal influences on cooking choice include time scarcity, synchrony, and the calendar. A lack of time for planning results in more rushed cooking decisions (McIntosh et al., 2010; Rawlins & Livert, 2019), requiring cooks to utilize what is in the kitchen or to source (stop at the store) just prior to cooking. For working parents, individuals with caregiving commitments, or multiple commitments outside the home, a lack of time is an important driver of choice. Just as influential to cooking decisions as time shortages is a lack of temporal synchrony among eaters. In other words, not everyone is able to eat a meal at the same time. Many cooks face the challenge of producing a meal that will be consumed two or more different times by different eaters in the households. This goal certainly constrains what and how cooks prepare when children’s schedules conflict within the household (Rawlins & Livert, 2019). For those living in households experiencing food insecurity, the day of the month can substantially impact choice. At the beginning of the month, households may utilize food support such as SNAP for purchases at the grocery store. Toward the end of the month, these resources are depleted, and individuals may turn to food banks and similar sources of food (Puddephatt et al., 2020). Eaters strongly influence what is cooked. For example, the number of eaters impacts the amount of a dish to produce. Does one double a recipe or prepare an additional component? The cook may consider each eater’s dietary restrictions due to health, religious, or ethical beliefs. The more eaters, the more palates a cook may have to consider. As anyone with children will attest, each eater also brings along their own preferences regarding what they will eat and not eat; children’ and youth’s preferences and dislikes may also change over time (she liked avocados at age three, why not at age nine?). Such changes in preferences are unpredictable and a bit frustrating to the cook. For many domestic cooks, cooking decisions require keeping track of which eater’s preferences were last indulged (Rawlins & Livert, 2019). For example, one child may prefer hot dogs while her brother prefers macaroni and cheese; which did the cook serve most recently? Goals for the specific meal are critical. These may include simply getting everyone fed, providing a healthy meal (or a comforting meal), or pleasing guests at a dinner party. A cook’s goals may extend to making enough food for leftovers or for when the cook is away, exposing eaters to new tastes or ingredients, or celebrating a special occasion or holiday.

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Proximate Social Influences The social composition of the household is a major influence on cooking (McCabe & Malefyt, 2015). Are you cooking for yourself only or your entire family? Are guests staying with you? Are children in the household or older people (their presence at the table requires the cook to accommodate their preferences and dietary limitations)? Are there others in the household who can share cooking responsibilities? Geospatial Influences Geospatial influences refer to the physical spaces in which we live. These influences include the proximity to grocery stores, markets, and farms. Neighborhoods that are more economically affluent typically have a greater variety of sources for cooking ingredients. Where we live impacts how difficult it is to shop if we rely on public transportation. The proximity of restaurants and other eateries also impacts the cook’s decisions regarding cooking for their household. Sociocultural Influences Sociocultural influences refer to the societies in which we live and the cultural practices within them. Food practices are a distinctive quality of cultures, which vary in terms of ingredients, dietary restrictions, rituals, and celebrations. For people who change sociocultural milieus—who move to a new region or nation—the experience of adapting to new food practices can be challenging and isolating. Our culture also shapes who we are—not just the content of our identity (e.g., Bengali or New Orleanian) but the nature of our identity as well. For example, psychologists have found that individualist and collectivist cultures vary in how people think about themselves and their connection to others (Hofstede, 2001; Triandis, 1989). DOMESTIC AND PROFESSIONAL COOKS Who made breakfast this morning? Who wears that apron hanging over there? Who is responsible for figuring out what we are going to eat tonight? Who makes the grocery list? Who cooks for Thanksgiving or the Fourth of July? Who cooks the burgers on the grill? Who makes cookies? The answer to all of these questions is, of course, the domestic cook. If you cook for yourself or others in residences, you are a domestic cook. In most households,

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one individual serves as the primary domestic cook, typically a woman (Szabo, 2014). In some households, another individual shares responsibility for cooking, or at least cooks occasionally. There are also cooking assistants (often children serve in this role). Typically, though, domestic cooking is solo. The domestic cook may be responsible for all activities beginning with planning the week’s grocery shopping and ending with cleaning the dirty dishes. Distractions while cooking may include children, work demands, taking care of adults, doing laundry, and dealing with pets. Activities such as kneading dough, deep frying, and whisking are at the mercy of the household. The domestic cook is in charge of the menu and assumes the burden to satisfy the flavor, diet, and other likes and dislikes of household eaters (Rawlins & Livert, 2019). The world of the domestic cook is part of the invisible labor of the household. The labor of planning, coordinating, juggling, and strategizing how to feed a family, in addition to physical labor of pushing a cart down an aisle or fixing a salad or grilling a burger, may often not be acknowledged by others in the household or considered equivalent to work for pay (DeVault, 1991). A professional cook is anyone who is paid to cook, regardless of their training or current position. Most professional cooks have had some amount of training. A significant group work their way up through the ranks of various kitchens, from dishwasher or prep cook to sous chef (Fine, 1996). Other cooks receive professional training, whether from culinary training institutions, community colleges, or the military. There are no set hours (like a restaurant) in the domestic household. The cook must accommodate the schedules of all of the eaters in the household, not to mention their own schedule if they work. If eaters are not there when the food is ready, the domestic cooks must take steps to be sure it is available later. In contrast to the domestic kitchen, where the live-in cook may prepare food at odd hours, the professional kitchen has a specific period of time when the window is “open,” when orders are received from customers and food prepared and passed to the front of the house for service. During service, domestic cooks must provide multiple dishes simultaneously, often with each requiring different prep times and levels of complexity (Short, 2006). Individual professional cooks tend to focus on their stations, typically engaging in less of a range of tasks compared with the domestic worker, who must clean dishes, store leftovers, and put their “customers” to bed rather than working the grill station. The professional cook does not typically know her customers or actively interact with them, whereas the domestic cook for the most part lives with his eaters. Don’t like your food? At a restaurant, you might complain to the wait staff, and they may convey your message to the cook. Have a complaint

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for the domestic cook (e.g., mom, dad, grandmother, older brother), and it becomes a bit more complicated! TOPICS EXPLORED IN THIS BOOK A challenge with a psychological examination of cooking arises from the nature of scientific psychology. Rather than be guided by overarching laws and macro-level theories (rather like one big mountain), the body of work in psychology is more like a range of small mountains and valleys, connected in some ways but each with slightly different climates and biospheres. If you have taken an “introduction to psychology” course, then you might recognize some of these subdisciplines in psychology: sensation and perception, developmental or life span psychology, cognition and memory, affect and motivation, learning, social psychology, neuropsychology, and personality, to name a few. Varying across these subdisciplines are empirical approaches. Although experimental methodologies still predominate, psychological researchers employ a considerable variety of methods to answer questions about human thought, feelings, and behavior. In addition to experiments, psychological research employs methods such as correlational studies and surveys, formal and informal interviews, participant observation, repeated designs (such as longitudinal and panel surveys), secondary data analysis and research synthesis, physiological data collection, non-participant observation, and focus groups. Although your introduction to psychology text may have presented the subdisciplines and methodologies in a straightforward fashion, there is considerable overlap and divergence across them. Psychological science provides us with multiple perspectives that provide varying explanations and interpretations of the same behavior. There are many areas in which psychology has been robustly applied to the extent that new subdisciplines have emerged, including industrial/organizational psychology, sports psychology, political psychology, investment psychology, health psychology, psychology of criminal justice, and media psychology. And now we have the psychology of cooks and cooking. This book examines seven major psychological topics that are highly relevant to cooks and cooking, whether domestic cooks or professional cooks. • Learning about cooking is a social act. Chapter 2 focuses on how we learn to cook. Forms of learning are reviewed as well as learning processes specific to the domestic and professional kitchen. • Cooking is temporally embedded. Chapter 3 focuses on temporal issues in the kitchen. Time is critical in both domestic and professional

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•

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kitchens, and this chapter examines a range of temporal issues in psychology that impact our experiences in the kitchen. Cooking plays a role in identity. It reinforces who we are. Chapter 4 focuses on how we think about ourselves as cooks. Gender identities, ethnic identities, and other aspects of the self of cooks are reviewed. Cooking reflects how we think. Chapter 5 examines how we think about cooking, make decisions, and plan our meals. Cognitive biases and creativity are also addressed. Cooking is an emotional act. Chapter 6 examines our emotions in the kitchen, including food-induced affect and cooking-induced affect. The chapter also examines our motivations in cooking as well as stress in the kitchen. Cooking reflects the personality of the cook. Chapter 7 examines the personality of cooks. Traits, mindsets, and other individual differences between cooks, including sensation and perception are covered. Chef leader personalities are also discussed. Cooking skills and confidence shape our kitchen behavior. Chapter 8 focuses on the result of that learning and explores the role of confidence and self-efficacy in domestic and professional kitchens. Cooking skills and concerns about deskilling in the kitchen are also raised.

I have very much enjoyed writing this text, and I do hope that it connects the dots regarding how much a psychological framework can tell us about the act of cooking. For those readers familiar with psychology, ideally you will gain an appreciation for how the discipline’s concepts and research maps quite nicely onto the act of cooking. For readers familiar with culinary studies, perhaps you will gain a deeper understanding of the cooking process as well as exposure to psychological theory and research. Enjoy!

Chapter 2

Learning to Cook

In this chapter, we examine how people learn to cook. Any culture in which people prepare their food for consumption inevitably requires the transmission of skills from one generation to the next. Theorists and researchers in psychology have sought for more than a century to understand how people (and other organisms) acquire knowledge and new behavior. Remember Pavlov’s salivating dogs? His work laid the foundation for understanding how we “learn” responses when exposed to particular stimuli. Recounting the entirety of psychological theory and research about learning would require quite a few pages with time devoted to the behaviorist approaches to learning, motivation, and cognition. We might include Thorndike’s law of effect, Watson’s work with conditioned responses, Skinner and his operant conditioning of pigeons, Piaget and children filling vessels with water, or Gagne’s types of learning. We won’t do that; instead, we are going to take a somewhat more holistic approach. Just how do psychologists think about learning? The largest area of investigation concerns the cognitive process of learning: acquiring new knowledge, experience, or a skill to achieve various goals in the future. Learning is also processual in nature: researchers examine how individuals learn new behaviors and actions that can likewise be used to achieve goals. Finally, learning researchers have examined social aspects of learning. We are often engaged in learning in a group and, along with others, employ what we have learned to interpret events, intervene, and create. To fully understand how people learn to cook, we should think about all these processes. WHERE AND WHAT WE LEARN There are two major settings in which people learn to cook: around the domestic hearth (figuratively speaking) and in commercial settings (e.g., restaurants, hotels). A third, rarer setting is the teaching kitchen, which shares 21

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many similarities to the commercial kitchen. These settings are distinguished by mode of instruction, roles within the setting, motivations of the learner and teacher, goals of learning, and instructional strategies. Learning to cook primarily involves preparation of food to be consumed, whether one is learning by grandmother’s side to cook Thanksgiving dinner or prepping vegetables in a commercial setting. Some teaching kitchens produce food that is consumed; others do not, depending on the course being taught. What do we learn when we learn to cook? Most humans learn at least a few cooking behaviors, with variations shaped by culture and our community. Many individuals consider cooking one of the most important skills in life to learn (Caraher et al., 1999; Lavelle et al., 2016b). Felix Warneken and Alexandra Rosati (2015) have identified the range of cognitive skills that we apply to cooking. For one, we must understand cause and effect: that applying heat to raw ingredients results in cooked food. We also must understand the future: we plan meals and know that the raw ingredients we have now can become prepared dishes later. Cooking requires us to learn behavior; it is characterized by many skilled actions, repeated from one cooking session to the next as well as from day to day (Benny, 2012; Wolfson et al., 2017). Fine motor control and coordinated muscle movements are essential, ranging from pushing a button on a microwave to filleting a salmon. Cooking also involves considerable perceptual learning. Think about poaching a chicken breast. Cues regarding when it is ready to serve (or over-ready to serve) are available to us through sight (e.g., color, juices), feel (e.g., how much the breast springs back when pressed), smell, taste (go ahead have a taste), and sound. We develop a robust sense of our cooking progress from all these cues acquired through hours and hours of cooking and observing others cooking. Aside from the skills required to prepare meals, the cook may become skilled in obtaining ingredients, organizing, planning, and decision-making (Rawlins & Livert, 2019; Trubek et al., 2017). Many of these skills vary across the contexts in which we cook (Wolfson et al., 2017): compare the procurement, storage, and monitoring required for a domestic cook who fixes eggs for the household on weekends with a professional cook who coordinates omelet production on weekends for a large hotel. And we should not forget how much this has radically changed over the past 150 years: cooking then required preparation of virtually all raw ingredients, in contrast to today, when there are tens of thousands of ingredients and products that require little or no preparation (Engler-Stringer, 2010).

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Domestic Kitchens: Learning around the Hearth We can confidently declare that learning to cook around the household hearth is the oldest and most prevalent educational context for cooking. How about you? Did you learn any cooking skills from a parent or grandparent while you were a child? Did you learn about cooking when you were an adult from a roommate, romantic partner, spouse, or child? Do you remember food being prepared in your household by parents or other adults? Although the techniques and technology have radically changed over the hundreds of thousands of years that humans have been cooking, the domestic kitchen remains the dominant setting for learning how to do so. Today, most residences around the world have some space designated for food preparation. In the United Kingdom, most adults who currently cook learned the skills at home, primarily from their mothers (Caraher et al., 1999). A survey of adults in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland reported that they learned to cook in the domestic kitchen; over half learned from mother and most of those individuals reported learning from no one else (Lavelle et al., 2016b). US adults are likewise most likely to learn in the domestic kitchen either from a parent while a child or in their own kitchen when adults (Wolfson et al., 2017). The predominance of the domestic kitchen as the site for learning how to cook continues into the twenty-first century (Benny, 2012). Learning to Cook as a Child The expectation of learning to cook by mother’s side is ubiquitous (Oleschuk, 2019). When most of our cooking skills are acquired as an adult, we still wax nostalgic about recipes or techniques that we learned from mother or grandmother (Wolfson et al., 2017). There is a strong cultural expectation that the mother (or grandmother) will teach both girl and boy children how to cook. In fact, 90 percent of US adults felt that parents should be responsible for cooking instruction (Wolfson et al., 2017). Nearly half of Hong Kong parents believe that mothers should do so (Lai-Yeung, 2015). Teaching how to cook is part of the feeding work that women are considered responsible for, which also includes planning, sourcing, and preparing meals (DeVault, 1991; Oleschuk, 2019). Merin Oleschuk (2019) notes that the idealized schema of learning to cook by our mother’s side tends to reinforce inequality in household activities, emphasizing and reproducing traditional domestic roles of women. However, many women are unable to fulfill the role of cooking teacher in the kitchen due to time constraints, perceived effectiveness, dread, or a lack of motivation (Rawlins & Livert, 2019). In Oleschuk’s interviews with Toronto family cooks, participants described a desire to teach their children but were unable

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to do so, feeling guilt and regret as a result (2019). Given that women are typically the primary cooks in households across most cultures, the role of teaching children and others in the household to cook is likewise primarily carried out by women in the domestic kitchen (DeVault, 1991). Even when both parents are food enthusiasts, the role of instruction (and daily production) often still defaults to mother (Cairns & Johnson, 2015; Fakazis, 2017; Rawlins & Livert, 2019). We must acknowledge the persistent gender inequality regarding the expectation that mothers will carry out the role of primary domestic cooking instructor. We should also note that there are some very clear benefits to having someone in the household (e.g., dad, grandmother, older sibling) fulfilling the domestic chef instructor role. Learning to cook as a child or teenager in a domestic setting provides a primary route for intergenerational transmission of family culinary traditions, including those associated with ethnicities of origin (Benny, 2012; Sutton, 2001) or strong traditions that aren’t necessarily connected to familial identity of origin (Rawlins & Livert, 2019). Annie Hauck-Lawson (1998) has termed this our food  voice: an individual’s set of food preferences, history, and traditions that reflects what we learned at our childhood table. We should also note the importance of food preparation to religious observances and daily practice. Transmission of food preparation skills can often take on a spiritual meaning. Several of the domestic cooks we interviewed (Rawlins & Livert, 2019) referred to “no name” recipes learned as part of their family tradition but that really did not fit any named cuisine. We found that family traditions are not necessarily from scratch either. One of our cooks considered canned Pillsbury Crescent Rolls (not from scratch) a valued component of what he remembered from childhood. Lavelle and colleagues’ study of Irish households in the Republic and the North indicated that those who learned to cook as a child or teen spend more time when cooking and reported less wasted food as adults (Lavelle et al., 2016b). Compared to those who did not learn to cook until adulthood, they found that child learners were less likely to order “takeaway.” Childhood participation in cooking activities at home can provide a positive skill-building experience, strengthen an ethnic identity (as noted above), and facilitate social skills (Utter et al., 2016). After all, cooking is a social behavior: when children and adolescents learn how to cook, they also learn about the social setting in which the meal is embedded. A cook’s knowledge includes temporal challenges, varying taste preferences, and the enduring social practices of a household. Children and youth learning to cook in the domestic kitchen represents informal learning, distinctive from formal learning (e.g., in a typical classroom for a credential) or non-formal learning (e.g., at a community center) (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Misra, 2021). Informal learning is also known as

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situational learning or embodied knowledge (Lave & Wenger, 1991). The informal learning context is practice based: one doesn’t abstractly learn about how to cook, rather one practices cooking. For a novice cook, the learning context can be likened to an apprenticeship in which there is a learner and an experienced teacher (e.g., mother, other relative) who guides them. Mothers (or other domestic cook instructors) often describe the activity to their young learners as “helping mother” in the kitchen rather than learning about cooking (Oleschuk, 2019; Rawlins & Livert, 2019). The learner moves from primarily assisting the cook to eventually taking on cooking responsibilities; Sutton (2014) has termed this process an “embodied apprenticeship.” In the kitchen, learners develop physical and sensory skills that can be used for future practice. The knowledge is absorbed in a casual context, not necessarily interpreted as learning by the learner. Like Dewey’s approach to education, these experiences are non-reflective and typically habitual (Janhonen et al., 2018). Short (2006) refers to the tacit knowledge of cooking, including perceptual skills, conceptual skills, and emotional skills that are acquired unintentionally. Central to this form of apprenticeship is repetition, as the learner internalizes knowledge and skills through repeated preparations of similar dishes and ingredients (Benny, 2012). One of Benny’s participants likened learning from her mother to osmosis: “I didn’t realize I knew how to make it. But then remembered what mom did” (p. 10). This instructional dyad in the domestic kitchen provides a powerful illustration of the social nature of learning described by Lev Vygotsky (Gredler, 2008). At the risk of oversimplifying, one key component of Vygotsky’s theoretical approach was the recognition of the critical role of language and social relations in learning. Children master symbols, reasoning, and other operations through constant interactions with an adult, in which the child acts on the environment and the adult assists and guides. We credit Vygotsky with the term zone of proximal development, referring to capabilities that the learner can demonstrate in the presence and assistance of an instructor (Gredler, 2008). Another term connected with Vygotsky’s approach is scaffolding, which refers to situations in which the learner applies new knowledge to a situation or problem initially beyond their capability. The learner is able to solve the problem with a bit of a stretch and a guide (e.g., parent, instructor) present (Gredler & Shields, 2008); social interaction is an essential component of the scaffolding process. Vygotsky’s approach resonates with learning in the domestic kitchen and, to some degree, the commercial kitchen. As noted elsewhere in this book, cooking is essentially a social behavior, and learning to cook is as well. Teaching children and youth to cook is not a one-way street, as many of the cooks we interviewed described how they began learning recipes and techniques over time from their youthful assistants (Rawlins & Livert, 2019).

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There are several learning strategies employed in the domestic kitchen. Clearly one primary strategy is experiential: children and youth learn to cook through doing, through practice. A second primary learning strategy is observation. We watch those activities that we are not skilled enough to carry out (or are just a bit daunting). We should note that observational learning in cooking tends to be multi-sensual. We watch, we smell, we feel the ingredients and heat, we listen to the cooking process and what ingredients sound like when we manipulate them. Finally, we taste. There is the immediate gratification of tasting something wonderful that you helped cook. These lessons are repeated on a daily basis in some households or infrequently in others. They last from a few minutes to all day long. A participant in a study of domestic cooks (Benny, 2012) fondly recalled her mother’s gnocchi-making sessions, which would take an entire day. The essential relationship between frequency of cooking at home and domestic cooking instruction has led many to worry about the perceived decline in home cooking. Over the past twenty-five years, a number of surveys, studies, and editorials have noted a decline in the amount of time individuals report that they devote to cooking at home (Metcalfe & Leonard, 2018). These findings are often taken as evidence that domestic cooking skills are declining and that current cooks are being “deskilled.” The implications for future cooks? If people are cooking at home less, the opportunities to teach children how to cook are also declining (Beasley et al., 2004; Caraher et al., 1999; Utter et al., 2016; Wolfson et al., 2017). Will no one be able to cook at home by the end of the century? This decline has been particularly noted among households with relatively lower SES (Begly, 2016). Indeed, many challenges to cooking have been identified in research, including a lack of time due to work obligations, children’s activities, and caretaking of children and adults (Metcalfe & Leonard, 2018; Rawlins & Livert, 2019). Theresa Lai-Yeung (2015) reported that Hong Kong parents rarely cook with their children, due to the demands of homework as well as limited space and safety concerns. Don’t get too upset over the total loss of generationally transmitted cooking skills. It is worth considering an argument made by Phil Lyon and colleagues (2003) that there was never really a “golden age” of cooking skills in which domestic cooks (primarily women) consistently prepared a daily menu of meals for their family. Researching UK domestic life during the 1920s and 1930s, they have found the possession of broad cooking skills did not necessarily extend to the working class. The researchers also found that many of the cooking skills required by domestic cooks have changed. For example, cooks in the United Kingdom during the period from the Depression through the postwar years had to develop inventive strategies for dealing with systemic shortages in raw and processed ingredients such as sugar, eggs, and

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other staples. The effectiveness of long-term food storage at the time was also a much more significant challenge; the capability and flexibility of contemporary food heating appliances were likewise radically different. More recently, the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in roughly two years of interrupted supply chains along with extensive social isolation at home. To what degree did these factors provide the time and/or necessity for acquiring great cooking skills and coping strategies? Given the degree to which domestic cooking is situated in specific social, financial, technological, and resource-available settings that are constantly in flux, pronouncements regarding the decline of home cooking may be unwarranted. Learning to Cook as an Adult Regardless of cooking experiences as a child, on reaching adulthood, we face the responsibility for feeding ourselves. For example, while two-thirds of domestic cooks in Wolfson’s Baltimore study (Wolfson et al., 2016) learned to cook from their mothers, most of these individuals reported additional modes of learning in the kitchen, such as learning from friends or partners as well as self-instruction. Moving away from home, young adults can take two primary paths (Beasley et al., 2004): moving into dormitories and other provisional types of housing that may have limited access to common kitchens, or starting a new household or family. The opportunity for acquiring cooking skills varies accordingly. Having one’s own kitchen may require self-instruction to acquire skills to meet the cooking demands of the household, be the household one person or many. Alternatively, a romantic partner or friends and co-workers may be important instructors. One woman in our study learned how to make Italian food from her German American mother-in-law, who was raised in an Italian neighborhood in New York (Rawlins & Livert, 2019). Although young adults who enter provisional living and cooking arrangements may have limited access to kitchens, there may be considerable opportunities for cooking with friends and acquaintances and expanding one’s cooking breadth of skills. Even if we live in a college dormitory for a few years, there are often kitchens available that can provide opportunities for cooking with new friends, potentially taking part in the preparation of different cuisines and traditions. Learning about cooking as an adult brings an opportunity to focus on particular skills or cuisines. Widening our skills beyond those learned from our parents or other family members can play a critical role in establishing our adult identities (Benny, 2012; Warde, 1999). For a young adult raised in a household where meat was regularly served, transition to a vegetarian diet requires the acquisition of new knowledge and skills, further enriching that identity. For a teenager at home who becomes a vegetarian, the domestic cook

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or even the entire family may acquire similar knowledge and skills for cooking vegetarian meals, which may also enhance their eating identities. We may specialize in the cuisines of our grandparents. Alternatively, we may learn completely novel cuisines. As noted in chapter 4, the practice of new cooking skills informs our personal identities, relational identities, and social identities. The addition of children or older adults to the household may require a domestic cook to deepen their cooking acumen as well as self-instruction (Lavelle, 2016b). Teaching children how to cook creates new opportunities for the parent to learn new cooking techniques and skills, sometimes from their children. For other domestic cooks, child rearing may be a life stage in which acquiring more cooking skills is put on hold, as the need to get everyone fed takes priority over expanding knowledge and cuisines (Rawlins & Livert, 2019). Later life span transitions may mark a return to learning in the kitchen. In our own research, we found that domestic cooks often intensified efforts to further their cooking skills and knowledge after life changes, such as children moving away or a partner dying (Rawlins & Livert, 2019). Self-Instruction In addition to learning from others, we teach ourselves to cook in the domestic kitchen. Even cooks who have extensive experience learning at their mother’s side will continue to teach themselves by seeking out recipes, videos, cookbooks, and other instructional modalities. Around two-thirds of adults are motivated to learn more about cooking (Worsley et al., 2014). Likewise, roughly two-thirds of adults engage in some form of self-instruction—efforts to teach themselves how to cook, whether the domestic cooks are in New Zealand (Utter et al., 2016) or Baltimore (Wolfson et al., 2016). Learning from others and self-instruction are clearly not mutually exclusive: just as our kitchen context changes over our life span, so do available modes of instruction. Teaching oneself how to cook always involves a very ancient and prevalent form of learning: trial and error. For example, we interviewed Joseph, who cooked most of the evening meals for his household. He was a motivated self-learner and had spent years and years through trial and error attempting to reproduce the rice and beans dish his Haitian grandmother used to make (Rawlins & Livert, 2019). Research indicates a positive, correlational relationship between cooking self-instruction and socioeconomic status: domestic cooks are more likely to teach themselves to cook in households with greater economic resources (Caraher et al., 1999; Wolfson et al., 2017; Worsley et al., 2014). There are likely several factors responsible. Less available time is probably the most

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important factor. Adequate resources to risk trial and error with ingredients (which may be wasted) may also contribute to this difference by socioeconomic status. Self-Instructional Media Question: What is the most prevalent form of self-instructional media in the kitchen? Answer: Recipes. We are most familiar with recipes, from recipe books, the Internet, television or video, or the side of a macaroni and cheese box. As we have noted, there is considerably more to cooking than simply knowing the ingredients and the basic steps. Many recipes contain this information but no more. The domestic cook has a plethora of media configurations available to assist in learning. These include traditional print cookbooks and recipes as well as their parallel forms on digital media. Since the second half of the twentieth century, an aspiring cook could watch television programming with instructional content, ranging from Julie Child to the Galloping Gourmet, Emeril to Alton Brown, and Rachel Ray to Giada De Laurentiis. Thousands of cooking videos—ranging from the formal to the surreal—are available on YouTube and other popular platforms. Internet search engines, smartphones, and smart speakers provide an additional instantaneous source of cooking wisdom. Recipes represent the basic building blocks of learning how to cook a new dish as well as refining those already in the repertoire. The oldest known recipes—for brewing beer and nettle pudding—date back to several thousand years before the current epoch (Thorpe, 2016), but nowadays they can be sourced from printed publications, cookbooks, community and selfpublished cookbooks, the web, and even the containers of basic ingredients (e.g., ketchup, Rice Krispies cereal, kasha). Typically, a recipe contains a list of ingredients and a sequence for preparing them. Additional commentary regarding the dish’s preparation, how to serve it, its origin, or a story about the dish may or may not be included. Recipes provide a list for provisioning, a behavioral sequence, a set of goals for preparation, and perhaps a set of perceptual expectations. That latter refers to images or drawings of the completed dish or even comments of others who have cooked that meal. Although the modality of recipes has changed over the past five or six thousand years (from stone tablets to smart speakers), recipes are a critical part of how we learn to cook new things or old things in a new way. There is a splendid body of research regarding cookbooks that I would recommend to an interested reader, but that is beyond the scope of this text. A recent conference of the Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS, 2021) included presentations on myriad topics regarding cookbooks: gender in early

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twentieth-century American cookbooks, colonialism in Latin American cookbooks, and the use of sugar in German children’s cookbooks. Then there is video. The renowned James Beard hosted a cooking show as early as 1947, and the use of movies, newsreels, and television to instruct domestic cooks may be even older. As video technology has changed over the last 120 years, the versatility of recorded cooking instruction has as well. Not only can one passively watch a cook talking and chopping, accompanied by camera closeups of the cutting board and stove, but the medium can also be quite interactive. One can watch on demand, stop and repeat a portion, and quickly obtain other videos that may address issues unresolved by the first. As an illustration, Dawn Surgenor and her colleagues (2017) compared print and video instructional modalities among a sample of Irish adults who considered themselves low-ability cooks. All participants were asked to prepare lasagna in sixty minutes, and all received a recipe card similar to what one would find in a cookbook. Participants then were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: the card alone, a video demonstration in which a cook prepared the dish similar to a television show, a condition in which a step-by-step video was presented with cues to carry out the steps, or the latter video and the ability to step, reverse, and advance the video, akin to material on YouTube. Participants in the video conditions perceived the instruction as more effective than the card alone; many said that they felt reassured by the video. The full control condition provided participants with the ability to avoid cognitive overload: they were able to return to focus on certain details with little distraction (Surgenor et al., 2017). Video can work for many populations. For example, Kellems and colleagues (2016) have demonstrated the viability of interactive, video cooking lessons for individuals with developmental disabilities. THE PROFESSIONAL KITCHEN Let us turn now to the role of the professional kitchen as a learning context. The main purpose of a traditional classroom is to facilitate the educational process, to provide a context in which students learn. The student is the “customer” in that sense. Contrast that to the professional kitchen: even though it is the site of extensive informal training, the “customer” is the patron, the consumer of the meal. I like to compare the stakes during training in the professional kitchen to the university. Instructors don’t fire students; we assign poor grades for poor performance. In the professional kitchen, an employee or apprentice who is not a promising learner may be shown the door. The importance of learning in the professional kitchen varies from venue to venue

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and, likewise, depends on the average complexity of the dishes produced, variations in the menu, and turnover in the kitchen staff. Educational Facets of the Professional Kitchen The professional kitchen is an informal learning context in which the primary goal is customer service, not training or education. The professional kitchen is highly organized; it can provide substantial structure for training activity (James, 2006; McDermott, 2011). Learning in the professional kitchen is shaped by a number of physical, psychosocial, and organizational influences. We will first turn to the professional kitchen as a physical space. Despite being cramped, hot, stressful, and chaotic, it functions as a learning environment. Several social influences shape learning, including the degree of task interdependence between kitchen staff as well as the kitchen hierarchy. The degree to which kitchen staff rely on routines and structure likewise impacts the nature of training. Space to Learn Most professional kitchens are cramped or certainly can seem relatively small during the height of service with many staff moving about quickly avoiding accidents, burns, spills, and cuts. For the newcomer, the acquisition of new skills and routines is also spatially defined. There are any number of microspaces in the professional kitchen in which specific activities are carried out; learning that content requires learning what to do in a particular space (Fine, 1990; James, 2006). Prepping vegetables or salads requires flat spaces that are ideally not next to heat sources. Sautéing requires burners and baking requires ovens. Equipment is not always portable, limiting what tasks can be learned in those spaces. As an example, the garde manger—one who prepares dishes served cold, such as salads, hors d’oeuvres, canapes, and appetizers— requires a different space from a baker, as do those washing ingredients or prepping proteins. The typical training sequence for a newcomer is to learn a specific task and “master the space”—that is, learn how to set up the space, know what accessories may be necessary and whether they are nearby, carry out the procedure, and clean the space. Once mastered, the learner moves onto other spaces within the kitchen. Contrast these spaces to your home kitchen: How many separate preparation stations do you have? For us, the coffee area, toaster area, and cutting area may overlap. Kitchen Hierarchy Most professional kitchens have a degree of formal hierarchy (James, 2006). This is a legacy of the kitchen brigade system, dating back to Escoffier in

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the late nineteenth century (Symons, 2004). In its original formulation, the kitchen was led by the chef (aka chef de cuisine or executive chef), who was ultimately responsible for the kitchen. The sous chef served as deputy and second in command to chef. At the level beneath them were the chefs de partie, or station chefs, who were responsible for the production related to sauces, pastry, grilling, fishes, cold dishes, and so on. Within each functionally and spatially distinct station, the chef de partie would be assisted by a commis (assistant) as well as an apprentice. Learning occurred within the context of this rigid structure, with a newcomer typically starting as an apprentice. The original structure has been adapted over time, with variations appropriate to the organization based on its size, whether it is part of a larger chain, and location (Cormier-MacBurnie et al., 2015). Interdependence Most of our educational experiences are individual: we attend class, take quizzes and exams, write our own papers, and receive our grades at the end of the term. We may participate in team projects with shared grades, but that is typically not the norm. In the professional kitchen, interdependence is the norm. A single dish served to a customer may have multiple contributors required to prep the ingredients, heat them, assemble with other components, inspect the dish, and hand off through the window (James, 2006). Let’s not forget that there is a waitperson on the other side of the window who serves the dish to the customer. The implications: Not only must kitchen staff develop individual physical skills, perceptual skills, and understanding of individual stations and processes, but they must also quickly learn how to perform those tasks interdependently, requiring coordination, communication, and shared understandings of tasks. A brilliant domestic cook who couldn’t work with others in the domestic kitchen might not be able to keep a job in a professional kitchen. Structure and Routine Everyday activity is characterized by structure and routine. Whether a New Jersey diner, teaching hospital, New Mexico taquería, or university dining room, there is a menu and a routine developed around each item on that menu. Routines provide essential scaffolding for learning. How does one learn a new routine? The same imperative applies to professional kitchens as it does for getting to Carnegie Hall: practice. Practice is a ubiquitous learning strategy in the kitchen (Cormier-MacBurnie et al., 2015). Even the most experienced cook will have to enter a learning phase as part of a new routine during which they pick up speed, accuracy, and automaticity. Given that an experienced professional cook has learned hundreds of dishes, they may

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possess substantial meta-cognitive skills: they know how to learn quickly and efficiently and also have well-developed schemas in which they incorporate new information. A cook who is learning how to butcher a goose can rely on their schema for deconstructing ducks, noting commonalities and differences as they go along. This structure facilitates memory and elaboration of the material. When tasks become automatic, cooks can also experience a sense of flow during prep or in the midst of service (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Khabbaz & Livert, 2016). Professional kitchens that are franchises or units of larger chains are particularly well organized and structured, with policies, notebooks, and routines that parallel standardized menus. Changing one item on the menu may alter the routines of several cooks in the kitchen (CormierMacBurnie et al., 2015). Learning Mise en Place Learning to cook in a professional kitchen most likely introduces the newcomer to the concept of mise en place. Translated roughly as putting things in their place, this concept underscores the importance of readiness and organization in the professional kitchen. Day to day, shift to shift, cooks develop habits to achieve readiness such as daily lists, organization of stations, thinking through the work ahead, and checking to verify that ingredients are in place and even whether there is sufficient tableware (e.g., saucers) for service. A good chef is, if anything, organized (Baskette, 2001). Those readers familiar with personality psychology will likely recognize these activities as typical of someone with high conscientiousness (John & Srivastava, 1999), grit (Duckworth, 2016), or work ethic, one of the macro personality traits known as the Big Five. What about professional cooks who do not have personality traits that predispose them to be well organized? In that case, aspiring cooks must develop these skills (Fisher & Louw, 2020) or else find themselves fighting fires and being overwhelmed during the organized chaos of production. I once observed a group of student chefs (along with several accomplished chefs) cook for a fundraising dinner. I shadowed the cook serving as the “executive chef” for the evening. What did he have a kitchen assistant do first? Believe it or not: count the dishes. Knowing that you have enough dishes for a banquet setting is essential. You can’t wait for dirty ones to come back and wash them! I recognized the dish counting as an example of organizational skills.

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Informal Learning in Professional Kitchens Here is a useful thought exercise: Pretend that you are a Broadway actor who sings. You’ve just been hired to join the cast of a hit musical; you have heard most of the songs and have sung one or two of them in the shower. You start tomorrow night and won’t have the script until tomorrow afternoon. There will be no rehearsals. Break a leg! A bit anxious? Welcome to the process of learning in the professional kitchen. There is often little time to learn new dishes or practice preparing them (Pang, 2019; Schlegel et al., 2019). From a psychological perspective, the lead time between skill acquisition and performance may be very little. The best evidence that you have successfully learned the task is that the dish was served on time and consumed with no complaints (perhaps even a compliment to the chef). All, of course, in the midst of service. We refer to behavior learned through performance as processual learning, as it arises from performing the task (Cormier-MacBurnie et al., 2015). Most instruction in the professional kitchen relies on informal rather than formal learning. Like many jobs we hold, we informally acquire the skills, knowledge, and culture of our workplace (Cormier-MacBurnie et al., 2015). There is certainly formal learning in the professional kitchen: formal classes and credentials in culinary arts, baking arts, and hospitality are available around the world and are a significant sector of postsecondary education. Think of internationally recognized culinary academies such as Le Cordon Bleu or Johnson and Wales as well as the local community college offering associates degrees. We will talk more specifically about this very important modality for learning how to cook in this chapter. Learning in the professional kitchen is essentially a social activity. For example, when a cook is assigned to a new station, an experienced other (more knowledgeable colleague) may provide a short tutorial on how to run it. Typically, a kitchen newcomer is trained at one station and carries out a single task until the skill is grasped and the learner’s activity becomes coordinated with that of others in production. This process is central to training in the professional kitchen (Abecassis-Moedas et al., 2016; Cormier-MacBurnie et al., 2015). and, in the parlance of the brigade system noted earlier, this is referred to as an apprenticeship (Lave & Wenger, 1991). In an apprenticeship, there is a clear novice (the newcomer) and an expert; knowledge is presumed to flow in a single direction. We should note that McDemott (2011), in his examination of formal kitchen apprenticeships, found that kitchens generally diverged from a strict expert-to-novice flow of information given that kitchen climates were more co-participatory, with continuous learning of all staff being emphasized.

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Recall that the series of dyadic (novice-teacher) interactions recalls the concept of scaffolding (Courmier-MacBurnie et al., 2015), ever present in a professional kitchen. Each new task builds on the novice’s previous knowledge and is initially unachievable without the guidance and monitoring of an expert. Keep in mind that the ultimate goal of a professional kitchen is to prepare food on time and of an acceptable quality that satisfies customers. The informal apprentice model provides a traditional and still effective approach of learning the complexity of the professional kitchen without sacrificing production. The interaction between novice and expert in the kitchen often consists of a series of directives and physical demonstrations (Pang, 2018). There is an expectation of acknowledgment as well as compliance with each directive. For example, a cook may instruct a novice regarding the steps in butchering a duck. There are a number of steps required and errors may render some of the products unusable for the intended dish. Learning through observation is essential for the process to unfold. The lesson involves the novice carrying out steps, the expert reviewing the outcome, and discussion regarding the preparations. The two words that I hear most often when observing a professional kitchen are “Yes, Chef!” The emphasis on soldier-like verbal behavior does not necessarily indicate a chef with a power trip; rather, the immediate acknowledgment is essential to avoiding mistakes and confirming that the learner understands. From the learner’s perspective, this process may seem simplistic (e.g., having to demonstrate basic skills such as slicing onions) or even an exploitive form of cheap labor (e.g., having to run an errand picking up ingredients); however, such activities may be instructive to the novice and provide vital evaluation of his or her skills to the expert (James, 2006). Another key education strategy in this arrangement is trial and error: the newcomer learns a task by making mistakes, reflecting, correcting, and hopefully converging on a level of accuracy and speed required for production. Given the motivation to get it right, memories of errors tend to linger (Cormier-MacBurnie et al., 2015). Mistakes are pointed out by experienced others but generally are treated as an inevitable part of training, and the focus is more on dealing with errors rather than being punitive (Pang, 2018). Another vital strategy is observation (Abecassis-Moedas et al., 2016). Physical demonstrations of processes are always present and part of the culture of the professional kitchen. Even when working with an experienced staff, chefs will “demo” a new dish, techniques, equipment, or ingredients. The Professional Kitchen as a Learning Community Depending on the culture and structural limitations (e.g., physical space and time), the professional kitchen can be a location for informal communities of

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practice. Communities of practice are social spaces in which people support each other’s learning through knowledge sharing, activity, and interpretation of that activity (Cormier-MacBurnie et al., 2015). Such communities may be quite diverse, consisting of individuals who are established experts, novices, and those who are experienced but still developing their skills. Kitchen workers may not even recognize their social interactions as a community of practice but nonetheless share knowledge, tips, stories, and collectively solve problems outside during prep, a cigarette break, or a lull in service or over beers after the shift. I recall observing a hotel kitchen in Hanoi where Vietnamese cooking students shared a method for making a bird’s nest out of sugar during a break in service with culinary students from the United States. One Vietnamese woman started the demonstration, and others who could spare the time drifted over to watch and ask questions with hand gestures. Communities of practice in the professional kitchen take advantage of experience sharing as a specific learning strategy. Each chef can contribute his or her own history (e.g., apprenticeships, prior positions), formal training, and new experiences to the kitchen’s collective knowledge (James, 2006). One of Cormier-MacBurnie et al.’s (2015) chef informants explained, “When I learn something, I take it back and train everyone how to use it” (p. 529). This process has been termed a cascade of learning: when the chef learns, the knowledge flows to the sous chef, station chefs, and others in the kitchen. How do the experts in the kitchen learn more? Well, chefs have to eat too. Going somewhere else to eat is more than a busman’s holiday: visiting other establishments can expose the cook to new dishes, cuisines, and techniques. Participation in cooking for benefits or other community events gives cooks an opportunity to gain exposure to new dishes or ingredients and make connections. Cooking competitions likewise provide a chance to see what others are doing and to demonstrate one’s own abilities: to show off. Another approach is to intentionally take on the role of a novice. My chef friend Marty was intent on sharpening his noodle skills and arranged to stage a night at an Asian restaurant in the Lower East Side of New York City. Staging is a bit like a cross between a job interview and the informal apprentice sequence we’ve already discussed. When you stage, you take on a particular station or set of stations at a new workplace both to learn the kitchen and for the kitchen staff to evaluate your aptitude for joining their team. This arrangement used to be gratis—you didn’t get paid for your work; the opportunity itself to get hired or to learn was considered adequate compensation. In Marty’s case—he is an accomplished chef—this process involved working alongside an older master noodle maker in the kitchen in the same way that a seventeen-yearold might do.

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Lifetime Learning Marty’s story of staging for noodle wisdom highlights another element of the professional kitchen culture: one never stops learning how to cook. The professional kitchen is the site for learning, whether for newcomers or staff who are expanding their repertoire of skills (Cormier-MacBurnie et al., 2015). What goes on in any professional kitchen—restaurant, school, hotel, hospital or prison—constantly changes. The pressure for change comes from the development of new technologies, customer demands, food globalization, changes in supply chains, new preparations, new dishes, and the recognition of new cuisines. One’s own learning as well as the facilitation of learning within the professional kitchen is a significant goal for the executive chef or whoever is managing the kitchen (Cormier-MacBurnie et al., 2015). Whenever I talk to chefs about their staff, the need to continually train and find new talent always comes up. In fact, one Philadelphia chef I interviewed spent far more time talking about his pride in bringing along employees to greater responsibilities than how many dishes the kitchen produced, the restaurant’s media attention, or the annual revenue of that location. As a Nova Scotia chef in Cormier-MacBurnie et al.’s study observed, “If you stop learning you may as well just check out” (2015, p. 68). Virtually all the chefs I have ever interviewed have expressed this sentiment, regardless of age or situation. FORMAL INSTRUCTION AND COOKING Aside from learning to cook in domestic and professional kitchens, there is formal cooking instruction. Formal instruction typically involves a structured curriculum that results in a credential when the curriculum is completed. Formal instruction in cooking can range from classes in primary and secondary school to community colleges to culinary academies to graduate degrees. In nations such as New Zealand, cooking classes in secondary school are part of the national educational curriculum (Utter et al., 2016). There are even specialized summer camps where children and adults can learn to cook (Fakazis, 2017). Cooking School Many vocations provide significant formal training prior to entering the actual workplace. Think of surgeons who go through college and medical school before picking up a scalpel or air traffic controllers who have extensive formal training before communicating live with aircraft. For cooks,

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formal training may consist of two-year college or trade school degrees, four-year programs, and even graduate study. In some cooking courses, one may pick up a knife on the first day of coursework. However, there may be several weeks before you start working with food. When I studied chef students at a well-known cooking academy in the early 2000s, the lead time between starting the first semester of study and picking up knives (or dough for pastry students) was about eight weeks (Livert, 2004). Formal culinary academies—such as the Culinary Institute of America or Johnson and Wales in the United States or the Cordon Bleu around the globe—are big organizations and play a critical role in the restaurant industry (Ruhlman, 2000). The credentials earned by graduates reinforce the professional nature of the cook’s vocation (Cormier-MacBurnie et al., 2015). Cooking programs typically include a mix of lecture and kitchen-based classes. Traditional lecture courses may include the cultural and historical origins of various cuisines, menu planning, cost accounting, and restaurant service. Teaching kitchens consist of multiple stations that may accommodate up to twenty or twenty-two students. Equipment in a teaching kitchen may include flattops (gas stoves), ovens, prep areas, walk-in freezers, refrigerators, giant steam kettles (for stock), a chef instructor’s station and podium, and sinks. Training topics range from basic skills and techniques to specific ingredients and cuisines (e.g., French, Italian, Japanese). Some classes may introduce fabrication courses to orient students to various proteins and how to break them down and prepare them. In production courses, students prepare food for consumption by the students at the academy or even the general public. Many cooking schools have public restaurants that are staffed by students—with faculty oversight—where the time, production, and service pressures approach those of the industry. Within kitchen classrooms, students assume various roles such as food steward, saniteur (sanitation), and pot cleaning. A range of learning strategies are employed in cooking schools. Within a teaching classroom, students observe chef instructors demo techniques and preparations. Development of skills such as knife cuts or kneading relies on trial and error. Active reflection on errors and surprises is encouraged by chef instructors. Assessment of student progress is continuous. Instructors observe procedures, such as the development of consommé. They examine output, such as the quality and consistency of knife cuts. I was struck by one chef instructor who could tell when a student would have problems with preparation through a quick glance across the kitchen. And chefs do quite a bit of tasting. I recall a chef instructor tasting nineteen different preparations of crab bisque; on that occasion I did the same, thus demonstrating my lack of tasting acumen compared to a pro. It was often obvious even without tasting whether

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the preparation had succeeded: with fifteen or twenty versions of the same preparation, anomalies stuck out. Cooking schools provide a broad and intensive education that prepares students for careers as cooks, restaurant management, hospitality, food research, and food media. They play an integral role, providing prescribed curriculum, structure, and training in the standards and practices required by the restaurant industry. Just as medical schools serve as an essential regulator for the medical profession, cooking schools provide a similar control function for the food profession. Training Monkeys to Cook Before we conclude on the topic of learning to cook, you might be interested in research carried out by Felix Warneken and Alexandra Rosati (2015) with chimpanzees. Their research question: Could you teach a chimp to cook? Given the critical role that human mastery of cooking played in our own evolution, how easy would it have been for other primates to develop similar processes, given a mastery of fire? The researchers worked with a group of chimps at a research station in the Congo to answer this question. No, they did not give the chimps a cookbook, a Cuisinart, and a sauté pan. Instead, the researchers identified a set of cognitive activities that would be required for a chimp to cook, including preference for cooked foods; preference for a delayed, cooked slice of potato over an immediately available raw slice; preference for putting a raw slice in a cooking device versus non-cooking; and preference for putting a novel raw food in a cooking device versus eating it immediately. Many of the activities required a future orientation (anticipating what will happen to the food when cooked) and causal reasoning (placing the food in a cooking device cooked the food). The chimps were run in one-on-one sessions with researchers and demonstrated the ability to carry out these very basic activities. The strong preference demonstrated by the chimps for cooked food is thought provoking. Given the social nature of chimps—like humans—I wonder whether the chimps who learned to prepare food by putting it in a cooking device would share it with other chimps? Learning to Cook Learning to cook is one of the most frequently occurring educational experiences on the planet. It is predominately social, carried out in domestic households, collective living situations, and in the professional and teaching kitchens. Most of the time, learning to cook is informal and processual,

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although there is also formal training. For the individual of any age, there is a galaxy of self-instructional material and resources. There are even massive open online courses for cooks (Adam et al., 2015). Even though it is designed for production and service, the professional kitchen is also a learning kitchen. Skill acquisition is a constant in the cooking profession. In some cases, cooks must cobble together experiences from trial and error and being thrown into the fire (Boccia, 2016). However, many kitchen leaders take advantage of their role in instruction, facilitating a climate of learning and sharing. Cooking and learning—both primarily social activities—are interwoven human behaviors.

Chapter 3

Time to Cook

While writing this chapter, I had the occasion to enjoy a wonderful lunch at Marcus B&P in Newark, New Jersey. The restaurant had a large window to the kitchen, as in many venues. It was late in the afternoon, and the restaurant was not very crowded. I walked over to ask Chef James Bowen about the kitchen clock hanging in the window: Do you pay attention to both the customer tickets (in which time and orders are recorded) and the clock in the window? Does it get confusing? He thought about it and noted that he paid little attention to the time stamped on the orders; rather, he kept an eye on the clock. As we were leaving, Chef Bowen stopped by our table and further reflected, “Time is the number one thing in our head. Always.” I am willing to wager that most chefs, cooks, and other restaurant staff you encounter will say something similar. It is also clear from the many domestic cooks I have talked to that they share the same perspective: time is central to cooking. That’s not terribly surprising: in our post-industrial world time is central to most of our work, care, and play. Time became important during the nineteenth century as faster and faster transportation modes required more exacting consensus regarding time and its nature. Train schedules required precision in a way that a horse-drawn coach would not. Temporal precision had yet to enter the domestic kitchen. For example, Rachel Rich’s study of diaries and household inventories documented the presence of clocks in middle-class households in France during the nineteenth century (Rich, 2018), though not in the kitchen. Time was incorporated into personal lives: women often referred to the time of day in their diaries; contemporary advice literature likewise assumed women of the house to be the timekeepers as well. Why were there no clocks in the kitchen? Clocks are principally used in today’s kitchen to measure the length of time something has been fried, baked, sauteed, grilled, or boiled. Regulating heat in nineteenth-century stoves and ovens was far less precise than today’s kitchen equipment. Contemporary cookbooks and advice literature rarely referred to minutes but did refer to time related to seasons and the cyclical 41

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nature of crops and beasts. They communicated the range of seasonal ingredients and dishes and provided sample menus typical for the time of the year (Rich, 2018). Today, we have temporal precision in the kitchen, but often ignore seasonality when sourcing ingredients and planning menus. Even though it might be February, I can easily source a pound of fresh tomatoes at the nearest grocery store, despite my location in the Middle Atlantic region of the United States. Noted psychologist Joseph E. McGrath observed that all human behavior is embedded in a temporal context (Kooij et al., 2018). Time provides a critical frame of reference for acting in the world and for thinking about ourselves. William James, one of the founders of psychology in the United States, recognized the importance of time to human experience, devoting a chapter in one of his seminal books to the perception of time. To understand the role of time in the kitchen, we must also understand the psychology of time. This chapter starts with an examination of temporal facets of any kitchen, domestic or professional. We then explore the emerging study of the psychology of time, including time scarcity, time urgency, and varying temporal perspectives. We finish up the chapter by exploring the role of time in the professional kitchen. THE TEMPORAL CONTEXT OF COOKING Let’s start with a focal example of how much time is rooted in cooking (and cooking rooted in time). Imagine a married dad, Karl. It is Tuesday night, and Karl plans to cook dinner for his wife and two kids. His wife, Stephanie, is working late. Karl decides to cook hot dogs for the kids and broil cod with salad for the adults. What are some temporal issues related to Karl’s cooking dinner? • Is there a standing Tuesday routine (e.g., tacos)? • Why did Karl choose the cod? Had it been purchased several days ago and is about to spoil? • Does Karl have enough time to cook the menu he selected? • How long does the cod and salad take to cook, relative to the hot dogs? • Do the children have activities immediately before or after the meal that may require Karl to interrupt preparing the meal? • How long did Karl have between the end of his workday and when he planned to serve dinner? • Can the cod preparation be interrupted?

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These questions all concern time and have direct implications for the final product: the meal eaten by Karl and the kids, and later by Stephanie. We can distinguish four important groups of temporal influences shaping each meal we cook: the food itself, the cooking process, domestic routines, and synchronicity of consumption. Food Is Temporal Until the end of the nineteenth century, food choices were dictated primarily by the season. For example, fresh corn and tomatoes were available to cooks only during the summer and fall in the northern hemisphere. Even if they were in season, getting seafood in the Midwest or bananas in Kentucky was possible only once refrigeration and reliable supply chains evolved. Domestic cooks now have a considerable variety of options for fresh ingredients that are grown neither nearby nor during the season in which they reside. Food also has a limited amount of time in which it is consumable; Gary Fine refers to this issue as the temporal dynamics of food (1990). (We should note that what eaters will consume is strongly influenced by culture and domestic practice.) Fresh ingredients must be consumed within a certain time. Refrigeration extends this duration and freezing can do some amazing things, but there are still limits. Once made, the garden salad will become sadder and sadder with each passing day. Purchasing food also has a temporal quality. Do we go to the large market (which takes thirty minutes to get there round trip) or the corner market? How much time do we have? When during the week are we planning to shop? As occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic, there may be lines or inventory shortages, which extend the time it takes us to purchase what we need to prepare a meal. Cooking Is Temporal How long will it take to prepare the ingredients? Are there multiple, parallel lines of preparation? Must some preparations be completed in advance of others? Will multiple dishes require the same pots and pans or equipment? If they do, which dish should I start first? Preparation, cooking, plating, service, and cleanup all occupy temporal space. As we note, challenges arise when the preparation time exceeds the available time for that particular meal. Someone is going to be unhappy (and hungry). Domestic Routines Do we have brunch on Sundays? Tacos on Tuesday? Movie night on Fridays? Is it the weekend or a weekday? Do we usually prepare a full Christmas

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Eve dinner? Many temporal issues involve longstanding and shorter standing family routines (Kaufman, 2010). Some routines—such as a 6:00 dinner time—are inherited from the temporal arrangements experienced during one’s childhood. Others emerge when romantic partners move in together, households merge, or children join and leave the household. We should add that domestic routines are significantly shaped by the culture(s) in which the household is embedded. Synchronization of Consumption A contemporary temporal challenge for domestic cooks is synchronization: that the food is ready at the time when all of the eaters are ready to sit down around the table. You are probably familiar with some of these scheduling challenges: children with school and after-school activities, adults with non-aligned job schedules or who are also in school, or special occasions. Add to this the more random nature of our lives. As food scholar Alan Warde points out, our post-industrial era is characterized by time fragmentation (Warde, 1999). Our jobs are no longer 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. We work on weekends. School, sports, leisure, and faith activities are scheduled around much of the clock. Synchronization is not just a challenge because eaters are working or in school or taking care of others; it is more challenging due to the fact that many time structures in the culture have become fluid. I am reminded of one of the households in our study of US domestic cooks in which the primary cook prepared a dinner that was served to various members of the family at three different points in time during the same evening. A PSYCHOLOGY OF TIME We have so far primarily focused on what could be termed objective time: the time that is displayed by our clocks, phones, ovens, and microwaves. Objective time (or fungible time) always moves in one direction, it is homogeneous, and it is absolute (Levasseur et al., 2020). What about subjective time? Subjective time is cognitive, heterogeneous, and constantly interpreted. Did you ever notice just how slow the clock moves ahead on the microwave when you are making popcorn? Or perhaps you noticed how quickly caramel on the stove burns if you are not paying complete attention to it? Our perception of time, time-directed activities, and how we think about the past, present, and future varies between individuals and within our own lives. Our temporal perceptions are likewise influenced by social, cultural, and situational factors. Time embeds our human experience (Kooij, 2018; Shipp & Cole, 2015).

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Psychologists have sought to document and understand the human experience of time since the founding of the discipline at the end of the nineteenth century. In addition to William James, other distinguished psychologists from the field’s earlier days, including Hugo Musterberg (Landy et al., 1991) and Kurt Lewin (Zimbardo & Boyd, 1999), studied and conceptualized our temporal world. Early industrial/organizational psychologist Hugo Musterberg studied how workers monitor the passage of time (Landy et al., 1991). Social psychologist Kurt Lewin, considered by many one of the theoretical founders of the field, argued that individuals’ perspective on time was composed of their individual perceptions of their past, present, and future. Lewin saw individual behavior as embedded in a continuous flow of our experiences that were, in turn, linked to various periods of our lives. Lewin’s approach inspired well-known social psychologist Philip Zimbardo to characterize his work on time as “very Zen” (Zimbardo & Boyd, 1999, p. 171). In a psychological sense, humans are time travelers (Dane & George, 2014): we are able to effortlessly think about our past, present, and future. Following are some of the major concepts to emerge from the psychology of time. Our discussion is by no means exhaustive, but we highlight those concepts that seem most important to cooks and cooking. Temporal Scarcity We often feel rushed; such feelings of temporal scarcity are a common feature of modern life. According to time use studies, Americans believe they had more time available in the past (Robinson & Godbey, 1997). A number of structural changes to our daily lives have created temporal scarcities (Rogus, 2018): the breaking down of traditional temporal structures (e.g., stores only open from 9 to 5); changes in commuting and the spatial arrangement of communities (e.g., taking more and more time to get from point A to point B); changes in unpaid work; and changes in household structures. We experience subjective temporal scarcity when we perceive there to be insufficient time to achieve a goal. In contrast, we refer to objective time scarcity as processes or activities requiring a specific amount of time when we literally don’t have that much time. Water must boil for eight minutes to prepare pasta, but you have only four. The cake must bake for thirty minutes, and you have only five. (Can you speed up a cake’s baking time by raising the oven temperature by 200 degrees? Probably not . . . definitely not.) There is little interpretative space in these cases: the processes take a given amount of time and cutting them short will not yield the desired culinary outcome. This is a book about the psychology of cooking, so we are even more interested in variations in people’s perceptions of time shortages. It may be no surprise that temporal perceptions do not always match reality. For

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example, when asked to estimate how much free time they have, people usually think they have less time than the discretionary time reported by them in time use diaries. As with other perceptions discussed in this book, perceived temporal scarcity varies from person to person. Take the kitchen as an example. We have forty-five minutes to make the cake (baking takes thirty minutes, remember). Mixing the ingredients and frosting should take ten, and we need five minutes for cooling. Some individuals would perceive a temporal scarcity; others would not (Kaufman-Scarborogh & Lindquist, 2003; Rogus, 2018). Perceiving time scarcity and feeling rushed is not a pleasant experience. In several studies consisting of over thirty-five thousand subjects, Sharif and her colleagues at Wharton and UCLA (2021) found a direct relationship between having less perceived discretionary time and well-being. Interestingly, having more time available does not always result in more positive well-being; at a certain point, one can have too much available time and individuals may feel less productive as a result. An objective source of time scarcity among women is an increased workforce participation over the past fifty years without a corresponding reduction in domestic duties. The greater number of women with full-time jobs has not been offset by a change in domestic gender roles. Based on time surveys, a woman who takes a full-time job reduces her time spent on domestic care by only about a third (Robinson & Godbey, 1997). Although nearing parity with men in terms of workforce participation, women in western countries still shoulder the greater burden of domestic duties at home including cooking, partaking, and cleaning. Studying change in time use, Jean Adams and Martin White (2015) found that, since the middle of the twentieth century, the amount of time women cooked each week had dropped, offset to a limited degree by increases in men’s cooking at home. As an illustration, in their 2015 study of 4,379 adults in the United Kingdom, 60 percent of women reported cooking for thirty or more minutes during a month compared with only 33 percent of men, despite workforce participation approaching parity. Regardless of cause, time scarcity is extremely pertinent to cooking. Many scholars and public policy experts have blamed a growing time scarcity for the decline of home cooked meals, increased fast food consumption, deskilling of domestic cooks, and decreases in family commensality (Jabs et al., 2007). Users of convenience foods are often berated in scholarly and mass media (Warde, 1999). Not having enough time to cook has been cited as a major reason for an increase in household consumption of convenience foods: foods that are prepared for cooking or that are already cooked and ready for consumption. The reliance on prepared foods rather than cooking home meals from scratch has

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been linked to several negative outcomes, including a rise in obesity worldwide (Anderson & Butcher, 2006). Horning and colleagues (2017) found that over half (57 percent) of Minnesota mothers with young children at home gave a lack of time as the reason they purchased convenience meals. Temporal scarcity was also most likely to be cited as the reason for using convenience foods by women who worked full time. Although this explanation is consistent with our objective notion of time scarcity (more working hours means less time to cook), the degree to which individuals’ perceived lack of time reflects object temporal shortages is unclear. For example, in a USDA study of 4,826 US households, objective time scarcity (i.e., variations in work time and travel time to work) was not predictive of the amount of convenience foods in household purchases; in contrast, subjective time scarcity (based on self-reports) predicted convenience food consumption (Rogus, 2018). Indeed, nearly as many women reported using convenience foods because they were well liked by their family (49 percent) and easy to fix (33 percent) (Rogus, 2018). These findings might suggest that, even when cooks perceive adequate time, the purchase and preparation of convenience foods might not drastically decline. As a matter of fact, the cost of basic and raw food ingredients has increased more rapidly over the first portion of the twenty-first century than has convenience food, also contributing to its appeal (Rogus, 2018). Analysis of time use data, in which Americans report what they do throughout the day, suggests that the use of convenience equipment such as microwave ovens does not actually shorten the amount of time spent cooking (Robinson & Godbey, 1997). Instead, the greater cooking time afforded by such technology has been linked to increasing the quality or quantity of preparations. Individuals adopt varying strategies to deal with temporal scarcity, or what Jabs and colleagues refer to as timestyles (2007). In their study of employed mothers who cooked for their families, Jabs and colleagues identified one reaction to temporal scarcity as active: including the proactive management of household schedules as well as inclusion of assistance from others in the preparation, serving, and cleaning up after meals. Other individuals in the sample had reactive timestyles in which they felt at the mercy of the clock, resulting in a feeling of helplessness in the face of time challenges. Still others faced temporal shortages in a spontaneous way, but not the negative emotional consequences as a result. Another cooking strategy to deal with scarcity of time is to choose an alternative preparation for the same dish. In David Sutton’s memorable ethnography of domestic cooks on the Greek island of Kalymnos (2014), many of his informants dealt with temporal shortages by replacing a traditional manual process (i.e., peeling a tomato) with a more efficient but less ideal process

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(i.e., grating a tomato) or by skipping the process altogether (i.e., putting the entire tomato in a blender). Popi (one of Sutton’s informants), when facing time scarcity, would use a pressure cooker to soften octopus rather than a slow boil. Again, not ideal, but she was willing to make the trade-off in order to cook the desired dish. Alan Warde (1999) suggests that we think about convenience as a temporal strategy that does not necessarily free up time, but rather shifts time. He notes that many modern appliances do compress or reduce the time required for a task: an electric dryer rather than drying your clothes on a clothesline or a using an electric mixer instead of mixing cake dough by hand. According to Warde, convenience foods compress cooking times, but they also permit the shifting or reordering of time. Time spent in preparation can be shifted to other aspects of the meal. For instance, in our conversations with domestic cooks (Rawlins & Livert, 2019), respondents often prepared a side dish or dessert from scratch or raw ingredients to complete a dinner when the main course was either pre-prepared or easily prepped. Warde likens convenience foods to an automatic coffee maker. Even the time compression created by convenience foods does not reduce all of the other activities required of the cook (e.g., planning, purchasing, serving, cleaning up) (Adams & White, 2015). Additional strategies for time management during scarcity include planning meals and shopping trips, coordination with others, multitasking, and prioritization (get the kids fed, then go from there) (Jabs et al., 2007). Perceived time scarcity significantly impacts the emotions we feel when cooking (Rawlins & Livert, 2019). When we have time to cook, we can plan for it, think about recipes, and even change our plans a few times. It is the crucial determinant of whether making dinner is a pleasurable experience. According to one of the domestic cooks we interviewed: [Cooking is a chore] when I’m pressed for time and I’m already tired. I leave work at varying times depending on the night of the week. Some nights when I come home I’m like oh damn I’ve got to make something and it’s already late and the baby’s gonna be, like, tired. I do it anyway, but then I’m like pretty much ticked off. (Lorraine)

The cooks reported that cooking under the pressure of time scarcity and time asynchrony resulted in their feeling more anxious, less valued, less happy, and more bored. I most enjoy cooking on the weekends or on my days off when I don’t have to hurry. (Judith) No time to enjoy cooking tonight. We rushed through dinner and homework to get to soccer. (Ann)

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I enjoy cooking least when I have got to feed everyone in shifts because someone is running out at different times or someone is getting home late. It is difficult to cook the way I would like to when four out of seven nights a week at dinnertime I have to transport the kids to sports events and other activities. (Judith)

The late Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is credited with the concept of flow: an optimal feeling arising from engaging in an activity that we have managed. Cooking is one such potential flow activity in which we can lose ourselves and lose track of time. Feelings of time scarcity, or being rushed, interfere with our ability to achieve flow, as does taking care of children while cooking. Cooking the same meal under temporal scarcity invokes feelings of frustration, anxiety, or anger (Kaufman, 2010). Cooks that we talked with around the United States reflected this sentiment: no matter how familiar or generally enjoyable a meal was to cook, cooking in a rush took all of the positive affect out of it (Rawlins & Livert, 2019). Time Perspectives Humans are time travelers: we deeply reflect on the present, past, and future. While I am writing this paragraph, I have just been thinking about whether I can get away and take my son to a Phillies game in a week or two as well as what I was doing in August 1986. (Quite distracting when you are trying to write a book!) Our multiple time perspectives have been a longstanding subject of inquiry in psychology. One frequently researched construct in the psychology of time is known as time perspective (Zimbardo & Boyd, 1999), or the degree to which we spend time thinking about the past, present or future; very similar concepts have also been termed temporal orientation (Drake et al., 2008; Holman et al., 2016) and temporal focus (Samani & Busseri, 2019; Shipp et al., 2009). According to Phil Zimbardo (famous for the classic prison experiment) and J. N. Boyd, we continually reconstruct the past and reformulate the future, all while making decisions in the present (1999). A broad body of research has linked individual differences in time perspectives to a wide range of outcomes. Zimbardo and Boyd’s study in 1999 indicated those with a future time perspective were more likely to be highly conscientiousness and to be concerned about the consequences of current actions. In contrast, individuals with a present time perspective were more likely to endorse risk taking and to report higher levels of substance use. Cole and colleagues’ study (2017) of British adults found that those with a future time perspective were more likely to have high self-efficacy and self-esteem. Similarly, a balanced time perspective predicted participant’s well-being including mindfulness and certain measures of happiness (Drake et al., 2008).

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What is the relationship between have a present time perspective and living “in the moment?” Mindfulness—an awareness focused on the present and nonjudgmental—has been linked to positive health outcomes such as reduced stress and anxiety, increased attention, and higher self-esteem (Samani & Busseri, 2019). In a study of young adults in the United States, a mindfulness orientation was, not surprisingly, correlated with a present temporal perspective. Surprising to the researchers, mindfulness was also related to future time perspective, a greater focus on one’s goals and plans. Consider the concept of mise en place (MEP) in the professional kitchen. MEP refers to the practice of being fully prepared at one’s station for upcoming service. MEP likely functions to reinforce the professional cook’s temporal perspective. Clearly MEP requires a future time perspective (although in the very near future) to think through what is necessary to get one’s job done. Moreover, MEP requires focusing on the present and the moment and to push other other distractions. Time Urgency Do you know someone who constantly watches the clock? Do you? Or perhaps you are someone who always likes to be productive or engaged in an activity? These are behaviors we associate with the construct time urgency. Time urgency is a tendency to feel hurried, short on time, and to prefer to be engaged in activity (Briker et al., 2020; Landy et al., 1991). Also termed hurriedness (Shipp et al., 2009), a concern with time and filling available time has been treated as a trait-like predisposition. Individuals who possess higher levels of time urgency are likely to perform better on tasks, have a stronger achievement orientation, and perform well on tasks that are temporal in nature (Conte et al., 1998, Ishizaka et al., 2001; Shipp & Cole, 2015). There are health implications of this tendency: individuals who are more time urgent are more likely to report problems with sleep, digestion, and respiratory ailments (Conte et al., 1998). As an individual difference, people who have a greater sense of time urgency are likely to experience a better fit with workplaces that afford them the opportunity to maintain an optimal level of activity (Landy et al., 1991). The temporal preeminence of the professional kitchen would appeal to and provide an ideal person-environment fit for temporally urgent people. As Danny Meyer—founder of outstanding New York City restaurants such as Union Square Café, Gramercy Tavern, and Eleven Madison Park—stated in his book Setting the Table, “We’re looking for the kind of people whose internal alarm clock is always working and who always make adjustments” (2006, p. 159).

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Kitchen leaders with strong time urgency might not be the easiest to work for. Roman Briker and his colleagues (2020) studied the time urgency of 60 leaders and 277 followers in over 200 teams in Germany. Time-urgent leaders were more likely to be autocratic: directive, emphasizing power distinctions, and making decisions in decidedly undemocratic ways. This style is quite consistent with the stereotype of the executive chef as domineering and suffering little dissension. Briker et al. (2020) found that the subordinates of time-urgent—more autocratic—leaders were more likely to experience job stress and time pressure. A time-urgent chef can make the staff unhappy if they do not share that temporal perspective. THE TEMPORAL WORLD OF THE PROFESSIONAL KITCHEN We started this chapter with quotes from a professional cook that emphasized the importance of time in his work. Certainly, time is important in the domestic kitchen: cooks can feel rushed, synchronization of eaters is very important, and the experience of cooking the same dish can be either enjoyable (with a time surplus) or atrocious (under time pressure). The same phenomena occur regularly in the professional kitchen. However, there are additional aspects of the professional kitchen that strongly contribute to its unique temporal context. Time is an essential facet of most workplaces, but there is clearly a continuum ranging from an occupation like cooking to that of air traffic control or the emergency department at a hospital. In the latter cases, temporal errors can have life-altering consequences. A long line of aircraft waiting to land has far more serious consequences than a number of dishes stacking up in the window. Although lives are not typically lost if a professional cook makes an error related to time, as a social context, the experience of time pressure and conflict can often be just as intense. Let us consider the parallel between restaurants and emergency rooms: Emergency department staff cannot control when their patients arrive for treatment. There are certainly cycles during the week (Fridays and weekends tend to be busier, as are late evenings). However, accidents, crime, and mass injuries can occur at any time. Cooks and other kitchen staff likewise experience little temporal autonomy. Even though a restaurant has set hours and perhaps a sophisticated reservation system, rushes and slow times are not always predictable. Talk with any restaurant staff—whether in the kitchen or in the front of the house—and they will share how much they dislike the party that walks in the door unexpectedly twenty minutes before closing. Such occurrences have cascading effects with temporal implications: cooks’

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breaking down of the line, which could start before closing, now must wait until these final dishes are served (let’s hope the party is not having an elaborate dessert). Cleanup and the final batch of washing dishes, pots, and pans by dishwashers must pause. Waiters and other staff must wait to close down the front of the house until the last customers have left. Any preparation that could be undertaken for the next shift gets pushed back. Likewise, the cleaning of the space—floors, grills, stations—must be delayed. Next time you walk into a restaurant shortly before closing, you might carefully observe the expressions of the staff! Professional kitchen hours are tied to what is served (Fine, 1996). If a restaurant is open at 7:30 a.m., we expect breakfast, not barbecue. Think of a luncheonette or a tearoom. If the restaurant serves Vietnamese cuisine, we might expect them to be open for lunch and dinner. We might expect a diner open twenty-four hours a day to have Tolstoy-length menus with everything from a vegetarian omelet to baked cod to a gyro platter. Of course, institutional kitchens such as hospitals or schools have more predictability. Temporal Uncertainty Although a professional kitchen has set hours, a cook’s hours are by no means predictable. Depending on the kitchen, there may be a number of temporal uncertainties in a cook’s work life. There may be a need for a double shift (lunch and dinner). There may be fewer customers than expected, so the cook is sent home. There may be more customers than expected and the cook is called into work. An early brunch shift on Sunday may follow a late dinner shift on Saturday. The cook is typically expected to arrive earlier than the shift they are working. Lunch staff arrive in the morning and dinner staff in the late afternoon (Demetry, 2013). Once the cook arrives, there is the added uncertainty of the shift itself, such as how many customers will show up, how many large tables, how complicated orders will be, and so on (Fine, 1990; 1996). Time demands are continuous and represent a major source of stress among chefs (Murray-Gibbons & Gibbons, 2007). Unexpected changes in the menu, changes in work schedules, and staff absenteeism pose unexpected temporal burdens on leaders and staff (Peterson & Birg, 1988). This uncertainty can be a significant factor in labor churn, and burnout is endemic in the industry (Rowley & Purcell, 2001). Customers Serving restaurant customers brings even more temporal concerns than serving your family at home. There is always the uncertainty regarding the number of customers who will show up and in what configuration: ten tables

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of two or two tables of ten. On arrival, there is the expectation of being greeted, seated, and orders taken within the first ten minutes of sitting down (a round of drinks complicates that timing). Once items are ordered, there is the expectation that they will be served in a timely fashion. Waiting more than ten, fifteen, or twenty minutes for a dish can be a source of customer anger, frustration, and anxiety. The customer may not return and may even spread the word about the slow service. A perfectly prepared dish served thirty minutes late is still a failure. In addition, patrons around a table expect to be served at roughly the same time. This is why big tables create their own wave in the kitchen: the challenge of getting a number of dishes out all within a few minutes. And once served, customers follow their own schedules in terms of eating. Restaurants assume a certain amount of time to turn a table: getting orders, serving, clearing, getting the check paid, cleaning the table, and restocking for the next customer. How long that process takes is unpredictable. Some of us like to linger over dessert or coffee. Some of us have to get back to work. Some of us have plans for after dinner. Just how long the customers will be at their table adds yet another source of temporal uncertainty to the restaurant and its kitchen (Fine, 1996). As a column in the UK website Chef’s Circle stated: It’s OK if Bob in finance doesn’t have that report ready yet. It does matter if Mikey on fish doesn’t have that sole cooked at the right time and for the right amount of time, because if it’s there a minute too long, the 50 other items and dishes stacked behind it begin to slip into oblivion. (Chef’s Circle, 2021)

Cooks Who Can Tell Time Time is central to the reality of the kitchen (Fine, 1996) and cooks are expected to bring to the kitchen the ability to accurately judge time and monitor its passage (Demetry, 2013). Such temporal acuity is essential for the coordinated efforts in the kitchen. Andrew Pforzheimer, founder of Bartaco and the Barcelona Wine Club, shared with Dawn Davis, the author of If You Can Stand the Heat (1999): You become acutely aware of timing. Somebody will say to you, how long for the pasta, and you know they need it badly. The temptation is to say, it’s a minute. But it’s not, it’s six minutes . . . if you say anything but the truth, you’ve completely screwed up everyone else in the kitchen. (p. 18)

Gary Fine describes the need to develop an accurate internal clock (1990). Fine’s extensive observations in restaurant kitchens led him to conclude that good cooks have a chronographic gift: a clock in their head. Inexperienced

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cooks rely more on timers or clocks in part because they provide an illusion of control, reminiscent of the chef I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. As far as I know, cooks are not required to demonstrate time urgency or complete a temporal skills test when applying for a kitchen job. However, we can confidently conclude that such skills equip one well for the job. The Temporal Arc of Service The arc of service refers to the progression of activity in the professional kitchen surrounding breakfast, lunch, dinner, brunch, or catered events. The following depiction is based on my interviews with executive chefs, sous chefs, and cooks as well as kitchen observations. I am also influenced by the evocative writings of Anthony Bourdain (2000), Gary Fine (1996), and Michael Ruhlman (2000). Let’s start with the window. The Window The window or pass refers to the physical position in the kitchen in which prepared dishes are passed from the kitchen to wait staff, who will then serve them to customers. It is a strategic point in the kitchen: the cook inspects and approves the product going out; this function is often carried out by the executive chef, owner, or sous chef, depending on the size of the kitchen staff. This is the place where dishes served to a table must be assembled. If one dish is behind, you might see other sad dishes for the table languishing in the window under a heat lamp. When I observe in a restaurant kitchen, I try to get as close to the window as possible. Sometimes there may not be a physical window. With the preponderance of new open-kitchen restaurants, the window may consist of just an arch or open space. In one New York City restaurant I observed, the kitchen was in the basement. The window was an area set against a wall nearest to the stairs and—yes—the executive chef monitored dishes at that site, tasting, wiping the plates, and ensuring quality control. Servers carried the dishes upstairs for service. When the window is “open,” the kitchen is able to take orders, prepare them, and put them in the window. Occasionally I have heard a cook shout, “The window is up,” indicating that the curtain is rising on that evening’s service. The Prep Cooking staff may arrive hours before the window opens. Just how long before service depends on the chef and the climate he or she instills in the kitchen. For restaurants that serve dinner, pastry chefs are often some of the first to arrive. One executive chef shared with me the positive aspects of prep time:

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My favorite mornings are when I come in at 7 and the rest of the employees don’t get in till 8. Because I can get at least half of my prep list started and ready to go and I’m like, “yes, today is going to be a good day!”

Another chef shared: Before dinner rush, we have music playing. You know. Everyone is getting ready, cutting fish and meat and stuff and getting alone in your thoughts.

Prep time can be a reassuring source of temporal control in a context which may have very little: Every day we have a prep list. Somedays that list is just long and long and long but there is a sense of peace when that prep list is all done, stations are all stocked. Now I can’t control the business, whatever, but I can control everything being ready for business. I get, that’s an accomplishment and a time of peace, it’s like okay.

In her observation of temporal behavior in a professional kitchen, Daphne Demetry (2013) contrasts an initially laissez-faire policy regarding when cooks arrived in the kitchen for the dinner shift; the vague expectation was sometime between 12:00 and 2:00 p.m. A change in the executive chef resulted in a more temporally structured kitchen. All cooks were expected to arrive at 12:00 p.m. for their dinner shift. The chef also added a 4:00 p.m. family meal, in which all staff ate a sit-down meal. Staff would then clear boxes and other material used during prep before the window opened at 5:00 p.m. This temporal shift resulted in a decrease in after-work socializing as well. The shift described by Demetry is a vivid example of temporal social control exerted by kitchen leadership (Fine, 1996). Chefs control the schedule: which shifts are assigned to kitchen staff and how many shifts are assigned. The experience in the kitchen—and front of the house—can be radically different between weekday breakfast, weekend brunch, lunch, and dinner in terms of the arc of service. The chef must balance the desire to minimize the number of hourly workers scheduled for a shift with the risk of being understaffed and faltering on speed, quality, or both. Back to the analogy between professional kitchens and the hospital. We observed how the beginning of the shift is characterized by MEP throughout the kitchen and that staff may arrive early to start this process. At the beginning of the shift in the emergency department, nurses, assistants, physicians, and other staff perform their own MEP, ensuring that kits are complete and equipment is in its proper place. Moving to other hospital locations, consider the operating room (OR). A primary function of OR staff is preparation for the surgery, ensuring that all equipment and supplies are in their place, including

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resuscitation and other devices that may be required if the procedure does not go as planned. OR nurses and surgery residents have shared with me how this very important form of MEP is also customized to the attending surgeon. Different attendings—as with different executive chefs—have preferences in instrument placement and so forth. All of this preparation and intervention of time functions to reduce the time wasted in the midst of cooking or during an intestinal resection. The Rush The arc of service begins with a deceptive calm increasing to a crescendo of service at which point time demands, temperatures, ambient noise, and activity reaches a peak (Maguire & Howard, 2001). We can distinguish several common phases, whether we are talking about a white tablecloth restaurant (e.g., fancy) or the concession stand at a community baseball game (I covered the deep fat fryer during that cooking adventure). The opening of the window marks the beginning of service, which may start with a bang or a whimper. As more tables are seated, the pace of activity accelerates. As orders become stacked up, time pressure intensifies. The kitchen reaches the peak of the arc. Over the course of a shift, there may be just one or several peaks. At some point, most of the tables are served, there are fewer dishes to put in the window, and the kitchen staff begins to work to catch up, clean up, and start preparations for the next shift. The closing of the window marks the transition fully to these activities. The peak of service is often referred to as the rush (Demetry, 2013; Fine, 1990; 1996). According to Fine, the rush is “a period during which the needs of customers threaten to overwhelm the capacity of the kitchen employees to cope—at a time at which the restaurant is slammed” (1996, p. 64). Slammed is a term I often hear chefs use to describe it. Kitchen staff, social scientists, and food writers all generally agree on what characterizes the rush. Rushes feel chaotic. A rush in the kitchen is noisy: the sounds of food cooking and being plated, pots and pans banging, staff moving about, equipment running, and a cacophony of shouted requests and advisories between kitchen leadership, staff, and the front of the house. Rushes are also more dangerous. Food is being fired, knives are quickly at work, and kitchen staff are crisscrossing the crowded floor carrying loads that are hot, heavy, unstable, or all of the above. Distractions take their toll on staff with burns, cuts, and bruises. Cooks curse and yell. Occasionally, pots are thrown. The more rushed the cook, the greater the mistakes in the kitchen (Jones et al., 2014). Not surprisingly, the rush can be an aversive experience for kitchen staff. Time pressure leads to anger and frustration. Temporal conflicts

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characteristically arise between the kitchen and the front of the house: the wait staff wants to get dishes to the table on time, while the kitchen staff want to get the orders out and not have them get cold, or they will not be served at their peak of quality. There is little time to thoughtfully evaluate the job you are doing. Despite the time pressure, many cooks enjoy the rush. One chef likened it to a coordinated dance: I do Sunday brunches which is our busiest shift and, you know, once you have been busy for about an hour and you find your rhythm and tickets are coming in and you and your partner that you are cooking with are kind of playing a non-spoken dance.

Another chef compared the end of a rush to the end of a battle: You know when you have been fighting through a war all night is the best feeling ever. Everybody has, we all have a beer and a high five at the end of the night.

Cooks appreciate the warping of time. In a rush, one does not notice the clock, only the immediate temporal needs of the dish. One or two hours can pass quickly (Fine, 1996). Suddenly it is 10:00 p.m. and time to start breaking down the shift. The rush is an intriguing social psychological phenomenon and fascinating to watch. External time pressure depends on customer number, configuration, arrival time, and behavior at the table. There are norms established within the kitchen staff. There is the temporal climate facilitated by the kitchen leader. There is potential conflict with the serving staff. Physical and spatial limitations also influence these interactions. Despite the positive engagement of the rush, temporal pauses are welcome. One chef reported to me: I do get these moments over the course of the night where I do not have anything to do. You know my orders are done, my tickets are done. It sounds kinda weird but I will just sit back and kinda watch the restaurant and watch people talking and having a good time. I don’t know, it’s kind of relaxing momentarily, until things start flying again . . . You know step back you know sometimes and watch the restaurant instead of constantly having 30 different things on my mind.

The Slow Here’s a question: What can be as unpleasant as the feeling of being slammed during a rush? Answer: A slow shift. A slow shift does not provide the

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temporal distraction of a rush: the cook becomes very aware of the passage of time. A slow shift is insufficiently challenging. Cooks have little opportunity to demonstrate their competence. Gary Fine reported that some cooks felt that their performance was worse during a slow shift, despite the absence of time pressure and chaos (Fine, 1996). One chef shared with me the hazards of a slow night: You always hear this term: “two tickets retardation.” When it’s really slow in the kitchen you make more mistakes.

Demetry observed that slow shifts were characterized by gossiping, huddling around, and looking at screens (2013). Alternatively, slow periods are a time to prep, clean, and undertake other activities not possible during a standard shift. Both gossiping and engaging in less urgent activities fulfilled their purpose of temporal distraction. An old saying in the professional kitchen is “If you have time to lean you have time to clean” (Jones, 2019, p. 23). The Serenity of Chives As alluded to throughout this book, part of the pleasure that experienced domestic and professional cooks glean from cooking is a sense of flow: a narrowing of attention and a feeling of automaticity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). In one study, we asked chefs what point of time during the arc of service most closely approximated a flow experience (Khabbaz & Livert, 2016). As we have seen, these temporal points can include prep or the peak of service. Two chefs’ depictions of their flow moments vividly evoke the concept: And a kitchen can be controlled chaos, I’m sure you’ve heard that before, and your mind is so busy with that stuff, not that it is an escape from your home life but you know it’s 8 hours a day to 12, where you can concentrate on other things and then you can go back to whatever else is going on in your life. It’s a break you know. (#2) You just do, the quirky things you do, just go on autopilot and everything becomes silent. Like great athletes, like Michael Jordan, when I used to wrestle, people were screaming and yelling, I couldn’t hear a thing, I could hear my own heart beat and couldn’t hear nothing around me. I don’t hear the machine but I can see the tickets rolling. It’s what athletes go through, sprinters. As weird as it is and as weird as it sounds, the more intense and the more insane, the more peaceful I become, the more relaxed I become. (#5)

My personal favorite was offered by the executive chef at a nationally recognized, award-winning hotel. Despite his awesome responsibilities, his

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flow moment was when one of the prep cooks failed to show up for their shift: “When I pick up a knife and am cutting chiffonade or mincing chives.” Synchrony A major contrast between the domestic and professional kitchen is the number of cooks engaged in their craft. As you have probably noticed from the preceding section, a tremendous amount of temporal coordination is required in the professional kitchen, as opposed to the domestic kitchen, where the temporal coordination may have more to do with one’s eaters as the preparation (Rawlins & Livert, 2019). To properly estimate how long it takes to prepare a dish, all cooks in the kitchen must learn how to reliably discern doneness (a nice light brown versus black smoke) for as many as fifteen different dishes (Fine, 1996). As we have noted earlier, each dish has its own temporal window when it can be served. It is difficult to speed things up or slow them down. Of course, baking and pastry dishes are even less forgiving than main courses. Gary Fine likens cooking to an art for this reason, while baking is more like a science, given its temporal precision. Everyone in the kitchen and many in the front of house must share this knowledge for synchronized serving on the customer’s table. We will discuss later how individuals differ on temporal variables such as time perspective, time urgency, and temporal pacing. How is synchrony in the kitchen possible in cases when staff tend to have temporal orientations associated with poorer performance, such as a low sense of time urgency or a low future time perspective? Antonio Abrantes and his colleagues at the University of Lisbon (2020) explored this very issue among Portuguese management trainees. Randomly assigning 180 executives to 60 groups, the researchers examined the average levels of current time perspective and future time perspective on each three-person team. They then had teams engaged to time tasks to create an experience of temporal scarcity and time pressure. Teams that had higher average future orientations were more adaptable (improvising during the task) than those who were not. How is synchrony in the kitchen possible when cooks don’t have the same temporal orientation? In other words, when there are diverse time perspectives within the same team. One reason that kitchen synchrony is attainable is that individuals may adapt their behavior to their temporal appraisals: how they perceive time in that situation. Particularly relevant to our discussion of temporal issues and kitchen teams is a series of studies I conducted with Susan Mohammed and her graduate students at Penn State University. We were interested in just how diversity in temporal perspectives impacted kitchen teams at a culinary academy. The teams were created by chef instructors in one of two production classes: a

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garde manger class, which had daily production, and an advanced class in which teams developed menus and prepared dishes once a week. We were interested in whether team performance was impacted by not only the average temporal perspectives within a group but also the diversity or variance in the team: how much were those differences. We tracked 151 students, assigned to 49 teams, in the three-week garde manger class (Mohammed et al., 2017). Each day, they finished the preparation of hors d’oeuvres, forcemeats, or plated appetizers and served them. Part of the day was also devoted to preparations for the next day’s meals. Students completed inventories at the beginning of the course that measured their temporal orientation in terms of time urgency and polychronicity. (The latter term refers to a preference for working on more than one task at a time, analogous to multitasking.) We found that teams with diversity in time urgency experienced more conflicts regarding the timing of their work. Likewise, teams that had greater diversity in polychronicity—some team members liked multitasking and others did not—also experienced more temporal conflicts. Temporal conflict did not predict poorer performance, suggesting that the teams were able to work through the conflicts without impacting their performance. In another study, we examined the impact of diversity in pacing style among 48 teams of 162 students (culinary and baking) in advanced cooking classes (Marhefka et al., 2021). At the beginning of the ten-week class, students completed inventories measuring their preferred pacing styles. What is a preferred pacing style? A preference for steady pacing is straightforward: you like to spend the same amount of focused time on a task from starting on it to completion (Gevers et al., 2016). Individuals who prefer deadline pacing are more likely to work most on a task immediately prior to its deadline. U-shaped pacing is a tendency to work on a task quite a bit at the beginning, less during the middle, and a great deal prior to deadline. Question: When you work on a paper for school or other large projects, what pacing do you prefer? Another question: What pacing do you think works best in the professional kitchen? We found that consensus in deadline pacing was essential to team performance. If members of the team held disparate views of timing, they could work to establish temporal consensus and overcome the challenges of disagreements in deadline pacing (Livert & Mohammed, 2010). In further analysis of the data, we found that teams with at least one member with a low U-shaped pacing time—a weakest link, if you will—also gave the weakest performance in terms of the quality and creativity of their dishes (Marhefka et al., 2021). Taken together, our findings suggested that a diversity in pacing

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styles in the kitchen has the potential for disrupting performance, but proactive attempts to offset those disagreements may work. So far, we have discussed synchrony in terms of coordination in the kitchen. Temporal control challenges can also be found in the window: the transition point between the kitchen and the front of the house (Fine, 1996). Cooks and servers share the goal of serving a dish at its peak, before it has a chance to congeal, melt, cool off, or warm up. Kitchen synchrony gets all those dishes in the windows at roughly the same time. However, servers must also contend with the customers’ temporal worlds. Customers take their own time at the table, and when they are ready for the next dish is not predictable. If the customer is ready and the dish is not, a temporal conflict arises through the window and waitpeople inquire when will it be ready, creating greater time pressure for the cook. If the customer is not ready and the food is, then the server may feel time pressure to get the food out when it is still in its best condition. When the customer is ready and the food is not, the consequence may include a smaller tip for the server, complaints about the service, or complaints about the kitchen. This tango of temporal conflict occurs regularly. When a customer is waiting for a long time for food, as their blood begins to boil, their anger is directly affecting the tip for that waiter. The waiter doesn’t have anything to do with the kitchen’s speed or efficiency, but your average diner looks at the restaurant as a whole. Bad service includes wait time to most. (Jones, 2019, pp. 70–71)

TIME IS IN THE EYE OF THE PERCEIVER As we close this chapter on time and cooking, we can reflect on the degree to which time impacts our world and our kitchens. As with other constructs in this book, we find that, although more easily measured, the experiences of time and emotions associated with time can be idiosyncratic as well as very situationally normed. I would be remiss if I did not share one more example of the mutability of time. We reach for objects numerous times in the kitchen, perhaps nearly a thousand times in a week or two. American researchers Michelle Holubar and Martin Rice (2006) found that individuals were faster at picking up a familiar coffee mug in their own kitchen than an unfamiliar mug of the same weight. This difference increased in a laboratory setting, where the familiar mug was picked up even more quickly than the other. What is the connection to time? Our kitchens—domestic and professional—are spaces that become filled with meaning. Cooking equipment, such as mugs or pots or ladles, becomes familiar. You may recall from introductory psychology the mere exposure

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effect (Zajonc, 1968): that familiar objects, on average, are regarded more positively than unfamiliar objects. That this difference increases in an unfamiliar setting likewise suggests the importance of prior experience. Change our kitchen equipment or change where we cook, and the pace of our preparations may change. Speed is impacted by the meaning we give to the situation. WINDING UP THE CHAPTER Time is central to cooking, whether domestic or professional. A thorough understanding of the psychology of the cook thus requires consideration of our temporal subjectivity and its impact on food preparation behavior. From the dinner bell to the “window” in the restaurant, the recognition of “time to eat” is central.

Chapter 4

The Role and Identity of a Cook

Cooking—whether in a domestic kitchen or a professional one—changes the way we think about ourselves. In this chapter, we examine the impact of cooking on our self-concepts, self-schemas, and identities: all key components of how we think about ourselves. Let us first explore a set of concepts for understanding “me.” COOKING AND GENDER One cannot talk about cooks without acknowledging the degree to which roles of domestic and professional cooks are highly gendered: in most cultures, women traditionally and still typically carry out the role of domestic cooks (Sterns, 2019). In contrast, the role of cooking for pay has been typically associated with men. Both professional and domestic cooking roles are shaped by traditional gender roles. According to Alice Eagly’s social role theory, gender roles are the consensual beliefs regarding patterns of behavior, personality traits, and attitudes that demarcate being masculine (i.e., what it is to be a man) and feminine (i.e., what it is to be a woman) within each culture (Eagly, 1987). We are influenced by gender roles from the moment that our parents learn of our biological sex. A wide body of experimental research has identified that the differences in how we are perceived and treated even as infants are at the basis of what others perceive to be our gender (Burnham & Harris, 1992). Once born, we face strong pressures to adhere to gender roles at home, in school, at work, among friends, online, and in pretty much any other social setting that you can imagine. What are traditional gender expectations in North America? Qualities ascribed to women include caring, nurturing, sensitivity, a concern with children’s health, and a communal orientation. In contrast, men are expected to be assertive, controlling, aggressive, confident, more risk taking, and less concerned with domestic and health issues (Eagly, 63

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1987; Eagly & Karau, 2002; Fielding-Singh, 2017). We face strong pressures to adhere to those gendered expectations, regardless of whether we believe them ourselves or even identify with the gender that others perceive us to be. These traditional gender roles are also known as hegemonic masculinities and femininities. Hegemonic refers to their complementary function: adherence to traditional gender roles preserves the patriarchy (male dominance) and male power through behaviors that reinforce differences in power between the genders (Newcombe et al., 2012). Gender roles are not static. By engaging in behaviors and attitudes consistent with gender roles, we produce and reproduce gender. In that sense, gender thus resides in the person as well as in social transactions and daily activities pertaining to social roles (Lyons, 2009). We should note that such roles are socially constructed: they are specific to each culture, have emerged over thousands of years, and are not biologically based. At this point, we should also recognize that, in many cultures, the influence and inevitability of gender roles are loosening. In the twenty-first century, gender roles are changing, gender identity is more fluid, and many individuals strive to create new sets of expectations. Their resistance and that of their allies push back the traditional roles and open up a new set of possibilities that can be selected by the individual based on the identity that they choose. Despite this progress, gendered roles and expectations—including those of domestic and professional cooks—will likely endure for a long time. HOW PSYCHOLOGISTS THINK ABOUT THE SELF The question of who we are, how we make sense of the world, and what we mean by “me” is a central concern in psychology as well as for humanity in general. From the oldest cultures and religions through Sigmund Freud’s ego and Erik Erikson’s identity crises to contemporary scientific psychology, we have constantly sought to understand how we think of the body that we inhabit, the actions it undertakes, and what or who we are. Psychologists such as the radical behaviorists (e.g., Skinner) may have considered the study of self somewhat of a waste of time, as it involved inner processes, not observable to researchers. Social psychologist Roy Baumeister has likened the study of self to that of a “big tent” (Baumeister, 2019) under which there are innumerable psychological theories and approaches to understanding the self. Many social psychologists have argued that the self emerged as a set of psychological structures to enable humans to live in group settings, compared to other species in which individuals can go through live in a more solo manner (Baumeister, 2019). Animals can source many of the needs from their habitat; as for humans, we have learned to help each other. The self provides

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the vital connection between social interactions with others in our group and the bodies we inhabit. Interestingly, it is argued that one of the functions of having a name is so that groups may function more effectively. (After all, how could our tribe get anything done if everyone was named Sidney?) Who are you? That question is easy to answer: unless you have severe neurological issues or were raised in total social isolation, you know that you are that person you see in the mirror. Self-awareness—the ability to recognize our body—is a basic component of the self. Actually, mirror self-awareness is not limited to humans and has been empirically demonstrated in other primates, dolphins, and elephants (Plotnik et al., 2006). Beyond self-awareness, there are a number of approaches that psychologists and social scientists have used to understand the self; there are likewise tens of thousands of research studies published which deal with the topic of the self, identity, and related concepts (Oyserman et al., 2011). In this chapter, we will focus on self-concepts and schema, various identities, and ways in which cooking identities may change over the course of a person’s life. Self-Concept Here is a useful exercise: Think of yourself right now. How might you describe yourself? What five things first come to mind? What two things would you like to change about yourself? Okay, our exercise is over. What did you think about? What came to mind just now was likely drawn from your self-concept (Oyserman et al., 2011). The self-concept includes cognitive structures about you, including schema, attitudes, judgments, ways that you make sense of the world, and your goals. We build and organize our self-concept around what is important to us. Back to the thought exercise for a moment: Were any of the ways you described yourself connected to your most important beliefs or values? If so, they were likely more central to your self-concept. As an example, if you have always enjoyed playing sports, you likely have many well-developed cognitive structures (or schemas) regarding yourself playing sports, watching sports, and experiences on sports teams. Those who have robust schemas that are a significant part of their self-concept are said to be schematic (Oyserman et al., 2011). Researchers have explored how people are schematic in terms of gender, age, race/ethnicity, and even academic standing. For example, individuals who have been overweight during much of their lives may be weight-schematic: they think about their body size when interacting in social settings, when eating a meal, or other activities that make that aspect of their selves relevant (c.f., Holub et al., 2012). People can certainly be schematic with regard to cooking. A cooking-schematic person might have a well-developed narrative of their development as a cook,

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elaborate memories of their own cooking activities, think of themselves when observing other people cooking, and may think of their own cooking activity when they eat in a restaurant. As opposed to professional cooks, who may acquire credentials or otherwise undergo training on the job, the domestic cook may never acquire such markers of their identity as a cook. Instead, our emerging view of ourselves as a cook emerges from observing ourselves in the kitchen. According to self-perception theory (Bem, 1972), we deepen our understanding of ourselves in basically the same way we do with other people: we observe. Repeated episodes of successfully cooking meals for ourselves and others in the household may lead us to conclude that cooking is an important part of our self and that we have an inclination toward that activity. This process can be seen in a statement by one of the domestic cooks who wrote in her cooking journal, “Actually, it was nice to actually observe my own habits and I discovered that I am comfortable improvising with ingredients and measurements, confident that the food I make will turn out well” (Rawlins & Livert, 2019). Not all of our self-schemas are active at the same time. Instead, it is useful to consider our phenomenal self (Baumeister, 2019). Phenomenal refers to what we are experiencing at a particular point in time. It includes our stream of consciousness as well as our immediate experience of a situation. For example, while visiting a friend’s kitchen, we may think about ourselves as a cook and reflect on our cooking. When we go to the theater to see a play, we may be more aware of our experience in our high school drama club. In this sense, our self is mutable. Our overall self-concept consists of multiple schema that are highlighted at various points in time. Our identities ebb and flow depending on what we are doing. This depiction of the self may diverge from the way we regard ourselves—at least our inner selves—as stable and unchangeable. Rather, the body of research and theory regarding the self suggests that our inner selves are fluid. Different elements of our self are salient to us depending on the situation in which we find ourselves. It can seem as if we have multiples selves within the same body (Markus & Nurius, 1986). OUR IDENTITIES The impulse to know thyself can be traced back to classical philosophy (Deschamps & Devos, 1998). Identity has been an enduring concept employed across the social sciences, including psychology, sociology, political science, and even history. We use the term social identity to refer to group and other collective memberships (or statuses). There are a wide range of perspectives within psychology as to just what is meant by identity. William James, one of the pioneering figures in

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psychology, observed that people have many group affiliations; consequently, there are many identities or selves that they can draw on (1890). Despite this multiplicity, we maintain an awareness of being the same person across situations. George Herbert Mead proposed that identity was formed through our unceasing experiences of social interactions: that our sense of primary self emerged from engagement with others (1934). One implication of Mead’s approach is the idea that our most unique set of beliefs—our identities— depends on the presence of others. Identity formation and change is central to Erik Erikson’s highly influential theories of development (1950); Erikson conceived of personal (ego) identity as a set of goals, beliefs, and values, the evolving configuration of which can be tied to adjustment throughout the lifespan. Important formulations of identity have also been contributed by Hazel Markus’s work on identity as schemas for interpreting experiences and possible selves (Markus & Nurius, 1986); Henri Tajfel and John Turner’s theory and research on social identity’s roles in intergroup relations (Tajfel & Turner, 1986); and identity as linked to actual, ought, and ideal selves (Higgins, 1987). Several formulations of identity are relevant to helping understand how cooks think about themselves. Personal identities refer to the characteristics we believe that we possess; relationship identities concern our various connections with others (e.g., son, aunt, boss, girlfriend); and social identities are group memberships that define us. Also relevant to the self-identification of cooks and cooking are cultural identities and commensal identities. Personal Identities Common to many identity theories is a distinction between personal identity and social identities (Reid & Deaux, 1996; Schwartz et al., 2008; Tajfel & Turner, 1986). Through our identities we view ourselves as being different from other people as well as sharing commonalities with others. The characteristics that we believe distinguish us from others have been variously termed personal identities, personal attributes, traits, individuating characteristics, personal idiosyncrasies, and private identities (Deschamps & Devos, 1998; Ellemers et al., 2002; Oyserman et al., 2011; Reid & Deaux, 1996; Schwartz et al., 2008; Tajfel & Turner, 1986). Personal identities include gender, race, ethnicity, personality traits (e.g., nurturing, obsessive, anxious), and behavior (e.g., good listener, risk taker). Our experiences as a cook shape our personal identities (Wolfson et al., 2021). A cook’s innovative experiences in the kitchen might strengthen her identification as a creative person or a risk taker. Learning to cook meatless at home may strengthen one’s identity as a vegetarian.

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To better understand the personal identities associated with cooking, Roblyn Rawlins and I had domestic cooks to complete the sentence: “I am a ____ cook.” Participants then explained what they meant by whatever word they chose to complete the sentence, which is shown in capital letters (Rawlins & Livert, 2019). I think I’m a GOOD COOK. An “inventive” cook. I like to try new things. I like to read food blogs and I like to see recipes that other people have done and I like to try to incorporate them into what I do for my family. I am a PRACTICAL COOK. I am the person who is more likely to read the back of the rice box. I think I am pretty good at looking at what’s in the fridge to see if I can make something better. I am a GOOD COOK. I cook every night whether I want to or not, I never under/ overcook anything, I always try to add a vegetable to make something healthier, and whatever I make always tastes good. I would say I am a LEARNING cook. I am not wonderful at it but I am learning as I go. I am an EXCELLENT cook. I can make a new meal once and know the recipe by heart after that. I can also add to it and make it better. I am an OK, PLAIN cook. Cooking’s not my forte. You can see that in our meals.

One respondent shared both her identity as a cook and an aspirational identity: an identity she would like to acquire in the future. I don’t think I’m a GREAT cook. I try. But more times, convenience and ease win out over other factors. I’m somebody who would like to cook. Like to be better at it. Aspiring. Someday when my kids aren’t little, I’d like to get better at it.

Foodie? Are you a foodie? Foodie is an identity claimed by many people characterized by a distinctive orientation to food. Emerging in the 1980s, a foodie is someone who is enthusiastic about novel experiences in food preparation and consumption (de Solierr, 2013). Food enthusiasts more proactively engage in sourcing food than others, consider cooking and consumption as a leisure activity, consume food-related media, and spend more money on food (Moreo et al., 2022). They engage in alternative food sourcing patterns valuing raw, non-industrial, non-mass-produced, and what they perceive as authentic

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foods. Foodie couples often like to cook with each other and value the decisions they make regarding sourcing, menus, and preparation. Foodie embodies both personal and social identities. As an orientation to the preparation and consumption of food, including values, affect, and behavior, foodie is a personal attribute. Foodie also can function as a shared identity and a point of commonality with others. Relationship Identities We also think of ourselves in terms of the relationship identities reflecting our connection to the important people in our life: husband, niece, grandmother, close friend, and so forth. Given the highly social nature of cooking, it, too, may reinforce our relationship identities. A good daughter cooks for her parents. A good husband cooks when his wife is sick. A participant in our study of domestic cooks (Rawlins & Livert, 2019) shared how cooking affirmed her relationship identity as Mom: I can’t afford to take family vacations; I can’t afford to buy brand-name clothing. Most of what I purchase, I purchase on sale. What I can do is put my love and creativity into something they can appreciate: food. Even if they don’t realize it now, I hope that my kids can look back and say, “Mom always cooked for us.” I hope they understand how very much I love them and that if nothing else, they feel that through my cooking.

Another participant’s mother was not a cook, whereas cooking was central to her identity as a mom: I think it’s fun to consider how we develop our relationship and identity with cooking. I am the oldest daughter in a large family and my mom did not like to cook. I was a failure in the housecleaning department, but earned my keep (smiley face emoticon) by cooking for everyone. For this reason, I’m really comfortable cooking for groups (8–12 people) and I cook to please. I like to know what people like and then I make it for them!

Memories of cooking with our grandmother likewise will enrich our relationship as grandchild. Cooking one of those dishes we remember invokes our identity as a grandchild. In many cultures, we express sympathy for the loss of a loved one by cooking a meal and delivering it to those in mourning, serving to reaffirm our identity as a close friend, neighborhood, or trusted co-worker.

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Social Identities Social identities—also known as collective identities (Ashmore et al., 2004; Oyserman et al., 2011; Reid & Deaux, 1996)—refer to the affiliations and group memberships that are part of how we think about ourselves. Social identities can range from highly meaningful and bounded groups (e.g., heart surgeon, Jewish, libertarian, Phillies fans) to more diffuse (e.g., jogger). Tajfel and Turner’s influential program of research demonstrated how even randomly assigned and non-meaningful group memberships shape our behavior and perceptions (Tajfel & Turner, 2001). Some researchers are interested in how stable our social identities are— that is, that specific memberships are always active (Stryker & Burke, 2000). Other researchers have focused on the degree to which these social identities vary (e.g., Abrams & Hogg, 1999). For example, one of your social identities might be US citizen. However, this identity may not be salient to you until you interact with someone from a different country or travel to another country or apply for a passport (Crisp & Hewstone, 2001; Livert, 2016; Rawlins, 2012). For individuals who cook for money, cook or chef can function as a central social identity. The social identity as a cook is not limited to his or her workplace. An experienced cook in a professional kitchen is part of an informal culinary community with boundaries, associated jargon, markers of identification, and beliefs (Bourdain, 2000). Definitions of group boundaries include experience, training, and physical embodiment. For example, Burrow and colleagues, in their interviews with Michelin Star chefs (2022), documented how kitchen-related burns function as identity markers for those in the industry: I was on the tube once and I was hanging—stood up holding the top rail. And someone was like: “oh, where are you a chef then?” I was like: “what, do you mean?” And they were like: “well look at your arm, you must be a chef!” And I had all burn marks on my arms from the oven. And it felt so cool to be recognized as a chef. (p. 14)

Note also the popular skull and French knife tattoo found among some chefs (and fans of Anthony Bourdain). Although domestics cooks may never set foot in a professional kitchen, they also may aspire to the professional cooks’ social identity. Given the food revolution of the last thirty years, the increased attention paid to all things food and cooking has probably heightened the appeal of this identity. Many of the keen cooks in our research employed jargon associated with the professional kitchen (likely sourced from the Food Network) (Rawlins & Livert, 2019).

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Cultural Identities Identities also influence our cooking behavior as food is a very potent way to claim our ethnic origins (Murcott, 2019). The process of cooking employs ingredients with unique aromas and produces smells that are distinctive to a culture. Consumption of that meal that can be strongly evocative of identities that matter to us. Food can be central to our cultural identity (Fischler, 1988). Most dishes are cooked in a certain fashion, following certain guidelines and practices, all of these facets influenced by culture. Many of these enact our identities as they are drawn from specific cuisines associated with specific cultures (Levi-Strauss, 1970; Parasecoli, 2014). Cultural identity refers to the cultural values, practices, group perceptions, and beliefs that are connected to the culture in which an individual was raised (Schwartz et al., 2008). Many of us have at least one primary cultural identity. We may identify with two cultures, reflecting our parental background. Or three or more, reflecting our grandparents. Those of us who moved from one society to another may have more than one cultural identity. Likewise, those who live in a distinctive culture within a culture may also identify at various times with more than one culture: an Asian American who lives in San Francisco may be aware of and claim an American identity when traveling to Egypt. A person who identifies as Italian American may be inclined to cook dishes that are reminiscent of their childhood and that confirm their cultural identity. Those who claim Italian American as an identity but were not exposed to traditional cuisines as children may be motivated to learn such cuisines in a search for authenticity. Cultural identities and food practices are intensely interconnected. Nearly all distinct cultural groups define themselves, in part, by their cuisine (Rappoport, 2013). There are striking variations in Chinese cuisines from the south or the west. Likewise, there are differences in American Southern barbecue when you travel from North Carolina to Tennessee to Texas. As with social identities, cultural identities and their cuisines provide a source of commonality, as well as difference from others. We generally favor our own culture’s cuisine and may consider it better than others. Negative stereotypes of outgroups—the groups we don’t identify with—may include the preparation and consumption of food we find unappealing or even repulsive. We could consider cuisine akin to language in terms of richness and the function of demarcating a culture (Belasco, 2005; Naccarato & LeBesco, 2012). Moreover, many religious faiths (i.e., Jewish, Muslim) have well-defined food practices. Adherence to cooking consistent with the practices of one’s faith thus becomes an expression of personal identity (being devout) and cultural identity. Many of us also culturally identify with a geographic region. For example, I was raised in the American South,

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and, on special occasions, I will cook biscuits from scratch; the biscuits represent a connection with that identity. My own family did not cook biscuits at home from scratch, so my habits represent the cooking of a dish that resonates with a social identity as I have reconstructed it. As we mentioned before, an individual’s awareness of and motivation to enact their social identities is stronger in situations where their membership is salient: in a sense, social context thus impacts who we think we are (Deaux & Major, 1987). For someone who immigrates to a new host country or is a child of those who did, cooking food consistent with their identity is important. For migrants, cooking their own cuisines provides a space in which they can affirm cultural identity claims through cooking, sharing, and consuming with fellow migrants (Murcott, 2019). Cooking practices, in fact, may also provide an important avenue for migrants new to a culture to resist the dominating culture (Heldke, 2003). The connection between cultural identity and cooking can be particularly important for immigrants (Segall, 1986). Charles Feldman and colleagues explored how cooking a traditional dish in a new culture evoked memories related to identity among Korean Americans (2019). The researchers conducted a series of focus groups with Korean Americans who had migrated to the United States and focused on the preparation of a traditional dish: kimchi. For the first-generation participants, kimchi was connected to memories of self, family, and their recent family history. They recalled mothers and grandmothers making the dish in traditional ways. For many, experiencing the smell of kimchii in trash cans and dumpsters became an important marker that they were in a Korean neighborhood. An American who married into one of the first-generation Korean families was accepted into the Korean culture because he tolerated the odors of kimchi preparation. We should note the importance of understanding the cross-cutting nature of identity: making kimchi in New Jersey was a way to re-create and reaffirm social identity as Koreans for the women in the focus groups. For men, who traditionally are not involved in the process of kimchi, the transplanting process was far less relevant. Commensal Identities Another relevant form of identity is one I term commensal identity. Commensal identity is a generally transient social identity emerging from eating a meal with other people. I would argue that commensal identity could function in a similar way to a social identity as it is quite well defined (you are either at the table or not). A majority of our commensal identities may be fleeting: we may eat together once and not think of it again in our lives. However, I have experienced a number of meals that I fondly recall much

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later, particularly the company of those around the table. Many times, the shared meal provided a chance to deepen a relationship with an acquaintance I only saw at meetings or conferences. In the workplace, people also engaged in lunch groups, from which a commensal identity also emerges. Thanksgiving and Identity The celebration of the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States provides a nice illustration of the relationship between cooking and identity. For Thanksgiving, US residents typically partake in extensive grocery store purchases and planning; cooking turkey, tofu turkey, or other high-profile proteins; adding a number of side dishes (including stuffing and gravy); and offering an abundant array of pies and other desserts. For many cooks, Thanksgiving provides the opportunity to express a social identity as American that is by no means limited to US citizens. Newcomer households may attempt a Thanksgiving dinner as a means of exploring their new host country. Others new to the United States may modify the Thanksgiving dinner to reflect their cuisine of origin. Thanksgiving dinner can affirm relational identities as family members and close friends join around the table. The presence of an extended family reinforces a family matriarch’s sense of connections. The first Thanksgiving celebrated by a romantic couple likewise affirms their developing bonds. Thanksgiving can also inform personal identities as the cook may choose to follow recipes, innovate, employ convenience foods and technologies, or prepare a turducken. All of these identities are informed not just by the food itself but also by the social nature of preparation and consumption: often there are multiple cooks in the kitchen. Thanksgiving can also be a source of conflict as the cook negotiates competing identities (e.g., mother and hostess versus granddaughter). Thanksgiving is also probably the most widely celebrated act of commensality in the American holiday calendar. Inviting guests to the family table, joining others at their table, or volunteering to help serve dinner to churchgoers or the disadvantaged are central to celebrating the holiday. Would Thanksgiving mean the same to us if there were no cooking—if turkey and other dishes arrived at the door ready to go? Would the sequence, enthusiasm, and drama be the same? ROLE IDENTITIES Another identity construct that is central to cooking is role identity. Originally described by sociological theory, role identity refers to identities emanating from the social roles that we occupy (Owens et al., 2010, Oyserman et al.,

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2011), such as mother, daughter, or cousin. What do we mean by role? Roles are sets of expectations associated with a people who occupy socially defined positions (Biddle, 1979). Influential approaches to role identities include George McCall and J. L. Simmons’s role identity theory (1966), which focuses on how individuals assign values to multiple roles. Sheldon Stryker’s identity theory concerns interactional and commitment aspects of role identities as well as their salience (Owens et al., 2010). Psychologist Peggy Thoits’s identity accumulation theory (2003) has focused on the positive impact of multiple social roles for mental health and well-being. Throughout most of our adult lives, we occupy multiple social roles and may claim role identities as a result. For example, I used to identify as a son, a brother, and a student. Currently, I identify as a husband, father, teacher, and mentor. I identify as one of the domestic cooks within our household, but I wouldn’t describe myself as the primary cook (thankfully, Roblyn fulfills that role). There are two major cooking roles we examine throughout this book: the domestic cook and the professional cook. What are the implications of being either of these cooks and how do they affect what we think about ourselves? The domestic and professional cooking roles are shaped by our identities: personal, social, cultural, and those associated with social roles. A thought exercise: Close your eyes and imagine a domestic cook. Keep your eyes closed and imagine a professional cook. What is different about the two images? In addition to contexts (home kitchen versus institutional) and clothing (regular clothes with an apron versus chef’s whites and a toque), what else would be different? Well, many people associate a woman with a domestic cook and a man with a professional cook. The Female Domestic Cook Role As we have discussed, women traditionally have carried out the responsibilities of primary domestic cooking (DeVault, 1991; Furst, 1997; Hochschild & Machung, 2003; Szabo, 2014). Charles and Kerr’s (1988) research in Britain documented how a “proper meal” is by definition carried out by the female domestic cook. Depending on class, the British families in their studies expressed that cooking was a vital part of their domestic roles (Charles & Kerr, 1988). Cooking joins other domestic activities including cleaning; caring for the sick, young, and old; and the maintenance of household resources. Like these other activities, a great deal of foodwork is invisible: it must be carried out in the household but is infrequently acknowledged as a form of labor. A gendered activity, cooking is closely connected to the construction, affirmation, and reaffirmation of female gender identity, which many women may be hesitant to give up (Furst, 1997).

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A domestic cook’s responsibilities extend beyond foodwork to entail emotional responsibilities: they are expected to be concerned with keeping eaters alive and maintaining their health (DeVault, 1991). Domestic cooks are expected to be concerned with whether their eaters are satisfied with their meal (DeVault, 1991). Domestic cooks must also assuage feelings of inequity and disharmony that arise because Johnny got to eat chicken fingers while Jenny had to eat the tabbouleh with mom and dad (Rawlins & Livert, 2019). There is significant overlap between the domestic cooking role and that of parent—specifically, mom. Expectations for being a good mom often include children’s (and perhaps partner’s) health and well-being. Cooks and moms are associated with nurturing behaviors and the responsibility for keeping everyone healthy within a household. Women are associated with not only the nurturing role but also the caring role within a household (Naccarato & LeBesco, 2012). From a feminist theory perspective, caring behaviors can be mapped into several dimensions, including a concern with eaters, “caring about,” maintenance of eaters’ health, “taking care of others,” and foodwork acts, “giving care” (Fisher & Tronto, 1990). Cooking for others can be construed as one of the gifts given by women to their household, rather than a commodity to be purchased (Murcott, 1982). What happens in households where the mom works and has a limited amount of time available for domestic duties? As it turns out, even when men and women are both employed, mothers spend much more time on cooking than fathers (Cawley & Liu, 2012, Rawlins & Livert, 2019). Even with a career during the day, women may experience the same traditional gendered expectations regarding their cooking. Many turn to prepared meals and other time-saving technologies, and—if one scrutinizes the marketing of such—one finds that a key claim of such products is an assurance of health and caring, known as “packaged care” (Naccarato & LeBesco, 2012). Among same-sex couples, the distribution of responsibilities for domestic cooking are more equitable (Goldberg, 2013; Solomon et al., 2005), a finding that has been confirmed in studies conducted around the world (Bauer, 2016). The female domestic cook performs in a context of expectations regarding parental care and nurturing. She cooks to please her eaters with healthy meals, represented by a formidable set of expectations faced by women in the domestic cooking role. As we will see, men likewise invoke a number of traditional gender roles to shape their behavior when they take on domestic cooking. The Male Domestic Cook Role When men take on the domestic cooking role within a household, they have had the option of drawing on one of several sets of traditional roles: they can

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engage in a feminine domestic cooking role, masculinities associated with a domestic cooking role, or behaviors consistent with the masculine professional cooking role (Szabo, 2014). As domestic cooks, men can engage in the femininities associated with the role. As we have noted, these encompass feeding and caring for a household’s eaters, as well as the requisite emotional engagement. Why would men be averse to these behaviors? Traditional masculinity norms discourage the expression of caring and feeding: they would represent a threat to traditional masculinities (Fielding-Singh, 2017). Is a man still a man if he becomes emotionally concerned about whether everyone enjoyed dinner or whether it was healthy? In many traditional and even contemporary societies, the answer is a clear “nope” (Furst, 1997; Szabo, 2014). More typically, men engage in a set of masculinities associated with the role of a domestic cook. It is important to recognize the complementarity of hegemonic masculinities and femininities: one exists in contradistinction to another (Adler, 1981; Szabo, 2014; Newcombe et al., 2012). For example, when cooking at home, men are more likely to engage in the immediate preparation and cooking (applying heat to the ingredients), rather than the cleanup before and after the meal (Boyle, 2014). Traditional expectations are different for dad cooks compared to mom cooks. Fathers are often perceived as less competent and having preferences for serving fast, processed, and junk foods and spending less time on planning and provisioning (Fielding-Singh, 2017). These expectations are an example of how hegemonic masculinity is carried out: by being perceived as less competent in the domain, male domestic cooks have lower performance pressures than female cooks and may be excluded or not held responsible for foodwork beyond cooking such as ensuring a healthy diet for all eaters (Newcombe et al., 2012). Equity in domestic cooking roles thus becomes limited by concerns around what the fathers or males in general would do (Fielding-Singh, 2017). As with other domestic activities, male domestic cooks may engage in foodwork as a leisure role. Because men are traditionally not expected to serve as the primary domestic cook in households where a woman may serve in the role, they can regard their cooking participation as a form of self-oriented leisure (Kimmel & Aronson, 2004; Szabo, 2014). As leisure, domestic cooking provides an opportunity for developing skills, creativity, culinary artistry, and challenges that are not subject to the daily requirements of keeping household eaters fed or even feeding everyone in the household when one cooks (Murcott, 1983). A leisure orientation permits the male domestic cook to distance himself from the same obligations as a female in the same roles, an exercise of power within the household (Hollows, 2003). In our study of American domestic cooks (Rawlins & Livert, 2019), we found that when both parents worked, the mother typically cooked for kids

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most of the time and was responsible for more mundane but essential meals such as breakfast, lunch, and weekday dinners. Husbands more often took over the domestic cook role on weekends. This activity might involve grilling (inside or outside), preparation of meats, and the inclusion of wine. Even on these occasions, women might still cook a meal for the kids (Rawlins & Livert, 2019). Weekends, special occasions, and contexts that are free from temporal pressures provide similar opportunities for the domestic male cook. As mentioned earlier, domestic cooking masculinities may imply less of an obligation to cook healthy food, which is consistent with the tendency for men to undertake riskier health behaviors in a number of domains (Hammons et al., 2021; Lyons, 2009). Consonant with those expectations is the association of meat, alcohol, large portions, and more adventurous or exotic food with masculinity (Drummond & Drummond, 2015), and the complementary association of fish, fresh vegetables, and salads with traditional hegemonic femininity (Gal & Wilkie, 2010). As Drummond and Drummond point out, men are more likely to eat a salad labeled a Western Salad than a Nature Salad while the opposite would hold for women. Male domestic cooks may be more willing to engage in purchasing meat and interacting with butchers (Newcombe et al., 2012). Jonathan Deutsch (2005) provided a rich description of how firefighters treat the role of cook, which may rotate among them from shift to shift. Albeit a feminized role (as a cook for the “firehouse”), firefighter cooks employ profanity and hypermasculine banter as they eviscerate an onion or chicken. Michelle Szabo’s recent study illustrates how men have adapted varying gender roles when taking on the role of a domestic cook (Szabo, 2014). She interviewed thirty men of varying backgrounds who lived in the Toronto area and regularly cooked at home. Using a mixed-methods approach— interviews, observation, and a cooking diary—the study reviewed how men draw on various blends of culinary masculinities and femininities. Many of Szabo’s male participants spoke of cooking in terms of traditional culinary femininities, using terms to express care and compatibility. They spoke of the importance of producing meals that their families enjoyed. They also tended to focus on their responsibilities to the household and their anxiety associated with achieving their goals for the meal. Other men in the study referred to their cooking in terms of traditional culinary masculinities. These often alluded to culinary challenges, experimentation, and cooking as a hobby or leisure activity. Several single men from Szabo’s study considered cooking an important strategy in dating. Sellaeg and Chapman (2008) interviewed young adult, single men in Vancouver with similar findings. Men invoked several feminine gender roles in discussing their own cooking, including the importance of healthy and regular meals and the valorization of cooking and eating at home, rather than

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eating out. Their subjects expressed their culinary masculinity when contrasting themselves to other men living alone who lived in a landscape of pizza boxes and fast-food containers. Cooking for oneself was an expression of masculinity, as it represented self-sufficiency and independence. What happens when one’s dad and mom both cook? In a rich observation of eight Yorkshire families, Angela Meah and Peter Jackson (2013) documented how the domestic kitchen and table may become sites of conflict, driven by assertion of gender roles. In their sample, women often had to defer to male partners when the latter cooked, taking on dishwashing duties and relaxing concerns about the nutritional content of meals, out of concern for their children’s health. Men also appeared far more concerned about asserting their cooking skills than women, through more extensive (and inefficient) use of kitchen equipment and the display of pseudo-professional knife skills to distinguish their competence from that of their female counterparts (who typically cooked the majority of meals in the household). The Professional Cook Role and Masculinity Another option for male domestic cooks is to draw on traditional culinary masculinities related to professional cooks. In many traditional cultures, men have assumed the cooking roles associated with religious observances and or sacrifices (Furst, 1997), perhaps owing their higher status in various cultures. With the advent of what became restaurants in France in the seventeenth century, we see the professional cook emerge. He (or she) cooks for money in a non-domestic space for their own profit or that of their employer. The paid cook is typically a trained cook, who has undergone some amount of training and is expected to have mastered a specific set of skills. Although women have worked as professional cooks since the advent of the profession, the professional cook has been traditionally gendered as a masculine. Occupations continue to be highly gendered and gender segregation at work has been found to be the most significant factor in the gender gap in wages (Shrider et al., 2021). With few exceptions, those occupations that are male-dominated pay better than those that are female-dominated. According to the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, just under a quarter (24 percent) of employed cooks in 2019 were women. In the most elite professional kitchens, women held only 16 percent of the head chef positions within the top US restaurant groups (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2014). Yet women have made great progress in traditionally male-dominated professions such as veterinary medicine, accounting, and pharmacy. Men who cook are doing what has traditionally been considered a woman’s domestic role, but in the context of professional kitchens, cooking has been transformed into a high-status, masculine pursuit. Some refer to this

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phenomenon as “precarious masculinity”—chefs need to show that they are real men despite doing women’s work (Bosson & Vandello, 2011). This means the necessity of enforcing boundaries between what a chef and what a home cook does. It also results in a professional kitchen culture that can be hypermasculinized. In most commercial kitchens, the predominately male work culture facilitates bullying and abuse, to the degree that such interaction is considered part of the informal socialization process (Bloisi & Hoel, 2008; Bourdain, 2000). Professional kitchens are also typically sexualized workplaces filled with sexual joking and teasing. The highly gendered nature of cooking roles can be observed around the world. It persists, although there has been some progress in weakening the strength of gendered cooking roles. They are so embedded that we find that men in the domestic cooking role often imbue their behavior with masculine facets: grilling with fire, wrangling proteins, and fetishizing equipment and techniques. In the contemporary professional kitchen, women cooks often take on masculine performances; a rich example can be found in Anthony Bourdain’s book Kitchen Confidential (2000). A quick survey of cooking shows such as Gordon Ramsey’s Hell’s Kitchen confirm this cultural gender role of hegemonic masculinity in the professional kitchen (Nilsson, 2013). Although televised reality shows tend to exaggerate social relations, they can nonetheless inform role expectations for those who have limited exposure to the professional kitchen setting. A trend in restaurant layout may have help to reduce some of the most negative aspects of the professional kitchen climate. You are likely familiar with an “open kitchen” concept: the wall that traditionally separates the front of the house from the back of the house has been removed and restaurant patrons can view cooks on the line preparing food. The “window” may be just a counter where the all-important transfer from back to front occurs. As chefs and cooks take on a greater burden of public presence (McBride & Flore, 2019), cooks must carry out their daily work under greater scrutiny. The private space of the kitchen with its attendant culture—yelling, frantic motions, harassment, and frustration—are brought more into the open. In their interviews with UK chefs in open kitchen venues, David Graham and his colleagues (2020) document how this spatial arrangement changes staff norms and awareness during service. Their respondents reported that, compared with previous closed kitchen layouts, cooks were less disdainful and disparaging of customers. Bullying declined in the open kitchen layouts. Women chefs reported less harassment as well. In a sense, the open kitchen layout weakened the strong masculine and offensive banter and interaction endemic to the professional kitchen. Open kitchen formats likewise can be considered an intervention that could have positive effects on employees. What is not clear is whether such a format simply drives negative behavior

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into less visible spaces and times during the shift. It is also not clear what the effects of open kitchens are on the fostering of camaraderie in the kitchen and between the kitchen and front of the house. This certainly seems like an intriguing question for future research programs. REDEFINING, RECONFIRMING, AND MAINTAINING IDENTITIES THROUGH COOKING Let’s return to a central theme in our discussion of identity—namely, that identities are constantly created, re-created, and maintained through our social interactions and social contexts. We can’t understand identities without understanding the interactions in which they are embedded (Mead, 1934). Cooking informs and is informed by a range of role identities, social identities, and cultural identities (Murcott, 1982). Not only is food produced in the kitchen, but identity is produced as well (Naccarato & LeBesco, 2012). Beyond claiming identities, cooking is also important to maintaining those identities. Identity maintenance is the ability of an individual to preserve identities over time. Psychological studies have linked identity maintenance to adjustment and well-being in later life. A growing body of research has linked cooking traditional cuisines to maintaining cultural identities. This process has been documented primarily among women, who may view cooking as central to their identities and a primary means of maintaining family and culture (DeVault, 1991). Cooking to maintain a cultural identity has been documented in research studies of Gullah women and the rice culture in the US Coastal South (Beoku-Betts, 1995); Goan identities (Beagan et al., 2015); New Zealanders (Wright-St. Clair et al., 2005); and Inuit in Canada (Searles, 2002). Cooking food to maintain identity in new locations is not always easy. Challenges include sourcing traditional ingredients, locating traditional equipment or appropriate kitchens, and the substitution of pre-prepared or convenience foods (Hadjiyanni & Helle, 2009). Maintaining gender identities through cooking can be challenged by health issues such as cancer or dementia. For example, Julie Locher and her colleagues (2010) interviewed thirty elderly cancer patients in Alabama regarding how their illness had disrupted cooking. For male patients, there was relatively little impact on identity. However, their female caregivers were often disappointed and frustrated that men would no longer eat their cooking. By contrast, female cancer patients experienced disruption of an important component of gender identity, in terms of providing care through cooking and felt a loss of control. Male caregivers responded to the disruption in divergent ways. Some expressed a sense of inadequacy or incompetence in being able to cook a meal for their female partner. When male caregivers were unable to

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take on the cooking role, the couples often relied on other female relatives, such as a daughter, to prepare food. This gender asymmetry is also evident in Geraldine Boyle’s (2014) study of the impact of dementia on cooking and identity. Boyle interviewed twenty-one married couples in the United Kingdom in which one of the spouses had been diagnosed with dementia. She also observed their household interactions around cooking. Her findings echoed those for cancer patients. When the husband was the dementia patient, disruption was fairly minimal. However, the men who had previously helped their wives cook felt more disabled due to their spouse’s rejection of their help. In contrast, half of the male caregivers were unwilling to assume the role of cook. Many bought prepared meals or ate in diners. Female relatives also provided meals to the couple. Interestingly, men were also likely to actively prevent their wife from cooking while the women were reluctant to acknowledge their challenges. In a sense, there were conflicts over the woman’s gender role as caregiver through cooking: the men wanted to assert control over their partner’s perceived limitations due to dementia. Many did not take on the cooking role in lieu of their wives. At the same time, the women were upset to lose such claims to caregiving. Changing Social Contexts and Cooking-Influenced Identities: Incarceration In 2020, there were roughly 1.8 million people incarcerated in the United States (Vera Institute, 2023). Incarceration significantly disrupts and paralyzes identities (Stearns, 2019). Claims to personal identities such as being a good person, a supportive person, and healthy are threatened; sociologist Erving Goffman referred to these as spoiled identities (1959). New personal identities, such as criminal or bad person, may emerge. Identity claims concerning social roles such as mother, father, caregiver, and cook are significantly challenged. Mother is one of the most valued identities in prison and women are particularly burdened by both separation and the inability to care (and cook) (Sterns, 2019). Inmates may often establish new and inauthentic identities in prison to protect their true self (Parsons, 2020) while others loathe to do so and lose pre-prison identities. A new social role must be assumed as inmate. Cultural identity claim bases—for which cooking may play an essential role in maintenance—may be disrupted (Ugelvik, 2011). The food served in prison is often of questionable nutritional value and flavor, and it is served with plastic utensils and disposable plates and bowls, which further threatens personal identities of being a worthy, respectable person (de Graaf & Kilty, 2016; Stearns, 2019) as well as the perception that one is being cared for (De Vault, 1991; Parsons, 2020).

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Adherence to a vegetarian identity becomes difficult. Not surprisingly, food turns out to be one of the more salient features to incarcerated life (Smoyer et al., 2015) as well as an important avenue through which identity claims can be made (de Graaf & Kilty, 2016; Smoyer, 2014). Making dessert can be a powerful cooking practice to reclaim identity in prison. In her focus groups with women incarcerated in the American South, Elizabeth Stearns (2019) described how “Jailhouse Martha Stewarts” (p. 612) sourced, smuggled, and created recipes based on available ingredients such as “coffee balls,” made from peanut butter, sugar substitutes, and instant coffee. Desserts were shared, reinforcing a “good mother” identity. Creation of homemade dishes using commissary ingredients provided women with a similar sense of accomplishment; the improvisational elements of the preparation harkened to the women’s past roles as mothers in which they had to fashion a meal for the household out of available ingredients, providing them with a sense of competence. Smoyer (2014) reports similar behavior among women incarcerated in New England, as they cooked, often surreptitiously, to reclaim personal identities of “good” and “healthy.” Although cooking may assist incarcerated men in restoring some threatened identities, it also can threaten gender identities and social roles though the acquisition of a traditionally feminine social role. In her ethnographic study of inmates in Danish prison, Linda Minke (2014) spent over one thousand hours observing, interacting with, and interviewing prisoners. She documented the organization of food groups among inmates with prisoners taking on varied cooking roles: cook, waiter, and dishwasher. Men who cooked tended to have a higher status in such groups. They often dealt with the threat to masculinity by invoking a professional cook culture with its hypermasculine norms. Dishwashers and waiters—a very necessary and “invisible” aspect of cooking—were regarded as lower status. Parsons’s interviews with formerly incarcerated men in the United Kingdom (2020) also document organized cooking groups in wings where such activities were permitted. Men who took on the role of cook for their groups prepared food on nearly a daily basis, rewarded with various contributions of ingredients and other resources. Not only did the men gain social interaction and a network of allies, but they could also claim positive personal identities in their selfless behavior. Other men in these groups did not actively cook each day but might make a dessert or other treat on the weekends. Male inmates also found ways to offset prior personal identities regarding health and fitness by putting great efforts into sourcing raw fruit and other healthy items though various channels. The establishment of positive identities has been linked to successful rehabilitation; doing so requires shirking negative identities and differentiation

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from others who maintain them (Smoyer, 2014). Those incarcerated can employ cooking to restore damaged identities (Parsons, 2020). Changing Social Contexts and Cooking-Influenced Identities: Displaced People and Seniors Moving away from one’s home country and culture can be a traumatic experience, particularly if the move is not voluntary. Migration is one of the most important human issues of the twenty-first century, with 65 million people not living where they choose to be. Leaving home does not just cut connections with social relations left behind; it may also prevent cooking the food of one’s choice and culture. Cooking such meals becomes quite important to maintaining one’s identity while living in disempowering situations and can help restore damaged identities. Cortada (2015) explored cooking among Syrians living in a migrant camp. Cooking provided the opportunity to restore social roles ties (i.e., mother or carer) as well as cultural identity by cooking familiar cuisines. Food preparation and consumption offer [refugee camp residents] a space and a time for the formation of family and friendly ties, the enactment of comforting rituals. The Syrian refugees find comfort, humanity in the ritual of cooking expression of cultural identities. (Cortada, 2015)

Cooking in a refugee settlement can become an act of reminiscence, a link to one’s personal history and that of one’s country. But perhaps most of all, the ability to cook in these camps mitigates refugees’ biggest complaint: sheer boredom. “In refugee camps, there’s not very much to do. Cooking your own food gives structure to your day, it gives control over your life” (Cortada, 2015). Shopping at the market becomes a social activity, preparing ingredients a way to keep the past alive in the present, and enjoying a meal a source of conversation and community. In the United States, many older persons sell their long-term residences and move into housing complexes or apartment buildings designated for seniors. This transition can be difficult, as the individual must transition to often much smaller living spaces, including more compact kitchens. For those who were primary cooks in their household, such a transition can threaten their cooking identity in addition to the loss of control, bereavement, and loss of place that may accompany it. In a study for the Allentown Housing Authority (Livert & Rawlins, 2009), we explored the topic of lunch at a senior housing complex consisting of two high-rise buildings. Each apartment had a kitchen and 75 percent of residents lived alone. A free lunch was served downstairs in a common area during weekdays. Our resident survey revealed that over

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three-quarters of residents preferred to prepare their own lunch in their apartment. Less than a quarter of residents took advantage of the free lunch; others ventured out of the complex to eat lunch at nearby restaurants. Despite living alone, most residents valued cooking over companionship, socializing at other times during their day. We did not ask, but we do speculate that the individuals who cooked regularly were likely the primary cooks for the former households and did so to reconnect with that identity. Of social psychological interest, I should also note that those residents who did take advantage of the lunch program were a defined group, thanks to the positive effects of commensality. They were so cohesive that there was some animosity toward newer residents, who were more likely to have been born outside the United States. REFLECTIONS ON COOKING AND IDENTITY The ubiquitous and nearly universal act of cooking can make us who we are, contributing to a sense of self and specific identities regarding our personality, our social relationships, our group members, and our cultures of origin. Likewise, our identities shape what we cook, for when, and how we feel about the activity thereafter. Although we may overlook it, we attribute substantial meaning to cooking. For those who experience an interruption of their cooking practices created by aging, incarceration, or migration, the threats to one’s identity are not trivial. We might modify the popular expression “you are what you eat” to “you are what you cook.”

Chapter 5

Thinking about Cooking Choices, Planning, and Creativity

Have you ever cooked spaghetti and tomato sauce? In North America, it is relatively easy. Aided by a box of pasta and a jar of sauce, the odds of a person successfully producing an edible and even enjoyable dish are fairly high. For those of you who have cooked spaghetti and tomato sauce in this manner recently, how much did you think about what you were doing? Did you carefully follow the instructions on the pasta and sauce and put together a sequence in your mind? Or would you describe yourself as having been nearly on automatic pilot, thinking about other things, listening to music, or watching a video? When did you decide to cook that spaghetti? Just then, that morning, or several days before? Did you add a creative wrinkle to the dish? Some oregano perhaps? Or could you not find a colander but happened to have a tennis racket available to drain the pasta? THINKING AND THAT CRUCIAL COOKING QUESTION We face the crucial cooking question and answer it tens of thousands of times in our lives: What am I going to cook? It is the simultaneous influence of sociocultural, material, temporal, and personal considerations that shapes how a cook answers this crucial question. He or she brings to the task a set of goals: What does he or she want to accomplish as the result of his or her cooking behavior? When we interviewed domestic cooks about their goals for cooking dinner, their top five included cooking that was healthy, liked by their household eaters, comforting, convenient, and well balanced. As we have noted, the influences on the cook’s decisions vary over time resulting in different goals from meal to meal. When our cooks kept a cooking journal for each dinner for two weeks, their top five 85

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goals were similar: liked by eaters, easy to cook, fast to prepare, convenient, and healthy. HOW THE COOK THINKS So far, we have outlined how sociocultural, physical, temporal, and personal dimensions impact the cooking decision that we make as many as three times a day. Within that ecological context, we can focus on what psychology can tell us about how cooks think. Much of our discussion is informed by the subdiscipline known as cognitive psychology. Emerging in the 1960s and 1970s and inspired by the parallel emergence of information sciences, the “cognitive revolution” in psychology saw the development of theory and research around human decision making, memory, cognitive structures and schemas, heuristics, and automaticity (Reis & Holmes, 2018). Dual-Process Approaches An important perspective on the process of thinking, decision making, and judgment is provided by the dual-process approach. Dual-process models hold that we use one of two paths to thinking and decision making: either an automatic and effortless path or a deliberative and more cognitive approach. An example of these two approaches can be seen in the practice of driving an automobile. If you have driven a car, you likely recall your first experiences behind the wheel. You had to concentrate on how much to turn the wheel to turn the car, as well as how much to press on the brakes to slow the car, and your first four-way stop may have taken several minutes to negotiate as you dealt with the challenges of driving the car, the physical setting of the intersection, and the behavior of other cars entering the intersection. Your thinking was quite deliberate, and doing so likely took all of your attention. Sound familiar? Let us think about how you approach a four-way stop now that you are a wise and experienced driver. Can you remember which stop you last negotiated? When you were doing so, you might have been listening to the radio, thinking about what to cook for dinner, or reminding yourself that you shouldn’t be texting while driving. You likely thought very little about going through the intersection; it was almost automatic. What was a deliberate and effortful act of thinking when you started to drive has now become automatic for you. Several sets of labels have been coined for this automatic-deliberate distinction, including system 1 versus system 2 (Kahneman, 2011), intuitive versus rational (Gilovich & Ross, 2016), and automatic versus reflective (Leonard et al., 2008). Common to these referents is the depiction of automatic

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processes as uncontrolled, effortless, associative, fast, and unconscious while deliberative processes are considered controlled, effortful, slower, and deductive. Some cognitive researchers suggest that, in contrast to dualism, automatic and deliberate processes can also be viewed as two ends of a continuum, in which cognitive processes range from one to the other (cf. Fiske & Taylor, 2017). Alternatively, recent theories have proposed that a tripartite model better fits how we think: in addition to the automatic and deliberative, there are also meta-processes—ongoing evaluations of how our thinking is going—that constitute a third component (Leschziner & Brett, 2019). What does this multiple-process perspective on thinking tell us about cooking? Cooking is clearly pluralistic, involving a range of cognitive processes varying from the automatic to the deliberate (Dayer & Jennings, 2021). Think about when you are cooking a meal: Which components of your behavior seem automatic? How much do you actively think about the process of boiling water for pasta or chopping lettuce while you are carrying out those processes? Probably not very much. How much do you think about whether the turkey is ready or whether there is sufficient seasoning in a soup? Probably quite a bit more deliberation is involved, compared with boiling water. As we learn to cook, nearly everything we do requires effort and deliberation. Some activities become more automatic and take less of our attention. Freeing our attention enables us to take on new challenges. Or our mind can simply wander. Perhaps you have heard of the term “cognitive miser”? Susan Fiske and Shelly Taylor (2017) coined the term to refer to our tendency to think about challenge only as much as we need to. Remember the four-way intersection: according to Fiske and Taylor, we are motivated to conserve our cognitive resources—our bandwidth. If we don’t need to pay so much attention to getting through the intersection, then we won’t. Sometimes this automatic thinking creates difficulty for us. What do you do when you want to slow down your car? You step on the brakes (an automatic process). However, if you are driving on an icy road, you are aware that slamming on the brakes on ice will result in a skid and think more deliberately about your speed. In these cases, our dual systems may conflict and cost us valuable time in responding (Kahneman, 2011). Although we may cook thousands of dishes in our lives, there may be very few occasions when we undertake such skilled behavior without effortful thought, particularly to deal with daily challenges of time, our consumers, available resources, and our goals for that meal (Rawlins & Livert, 2019). Effortful thinking is also required when the typically automatic components of cooking provide surprises. Boiling water for pasta requires our focused attention when the pot bubbles over, there is a fire, or we realize that we added sugar to the water rather than salt. We may switch back and forth

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rapidly between these modes depending on the situation (Leschziner & Brett, 2019). Researchers think that one cue we use to determine which mode to use is cognitive fluency or simply the “feeling of rightness” (Thompson, 2009). If we make a decision automatically and it feels right to us, then we are ready to move on. If we don’t feel a discernible “rightness” in our decisions or a sense of cognitive strain (Kahneman, 2011), then we devote greater cognitive resources and deliberately think about the issue. Expert Knowledge There has been considerable research investigating the nature of expert knowledge in highly structured and well-defined domains (e.g., chess, poker) to those that are more loosely defined (e.g., gardening, painting). Individuals acquire expertise faster in situations where there is regular and immediate feedback regarding their performance, in which there are multiple opportunities to practice, and in which the behavior becomes intuitive. Imagine using the brakes in your car: you have developed intuitive expertise in terms of when to start pressing them down and how much pressure to apply (Kahneman, 2011). A parallel in cooking might be the grilling of a fish filet: after firing (putting the fish on the hot grill) a certain number of filets, you may experience the feeling of expertise just like you expertly apply the brakes in your car. An analogy for the cooking expert can also be found on the chessboard. In several truly classic studies in cognition, Carnegie Mellon researchers William Chase and Herbert Simon (1973) examined the role of experience on memory. In their research paradigm, chess masters, Class A players, and beginners were exposed for five seconds to a chess board with pieces arranged from a game in progress. Each participant then had to reproduce the position of pieces on a different chess board in front of them. Masters (experts) more accurately recalled the arrangements of chess pieces and were able to reproduce them faster than others. Chase and Simon (1973) concluded that the chef masters were better at “chunking” the pieces and positions into their working memory. Through this process, an experienced cook is able to remember several dishes at once, each with its own variations (e.g., fish with potatoes, fish with tomatoes, fish without the sauce). In addition to memory processes, experts have advantages in observing action in real time. For example, Paull and Glencross (1997) found that expert baseball batters (based on batting average) were faster and more accurate than novice batters at predicting the type of pitch based on an 80-millisecond video. With expertise comes the ability to more quickly make judgments. Experts do appear to develop what seems like an intuition regarding what they do. Nurses, mechanics, and chefs often describe an almost instinctual

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ability to recognize patterns and make decisions. Kahneman and Klein argue that these experts have developed an extensive array of heuristics, shortcuts, and clues that enable them to employ more automatic cognitive processes (system 1) to arrive at a decision (2009). Such intuition doesn’t function in a completely effortless way: experts must continually adjust their thinking, taking into account the situation (Klein & Kahneman, 2009, p. 238). I vividly recall observing a chef instructor scanning a teaching kitchen of eighteen students and, with what approximated a superpower to me, quickly pointing out to me that the chef student three rows away would be having difficulties in about five minutes, as their preparation was heating far too quickly. (It was and they did.) Planning to Cook Cooking requires a cognitive activity that differentiates us from most other animals: we must plan (Davies, 2005). We think of a goal or future end state (the dish we want to eat and/or serve), identify a set of behaviors to get us to that state (what do I have to do as a cook), and carry them out (while watching the clock and evaluating our progress). A plan can be defined as the mental representation of the sequence of actions required to achieve a goal (Gilhooly, 2005, p. 72). Planning requires an initial representation of the problem in our mind. We search our long-term memory for the possible actions to achieve our goal regarding that problem; for some problems, we have various shortcuts and clearly defined sequences that come to mind rather automatically (e.g., make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich). These clearly defined sequences have also been termed scripts by cognitive psychologists (Schank & Abelson, 1977). For novel or less familiar cooking goals for which we don’t have scripts, we need to deliberate on what actions are appropriate for the problem at hand. We select a set of actions (plan). We also must remember that plan; we store it in our working memory, which is limited and short term (Ward & Morris, 2005). As we carry out the plan, we also evaluate how well things are going. Consciously monitoring subtasks requires an executive function, a broad term referring to our ability to generate plans, maintain focus, and alter our goals if necessary (Doherty et al., 2015; Suchy, 2009). Let us boil an egg for an example. Select a set of actions (microwave or stove, container, source of water, amount of water, timer); keep those actions in your mind; and evaluate how well you are doing. Water not boiling after five minutes? Do you need to change the plan (or just need to turn on the burner)? Whether nearly automatic or requiring conscious deliberation, all our meals are planned at least in the short term. A boiled egg takes far less planning than does making paella for dinner, but planning is required

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nonetheless. Think about it: planning is essential to not just cooking but also most of the other everyday tasks in our lives. How do psychologists study planning? Most planning studies employ a task that participants must conduct. As they are doing so, researchers examine how much time components of the task require, predictors of success and speed, or the effects of brain injury or normal aging, to name a few. Two types of tasks are used. In puzzle tasks, there is a very discrete goal and a well-defined set of actions that will attain that goal (Burgess et al., 2006; Rose et al., 2015; Ward & Morris, 2005). Researchers often employ in their studies puzzles that people have had limited experience completing. Researchers often use the Tower of Hanoi puzzle or Tower of London puzzle. In both, there are several wooden pegs set into a board. Rings are placed in an initial starting position on the pegs. The goal is to move the rings so that they assume a different pattern on the pegs. You probably played a variant of this game with plastic rings when you were one or two years old. Using unfamiliar tasks for research has strong internal validity: the researcher can be confident of the degree to which outcomes can be causally linked to brain function rather than prior experience with the puzzle. Errand tasks require participants to carry out everyday tasks that might involve shopping, preparing for a party, or financial planning. There are clear goals and content that are drawn from everyday life. Unlike puzzle tasks, errand tasks may be facilitated by prior experience and tend to be more complicated. Such tasks may be said to possess substantially greater external validity—that is, they parallel our actual day-to-day experiences. We will talk about one type of task—cooking a meal—shortly. If you looked inside your dad’s head while he was cooking, what would you see? That is, where does all the planning and monitoring take place? Look at his forehead. Behind the skull you will find the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which plays a key role in executive function and planning (Doherty et al., 2015: Phillips et al., 2005). The prefrontal lobes are responsible for higher-order cognitive behavior, including goal setting and temporal sequencing. Evolutionarily speaking, they developed most recently in humans. These are areas of the brain that are proportionally much smaller in dogs—for example—and are still developing in adolescent humans. Zooming in further on your dad’s brain, research indicates that the left prefrontal cortex may be responsible for the details in our plans, while the right prefrontal cortex takes on the role of synthesizing information across planning events (Grafman et al., 2005). How do we know these details about brain function? There are two general strategies used to understand how the brain plans for action. The first approach is to observe brains that are functioning normally (not impaired by physical insult, injury, or disease). Researchers capture static or moving

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images of the brain through the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRIs), electroencephalography (EEG), or computed topography (CT) while the participant engages in a planning task such as a puzzle or an errand (Morris et al., 2005). A second approach is to observe how individuals with brain impairments perform on planning tasks compared to those with no impairments (Phillips et al., 2005). The latter approach primarily employs either puzzle tasks, like the Tower of London, or errand tasks, which integrate many of the activities we engage in when cooking. As an example, the Multiple Errands Task requires participants to sequence eight different errands related to cooking, without a specific set of rules. Just imagine for a moment the number of errands required to produce a Thanksgiving meal. The Party Planning Task (Macleod, 2001) does just that: the participant must delegate nineteen tasks to three imaginary helpers and specify a temporal sequence. Older adults appear to have more trouble with the party task, violating some rules and making errors in time allocation. Older adults also tend to do worse in tasks with less context (e.g., Tower of London) than more context, as they are able draw on routines they have developed in familiar contexts, compensating for any loss of executive functioning or working memory (Phillips et al., 2005). As Burgess and colleagues (2006) point out, we do most of our planning in familiar situations such as cooking, in which we can rely on our stored preferences, or history of carrying out similar tasks and/or in similar contexts. Novel planning, as opposed to the repetitive nature of much of our planning, does not necessarily benefit from our lifetime or experience. Cooking is the subject of several tasks/games developed to assess the loss of executive functions and planning skills in adults with Alzheimer’s disease and other neurological impairments. Cooking behavior may be more sensitive to head injuries and the activity can reveal deficits among head injury patients compared to those revealed by standardized neurological assessments (Doherty et al., 2015). Moreover, food is one of the more engaging topics for seniors who are living with assistance or in nursing homes. One example of cooking behavior games is the Kitchen and Cooking game (Manera et al., 2015). The game is carried out on a computer where participants choose one of four dishes to cook: pizza, chicken breast, a salmon wrap, or yogurt cake. Tasks include selecting ingredients and equipment from various locations within a simulated kitchen, planning which sequence of actions is to be performed, and producing the dish. Production involves manipulating various onscreen icons with finger movements (i.e., turning a finger to stir). The game provides evidence of cognitive activities required for planning as well as how participants pay attention throughout the task. The Breakfast Task (Craik & Bialystok, 2006) is another computerized game that requires participants to cook five breakfast foods for simultaneous

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serving. Similar to real life, the participant not only cooks the meal but also must set the table. The game can be presented on between one and six screens. Rose and colleagues (2015) analyzed data such as the selection of start and stop times, cooking errors, and other task measures, identifying two dimensions of cognitive activities while cooking, the activity related to overall planning and the management of individual tasks. Indeed, researchers have found a significant correlation between brain injury and poorer performance on the Breakfast Task (Tanguay et al., 2014). So far, we have primarily discussed the cognitive and memory aspects of planning. We should not forget that cooking is truly a multifaceted experience and that cooks also draw on their sensory knowledge when planning a meal (Mosko & Delach, 2020; Sutton, 2010). Many cooks can recall the taste and experience of a dish when they set out to replicate (or alter) that experience. Not enough seasoning the last time you prepared the dish? A cook might make a mental note to use more seasoning. Plans that have become rote and automatic thus become more deliberate with the addition of that mental post-it note. For professional cooks, deep and extensive sensory knowledge plays an integral role in planning the next iteration of the dish (Leschsziner & Brett, 2019). Why Some Plans Don’t Quite Work Planning a meal subjects cooks to the same biases that we all experience when planning. Cognitive psychologists have identified several planning errors or fallacies, including the planning fallacy, loss aversion, planning weights, default bias, anchoring, and sunk costs. Nobel Prize–winning researchers Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman (Kahneman, 2011) have documented the planning fallacy across multiple applied domains. According to the planning fallacy, we often make plans that tend to be unrealistically close to best-case scenarios. Sometimes they are even more optimistic than a best-case scenario! The actual activity turns out to be over budget or over time (or both). For example, individuals might start a kitchen remodeling project with a manageable budget but end up spending twice the initial budget, due to optimistic estimates, unanticipated complications, and not taking into account the cost of similar projects. Of course, this delusional optimism is not restricted to the domestic kitchen. Roughly one in six (17 percent) of independent restaurants fail in their first year of operation for some of the same reasons (Luo & Start, 2014). This planning fallacy is consistent with our optimistic bias (Leonard et al., 2008). We often hope—despite evidence and prior experience—that we will win the lottery, complete something in superhuman time, or leave home thirty minutes late and somehow not miss our flight. One way to reduce

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these fallacies is to bear in mind our past history when completing similar tasks (you could term it your own personal base rate) (Kahneman, 2011). (Of course, when we are rushing to finish something that is overdue, we are not in much of a mood to keep records, so it is often a challenge to reconstruct just what happened.) Decision researchers have identified multiple domains in which people demonstrate loss aversion, or a sensitivity to the risk of negative outcomes out of proportion to their statistical likelihood. This motivation to disproportionately avoid loss is also termed negative dominance (Gilovich & Ross, 2016). Thus the title of Roy Baumeister’s memorably titled 2001 paper on the subject: “Bad Is Stronger Than Good” (Baumeister et al., 2001). In the article, Baumeister and colleagues review important asymmetries in how we make meaning of our world. The negative is much more potent than the positive a range of psychological phenomena: in daily life events, the effects of odors, social perceptions, emotional interactions in close relationships, mood induction, social support, and memory and cognition. As Kahneman (2011) points out, a single cherry will not improve our perception of a bowl of roaches (yuck); however, a single roach will definitively change our impression of a bowl of cherries. For the cook, a common negative outcome to be avoided is that the food is prepared improperly (burned carrots) or that eaters will not like the food (okra ice cream). When planning a meal, cooks may avoid more nutritional food or more novel dishes if there is the slightest chance of their rejection. Let us not forget the sunk costs fallacy. You might have noticed that people often tend to stay committed to activities that are likely to fail, even though that commitment brings with it costs in terms of time and resources. As cooks, we continue preparing a dish, even when there is clear evidence that it might not work out (something bizarre seems to be going on with the roux!) as a result of sunk costs considerations. Alternatively, we may continue to prepare dishes with recently purchased equipment that is not quite working the way it was supposed to, resulting in strange and failed outcomes. At some point, we stop trying and the equipment is relegated to gather dust. Another source of planning miscalculations is to our feelings. Think about a domestic cook’s mood when he or she begins planning the evening meal. What is the cook’s mood at that time? Ideally a good mood. Research studies have confirmed an affective generalization hypothesis concerning positive moods: that we take more risks and are more likely to engage in exploratory behavior when in a good mood than in a bad mood (Fredrickson, 1998; Shiota et al., 2014). Conversely, we are less likely to be exploratory in our cooking or to take risks when we are in a negative mood. A cook in a rotten mood may be more likely to go with a tried-and-true dish. The same cook in a good mood might try that kale entrée.

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Not only does your current mood impact your planning, but your anticipated future moods can be influential as well. Psychologists use the term affective forecasting to refer to our beliefs about how we will feel as the result of a future event. Think of how you thought you would feel when you graduated, got a new job, or broke up with a romantic partner. How did it turn out? For most people who anticipate a future event, the emotions they actually experience are often not as extreme as they anticipated. When you actually went through a graduation ceremony (if you did), did you experience remarkable joy and satisfaction? I hope so. But for many anticipated experiences, we are so caught up in the moment and seemingly trivial events that we end up being less happy than we anticipated. Along these lines, individuals who win the lottery are typically no happier than they were beforehand (Brickman et al., 1978) after a relatively short duration. Likewise, individuals who have lost a limb or have become paralyzed are often no less happy or satisfied with their life than beforehand, sometimes more so (Gilovich & Ross, 2016). But I do digress. Our anticipated feelings influence our meal planning, particularly our concern about avoiding negative outcomes and regret. Not only is the possibility of failure greater when we are trying to cook something new or employing a new process rather than one we are used to, but the negative affect associated with its failure is also greater. It turns out that we regret behaviors more when they are atypical for us. Trying something new or unfamiliar is volitional, compared to more automatic processes that may be associated with our regular fare. We are more likely to attribute failure to something that we did intentionally than something that we failed to do. If we used a new ingredient but forgot to use seasoning for the dish, we are more likely to blame the new ingredient (Kahneman, 2011). A cook who buys brand-name ingredients experiences less regret if something in the cooking process fails than if they had purchased a generic ingredient. For humans, the anticipation of regret is highly motivating (Kahnemann, 2011, p. 352). Planning Strategies and Styles of Domestic Cooks When we asked domestic cooks how they planned meals (Rawlins & Livert, 2019), a range of approaches emerged. Over a period of weeks, cooks in our study provided details of what they prepared for dinner, when they had planned it, and any constraints they faced on that occasion. A variety of planning strategies emerged, varying from those with a long temporal window to those with very brief ones. One strategy cooks reported was advanced planning: These cooks created a weekly plan and had a set day of the week for shopping—typically the weekends—as well as a set time for preparing meals to be consumed later in

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the week. Often these were cooks who had more extensive feeding responsibilities such as preparing food for older parents who lived nearby or those with challenging work schedules. You are likely familiar with the strategy of day-based planning: having a set meal associated with certain days of the week. This is otherwise known as Taco Tuesdays or Fish on Fridays or Ham Night. Whether cooks sourced their food from large supermarkets, community food markets, or community supported agriculture (CSA), many cooks reported the use of market serendipity: that is, taking advantage of an unanticipated purchase by building a meal around it. You go to the fish market, spot some salmon, and plan a meal or two around it. Or perhaps you find fresh Brussels sprouts at a roadside market or there is a sale on Rotel tomatoes. Many cooks, including your author, frequently employ the pick a protein approach: select a protein in the morning (perhaps setting it aside to defrost) and build a meal around it once you begin preparation in the evening. Survey the eaters refers to regular daily conversations with the cook’s intended eaters. A primary objective and measure of success in preparing meals is whether they are consumed, so this communication is essential and, at times, frustrating, depending on the changing likes and dislikes of partners, children, parents, and other eaters. Finally, many cooks use the ask the fridge strategy. Planning occurs à la minute: cooks open the refrigerator or pantry, peer in, and see what is available to cook. Although it might involve more energy consumption (keeping that refrigerator door open so long), many cooks are very comfortable with this strategy. Cooks in our research reported their preferred strategies, but they often had to employ more than one from week to week. Two general planning styles emerged. Some domestic cooks could be categorized as planful cooks, utilizing some of the strategies mentioned above. These cooks typically planned a meal at least a day before they prepared it. Other individuals we termed improvisational cooks. Those cooks typically planned a meal the same day they planned to cook it. A substantial proportion planned the meal immediately prior to preparing it. Changes in Planning When our household configuration changes, our preferred planning approach may change as well. One big change is the addition of a romantic partner as a cohabitant or as a spouse. Issues of gender roles, power and control, autonomy and identity may emerge as the individuals negotiate how food gets cooked, now that there are two eaters and one or two cooks. The resulting arrangements typically maintain and foreshadow cooking responsibilities if

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and when children subsequently join the household. To understand this period of transition better, Kemmer and colleagues (1998) interviewed twenty-two young Scottish couples who were about to either get married or move in together; they then reinterviewed the couples three months after household merger. Each partner’s preexisting arrangements for break and lunch did not radically change. However, the evening meal changed. The couples arrived at a consensus regarding what constituted a proper dinner, its timing, and typical menus. The sharing of tastes and preferences, along with the new experience of regular commensality was considered by many of the couples to foreshadow their relationship in the future. Planning activities increased. Likewise, the couples undertook new projects such as a diet, ones that they had not pursued when living separately. The death of a romantic partner likewise alters how domestic cooks plan. For the individuals used to planning and cooking for two, they must now become used to cooking for one. The relatively automatic act of planning for two becomes a potential source of grief; the additional leftovers from meals that the couple used to consume at one sitting likewise may be a source of sadness (Nickrand & Brock, 2017). Responding to this planningrelated source of grief, Heather Nickrand and Cara Brock have developed a program for recently widowed partners titled the “Cooking for One Series.” Participants attend sessions on cooking for one led by a chef, sessions on shopping for one, sessions on baking, and sessions on outdoor cooking. To address negative feelings associated with planning and cooking meals, all workshop activities were carried out in groups or pairs. During these interactions, participants were encouraged to share cooking memories and memories of their partner. Food Waste and Leftovers Is food waste evidence of a planning failure? The answer depends in part on how you define food waste. Let us distinguish between food losses and food waste. Food loss is generally considered the non-use of edible food due to the first stages of the supply chain: agricultural production and post-harvest activities such as transportation and storage, processing, and distribution to point of sale (Gustavsson et al., 2011; Porpino et al., 2015; Principato et al., 2018). In contrast, household food waste refers to the unintended loss of food in the consumer process. This includes food that was not consumed but was edible at one point in time (e.g., spoiled milk); food that is edible but that the consumer does not eat (e.g., bread crusts); and food that cannot be eaten (e.g., eggshells and onion peels) (Gojard et al., 2021; Porpino et al., 2015; Principato et al., 2018).

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The costs associated with food loss and waste are astounding. A third of all food produced on the planet is lost (UNDP, 2014; Zepada & Balaine, 2017). Losses occur throughout the supply chain; however, pre-consumer food loss accounts for more non-use in developing countries, whereas food waste accounts for more of the non-use of food in developed countries (Porpino et al., 2015; Zepeda & Balaine, 2017). In the United States, household food waste is estimated at roughly $1 trillion (Kim et al., 2020). So, is this huge global waste due in part to poor planning? What can a psychological perspective on such waste tell us? There is relatively little research on the psychological influences on household food waste (Romani et al., 2017). We can conceptualize food waste as not a one-time event but as a behavior embedded in ongoing routines that have been established over the months and years as the domestic cook provisions and cooks for the household. As we’ve noted earlier in the chapter, routines lift the burden of thinking about what to do. This routinized knowledge includes the experiences based on smell, vision, feel, and sometimes even taste to decide whether an ingredient is spoiled— that is, whether it is no longer edible and should be discarded. Similar routinized perceptual activities are employed when we shop for food. The fresh produce area in most grocery stores is witness to shoppers handling and smelling various fruits and vegetables to gauge their appropriateness for the household. Shopping Routines A number of our shopping routines contribute to subsequent food waste (Gojard et al., 2021, Romani et al., 2017). One such habit is simply neglecting to check food dates prior to purchasing an item. Many of us also tend to purchase more perishable food than we need at one time (Porpino et al., 2015). Perhaps we think we will eat more healthily than we end up doing. In many cultures, overprovisioning is not in error but intentional: the ability to accommodate extra people at the table at a moment’s notice is valued as an indicator of good hospitality. During the Covid-19 pandemic, supply chains were interrupted and many were anxious regarding available food. As a result, shopping habits were often disrupted and many people tended to overpurchase and hoard food (Rodgers et al., 2021; Wang & Na, 2020; Wunderlich, 2021). Preparation Opportunities for food waste also occur during preparation when portions of food are typically discarded (Romani et al., 2017). For example, we usually don’t eat banana peels, lettuce cores, onion skin, eggshells, or chicken bones. This distinction between keep and cook or reject and toss in the trash depends

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on our cuisine, culture, and cooking practice. It is important to distinguish between inedible (e.g., a pork bone excluding the marrow) and unpalatable food, which is typically discarded during preparation according to a particular cuisine (e.g., fish heads). Storage According to Romani and colleagues (2017), nearly a third of households reported food waste due to shortcomings in storage. There are two major culprits: expiration dates and proper storage techniques (Porpino et al., 2015). Food that is marked with an expiration date often expires while being stored. First, the cook may not notice expiration dates when purchasing the food. Second, cooks may forget about the ingredient or not prepare the dish for which the product was purchased and find that it has expired (Porpino et al., 2015). For food that is not dated, the cook must rely on their own senses to determine whether it is spoiled and needs to be discarded. Each cook develops their own perceptual skills regarding spoilage that depend on feel, smell, look, taste, and sound (ever shake a container of spoiled milk?). What information is relevant to cooks when sorting through stored food? Insight into the cook or toss process is provided by Gojard and colleagues’ (2021) refrigerator study with French domestic cooks. In the study, participants were told to pretend that they were staying at a friend’s apartment for a few days and needed to sort through the existing food before they went shopping to see what to retain and what to discard. Items included meat, cheese, vegetables, convenience food, and leftovers. Participants could smell and handle but not taste the items. Most items were discarded by participants based solely on visual inspection, while about a sixth of items were smelled. None of the items actually had expired, but several did not have dates. Roughly 30 percent of the food was discarded; an average of thirteen out of eighteen unspoiled/unexpired items were retained. For the purposes of retaining food, the cooks’ perceptions—informed by daily practice—were more important than expiration dates. One potential way that future interventions could reduce domestic food waste is to retrain domestic cooks in terms of how they use perceptual information to assess whether food should be discarded or retained. Planning The lack of planning for shopping and lack of meal planning contribute to food waste in the household, accounting for nearly a quarter of discarded food (Romani et al., 2017). Effective planning involves taking inventory of the pantry or larder, planning meals, and implementing strategies for leftovers. In our own research with domestic cooks (Rawlins & Livert, 2019), we found

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that individuals used some form of shopping list on most purchasing trips. However, the lists were often incomplete and/or cooks bought items at the market on impulse, due either to pricing or to inspiration. Eliminating domestic food waste thus requires a significant change in routines. Given the nature of automatic decision making and the routinization of cooking, interventions to change how one prepares, judges spoilage, and stores food requires deliberation and time. As Romani and colleagues (2017) note, planning would help reduce waste, but altering such routines for management of food once acquired has the greatest potential for reducing waste. Leftovers Let’s talk about those leftovers for a moment. Although negatively portrayed in the popular media and food advertising, we should pay respect to leftovers. Many of our most popular dishes—chilis, soups, casseroles, kimchi, curry—are the result of cooks finding innovative ways to consume food left after a meal (Watkins, 2022). Watson notes that classic French sauces were developed, in part, to disguise leftovers so they could be served in restaurants. We should note the many advantages of leftovers. In our interviews with domestic cooks (Rawlins & Livert, 2019), we found a wide range of perspectives on leftovers. Domestic cooks often considered the production of leftovers a success: extra portions of a dish liked by the household that could be prepared quickly on another occasion when time was lacking. Leftovers also gave cooks a sense of accomplishment in terms of economy and avoidance of waste. Cooking one meal provides food for two. Few cooks complained to us about the presence of leftovers. Instead, their challenge often was to come up with something novel and accepted by the household to prepare. Leftovers themselves may be a source of waste due to not being served before spoiling (Porpino et al., 2015). For example, Romani and colleagues (2017) reported that nearly 10 percent of food waste involved spoilage of leftovers. Waste in the Commercial/Institutional Kitchen Food waste in commercial and institutional kitchens is also substantial. As noted earlier, in developed countries the greatest amount of food waste is in the latter portions of the supply chain. According to WRAP (2013), the primary causes of restaurant food waste occur in preparation (45 percent), storage (21 percent), and food served but not consumed by patrons (23 percent). Studying professional kitchens in Italy, Principato and colleagues (2018) distinguished kitchen food waste (loss prior to serving the dish) and consumer food waste (not consumed by the patron). Roughly a sixth of food prepared in restaurant kitchens was wasted, typically through poor preparation or spoilage. This included a significant portion of bread and fresh vegetables.

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Once served, roughly an equivalent amount (16 percent) was not consumed by the patrons; breads and fresh vegetables were significant types of waste. There are a number of entry points in the process of preparation and consumption that may offer opportunities for psychological interventions that reduce waste. On the preparation side, increased training to recognize spoilage, proactively increasing the yield from fresh and baked ingredients, and an examination of the social psychological context in which food is wasted may be efficacious. Some studies suggest that the quantity of wasted food is not tracked in professional kitchens and—when it is—is underestimated (Filimonau et al., 2023). Methods to reduce pre-consumption waste includes using the oldest ingredients first, demand forecasting, and better training in the trimming and preparation of meats and other raw ingredients (Naikoo et al., 2021). However, any such training has to fit the standards and expectations of kitchen staff and the owners. An oddly shaped baguette might be edible and tasty, but the kitchen staff may hesitate to serve it. Reducing waste during consumption is tricky. Consumers may overorder and then not take the extra food home. They may perceive doggie bags as messy or breaching norms, dependent on the establishment and the social context around the table. Can restaurant patrons learn to accept imperfect breads and slightly blemished vegetables and return to the restaurant again? Given the tremendous amount of food waste as well as extensive food insecurity, such innovative approaches to reducing commercial food waste are highly desirable. Before we leave our leftovers, we should note that even restaurant employees are often quite willing to scavenge uneaten or otherwise discarded food due, in part, to their recognition that much food is discarded due to quality control or regulatory issues (Watkins, 2022). CREATIVITY IN THE KITCHEN We now turn to another important aspect of thinking about cooking—namely, creativity in the kitchen. There is a tremendous body of psychological research concerning the antecedents and consequences of creativity, personality correlates thereof, and social influences on creativity (Karwowski & Kaufman, 2017). Surprisingly, actual psychological research on creativity and cooking has been fairly limited (Mosko & Delach, 2020). What do we mean by creativity? One traditional conceptual definition of creativity, drawn from John Dewey’s work, refers to an outcome or product produced by the cook (or artist or musician or builder or attorney) that is both novel and appropriate. That is, to be creative, an outcome must embody some degree of originality and has to be appropriate for the context. Appropriateness refers to the degree to which the creative work is feasible; it fits the social, physical, and

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other constraints of the situation (Beghetto et al., 2015; Leschziner & Brett, 2019). Think of a highly creative Broadway musical, such as Hamilton. Not only does it have novel qualities in terms of music and casting, but it is also appropriate for the Broadway context. It was written, composed, and visualized in a form that could be produced on Broadway. Thinking about producing a new musical based on the Hindenburg disaster? It might be difficult to have an 800-foot zeppelin explode and burn each night in a 44th Street theater. The creative producer must figure out how to make that original musical fit the theater, not to mention the budget. Cropley and Cropley (2010) have further distinguished functional and aesthetic aspects of creativity. Functionality refers to the satisfaction of the goals pertaining to the creative act: we want to enjoy a musical or think a food is tasty or that a work is both feasible and aesthetically pleasing. We seek to be entertained by a musical and expect a dish to taste good and be satisfying. Alternatively, we may place a higher premium on aesthetics. Serving leftovers in a new way is creative, high on functionality but potentially low on aesthetics (Beghetto et al., 2015). For example, reusing the leftovers from a Mexican meal by combining them into a pie might be tasty but not necessarily aesthetically appealing. Maryann McCabe and Timothy de Waal Malefyt (2015) have distinguished between backward and forward creativity. Backward creativity is the one we are most familiar with. It refers to judging the creative act on a product or outcome. A shrimp milkshake might be an example: the processes employed to create the drink are quite standard for making milkshakes (except deshelling the shrimp), but the outcome is novel. When we think about creative geniuses, we think in terms of backward creativity (e.g., Mona Lisa, Beethoven’s Ninth, Caesar salad). Forward creativity refers to originality in terms of the process, such as acts of cooking improvisation: changes in our practice that accommodate social, temporal, or other constraints exemplify forward creativity. This is a very useful distinction in that it permits us to classify innovation in the practices employed by the domestic cook as forward creativity (McCable & Malefyt, 2015; Rawlins & Livert, 2019). Even when the cook endeavors to prepare a dish according to a specific recipe, forward creativity may occur due to timing, ingredients, or equipment. Forward creativity in domestic cooking is not realized in new dishes “but rather in small changes or appearance or new names that signal difference from a familiar base” (McCabe & Malefyt, 2015, p. 56). Creativity in the professional kitchen may predominately involve backward creativity, such as a new dish or menu. However, it is likely that episodes of forward creativity are required to get through service every day. Our conclusion: creativity may be found in the practice of any cook, domestic or professional (Mosko & Delach, 2020).

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Facets of Cooking Creatively What type of thinking leads to cooking creativity? Recall that we distinguished two primary types of thinking and decision making: automatic/ impulsive (Type 1) and deliberate (Type 2). In creative endeavors, individuals use both as ideas are generated (more impulsive) and evaluated (more deliberate). Leschziner and Brett (2019) note that it is our ability to switch quickly from improvisation to evaluation and back again that may play a critical role in cooking creativity. In their interviews and observations in forty-four New York and San Francisco restaurants, professional chefs employed both types of thinking in the creative work. Interestingly, whether chefs tended to rely on automatic or deliberate thinking often depended on the cuisines they cooked. Chefs who cooked mostly traditional cuisines or more standard menus tended to employ Type 1 thinking in their creative work, relying on sensory knowledge established over thousands of hours of cooking, and heuristics that derived from their daily practice. In contrast, Leschnizer and Brett found that chefs who specialized in more innovative or experimental cuisines tended to be more analytic in their thinking; creativity required more effort and focus, along with more Type 2 thinking. Simulation is a critical component of creative cooking: a cook relies on her own sensory knowledge and physical memory to anticipate how a change or innovation in preparing a dish will taste. (Don’t have Swiss cheese? Would cheddar work?) Both domestic and professional cooks develop sensory skills over time, enabling them to evaluate a new idea with less and less cognitive effort. Let us try it. Think about a grilled cheese sandwich: What does it taste like, look like, or smell like? What does a well-prepared grilled cheese sandwich feel like when you pick it up? Now, imagine that you find some chopped dates in the kitchen; why not add them to your grilled cheese sandwich (Leschziner & Brett, 2019)? Can you now imagine the differences in taste, smell, or even texture in the sandwich due to your creative idea? Creativity in the kitchen significantly depends on the embodiment of the experience. As we have mentioned, creativity in cooking—domestic or professional— occurs within a social context with social relations, constraints, and temporal limitations. Therefore the grilled cheese sandwich example in actual practice might require you to consider the taste preferences of those you are cooking for, their dietary restrictions, and their willingness to experience new tastes. Creativity in cooking requires both sensory and physical skills and memory, but it also involves the physical space in which we cook. Familiarity with our kitchen enables us to more rapidly evaluate novel processes or activities. Where can the ten dozen cookies cool? How do we decant the gallon of seafood stew? Where can we clean the red snapper? Physical interactions with

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our kitchen over time create memories of bodily experiences that can act to scaffold our creativity. We enjoy creating things. Research in which participants record their activities and feelings in a daily diary confirms the links between creativity and positive affect. Individuals are more likely to engage in creative activities when in a positive mood (Karwowski & Kaufman, 2017). In addition, creative activities can lead to more positive affect and flourishing after the activity (Conner et al., 2018). Cooking—whether at home or at work—can be a creative endeavor and creative endeavors can be one way in which we fully realize our potential as human. Abraham Maslow’s well-known theory of motivation (1970) posits three levels of human needs. Maslow considered self-actualization the highest-level need: the ability to feel as though one has realized one’s own potential. He considered those in creative occupations likely to attain this highest level of his pyramid. So, does creativity in cooking count as self-actualization? Mosko and Delach’s study of college students (2020) indicated cooking was rated highly as a creative outlet. In Daniel and colleagues’ (2011) interviews with twenty Israeli men and women, many individuals reported that cooking did, indeed, satisfy the need to be creative. Many aspects of the cooking process were seen as creative: choosing the meal, selecting a preparation method, presenting the food, and improving on that day’s constraints. Not surprisingly, cooking satisfied physiological needs. Daniel’s participants also reported that cooking fulfilled a sense of security and control: a cook typically exerts control of the kitchen space. Serving a meal is also a form of social control as a cook may direct when and where to eat, who sits where, and, of course, what his eaters consume. In our study (Rawlins & Livert, 2019), cooks who considered themselves creative often cited their willingness to try new ingredients and procedures. Using up ingredients, working without recipes, and being curious were other reasons identified as creative. Thus, cooking creativity is closely related to an openness to experimentation, rather than the backward creativity noted above. As with other emotions, cooks reported that cooking in a time scarcity situation makes them feel not only less happy but also less creative.

Chapter 6

Feelings about Cooking The Key Roles of Motivation and Affect

I like soup and dishes that are soup-like. My soup experience was initially limited to Campbell’s soups. As I grew older, I’ve grown to enjoy French onion, borscht, miso, gazpacho, matzo ball, and many others. Soup is typically served hot, but many great soups are served cold. Did you know that research psychologists often use the terms hot to refer to emotions and motivations and cold to refer to cognitive processes? Our hot affective soup includes emotions, moods, motivations, and distress. Our colder cognitive soup includes mental processes underlying attention, memory, perception, and decision making. In this section we will discuss cooking in reference to emotions, motivations, and stress. Ready for some hot chicken soup? Read on! WHAT IS AN EMOTION? At their most elemental, emotions are reactions to events in our environment. Precipitating events may be physical (e.g., an explosion), social (e.g., seeing an old friend), or intrapsychic (e.g., remembering that we forgot a birthday). Emotions are our reactions, positive or negative, which entail physiological responses, subjective experiences, and behavioral tendencies (Gross, 2015; Lazarus, 1991). Emotions may have very rapid onsets and last for a short period of time. Emotion theory and research is a substantial area within psychology. It is also a very contested area (Mendes, 2019): there are a number of disagreements and debates, particularly in the past thirty years, as psychologists “rediscovered” emotions after the cognitive era that dominated psychological research in the late twentieth century. What are some of the theoretical approaches to understanding emotions?

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Evolutionary and Somatic Theories Devoting a book to the topic of emotions across species, Charles Darwin detailed variations in facial displays among various species, including the universality of emotional displays in humans (Darwin, 1872). Current evolutionary psychologists study emotions as well as the brain structures that underlie human emotional reactions. Somatic theories of emotion posit that we have immediate physiological reactions to emotionally evocative stimulus; our emotional experience is based on the physiological reaction. Emotion theories, including the James-Lange (yes, William James, founder of American psychology fame) and Cannon-Bard, are examples of somatic theories. Basic Emotion Theory A recent approach is basic emotion theory, associated with psychologist Paul Ekman. Ekman proposed that all humans possess six basic emotions: enjoyment, anger, disgust, fear, surprise, and sadness (Levenson, 2011). These emotions are thought to involve very specific facial expressions and physiological responses thought to be universal (i.e., recognizable in any human culture). Each emotion is thought to arise from specific events in the environment (e.g., disgust in response to repulsive food or other matter). Considerable research since the 1990s has provided support for the basic emotion theory, but not completely (Barrett, 2006; Levenson, 2011; Lindquist et al., 2012). Appraisal Theory According to appraisal theories, emotions are dependent on cognitive processes that occur in reaction to a stimulus (Lazarus, 1991). In contrast to the basic emotion approach, appraisal theory emphasizes the subjective nature of interpretation: the emotions we experience arise from our interpretation of a situation and these interpretations can vary from person to person. A situation that makes me embarrassed might make you angry, for example. In both cases, the situation matters to us: unimportant things or things that we don’t value are less likely to elicit emotions (Lazarus, 1991). Psychological Construction of Emotions Another viewpoint on emotions emphasizes variations between cultures in the acquisition and meaning of emotions. These psychological construction theories view emotions as embedded in specific social milieu; one cannot disentangle a set of universal emotions from the sociocultural setting in which they are embedded (Gross, 2015; Mendes, 2019). The constructionist view holds that emotions can be viewed in terms of a core affect that consists of a

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valence (ranging from positive to negative) and level of arousal (ranging from low arousal to high arousal) (Barrett, 2006). What can we conclude so far about emotions? As we discuss emotions and cooking, we will use the general idea of emotions as individual responses to an event in our social world. These responses depend on a subjective appraisal: the meaning that we impart to an event is most important. Our goal is not to single out a best approach to emotions; rather, it is to appreciate the differing psychological perspectives on them. EMOTIONS AND FOOD As noted earlier, this book’s primary focus is a psychological understanding of food preparation (cooking) rather than food consumption (eating). However, when we cook, we also eat: during preparation (tasting for flavor or snacking on scraps) as well as when the food has been served on the table. In addition to his or her own consumption, the cook anticipates what emotions will be experienced when eating their creation. Thus we need to turn for a moment to the consumption of food and emotions. Emotion-Elicited Foods Are there specific emotions that we associate with particular foods? In a series of studies, Bernard Lyman (1989) asked various college students to imagine that they were experiencing over twenty specific emotions including amusement, anger, fear, guilt, joy, and sadness. Students then indicated what foods they would want to eat while experiencing that emotion. Positive emotions, such as amusement or joy, were associated with healthy snacks, meat, or vegetables. Participants indicated a preference for energy-dense snacks when experiencing negative emotions. Yes, it may not come as a surprise that we turn to chocolate or potato chips during those dark times. Other lines of research have also investigated the link between emotions and food. Olivier Robin and colleagues at the University of Lyon (Robin et al., 2003) have identified a relationship between basic taste sensations and specific emotions. They asked thirty-four volunteer participants to sample liquids with flavors corresponding to the four tastes (salt, sweet, bitter, and sour) while connected to equipment measuring galvanic skin response, skin blood flow and temperature, and changes in heart rate. Significant differences in physiological patterns of reaction to the four tastes emerged. For example, a bitter taste evoked a physiological response similar to that of disgust and anger. A sweet taste evoked happiness or surprise.

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Food-Elicited Emotions We have seen how emotions influence our food preferences. Let us now turn to the opposite relationship: how food elicits emotions. When cooking, we may have a specific emotional goal for a meal in terms of ourselves and others who will eat the meal. We may prepare a meal that is someone’s favorite dish because we expect that it will make them happy. We may prepare a dish we know will remind someone of their childhood. We may prepare a dish to remind a partner of a romantic dinner shared in the past. Food marketers too are highly interested in the emotions that various foods evoke as a means of creating new tastes and improving old ones. Many food researchers use the EsSence Profile questionnaire (King & Meiselman, 2010) to assess the affective impact of a food. To measure its affective impact, a participant samples a food and then completes an inventory consisting of thirty-nine specific emotions. For example, salty-flavored crackers evoke a distinctive emotional pattern: high in calm and significantly lower in aggressiveness (King & Meiselman, 2010). How would you describe your emotions as a result of tasting saltine crackers? Are they calming for you as well? One shortcoming of measurement approaches such as the EsSence is that they do not provide insight into the rich context in which food memories—thus emotions—are constructed (Piqueras-Fiszman & Jaeger, 2014). Maybe saltines evoke memories of very bland soup? To identify the multiple influences of food on emotions, Dutch researchers Pieter Desmet and Hendrik Schifferstein asked participants to indicate whether they had experienced each of twenty-two emotions when eating food, what food elicited that emotion, and the reason for their feeling (Desmet & Schifferstein, 2008). Students recalled far more positive (e.g., joy, satisfaction) than negative emotions (e.g., disgust, anger). Desmet and Schifferstein identified five general sources of emotions. These included physical aspects of the food such as taste, smell, or texture. Participants reported that emotions also were connected to the consequences of consuming the food, both actual (e.g., we feel stimulated from coffee) and anticipated (e.g., that we will feel good after eating a salad). Emotions were also elicited by the personal meanings associated with the foods as well as cultural meanings of the food. Finally, the social context in which the food was consumed shaped emotions, such as emotional reactions to the cook or to others sharing the table. How does time impact our emotional experience of food? As mentioned earlier, emotions are typically short in duration and may quickly change. German researchers examined emotions over time as a result of eating a snack. Participants consumed either an apple or a chocolate bar at varying times throughout the day over the course of a week. Emotional reactions were reported five, twenty, sixty, and ninety minutes after the snack. Overall, eating

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an apple or chocolate bar was associated with more positive emotions than no snack at all. It would not surprise you to know that participants reported more positive emotions from the chocolate. However, chocolate-induced emotions were at first positive, but as time went by, participants eventually felt guilt and negative emotions. Not only can the same food elicit divergent emotions, but the pattern of emotional reactions also varies over time. Moving from Germany to Spain, Piqueras-Fiszman and his Spanish colleagues examined reactions to apples and brownies (Piqueras-Fiszman & Jaeger, 2014), also with the goal of understanding the role of temporal contexts on affect. Their study wasn’t quite as much fun: 157 adult participants viewed images of apples and chocolate brownies rather than eating them. They then reported how they would feel when consuming the snacks during breakfast, a midday snack, and a special dinner. Overall, the chocolate brownie elicited over twice as many emotions as the apple (again, are you surprised?). We note that the chocolate treat once again led to mixed emotions! The same snacks at dinner elicited stronger emotions. The afternoon consumption context was associated with worry and eagerness, breakfast with activity, and dinner with affection. Here we see the joint influence of time of day and individual appraisals on food emotions. The emotion of that joy derives from the immediate experience of eating transforms to the emotion of regret from reflecting on the implications of the experience (I’m going to gain weight!). The influence of food-elicited emotions can be long lasting. Why do some foods elicit emotions so readily? Let us suppose that I ate a quart of cookie dough ice cream immediately after I broke up with a romantic partner. After finishing the quart (and scraping the underside of the lid), I felt better. That sense of relief may also be part of my memory for that cookie dough ice cream. Food aromas play a key role in our recall of food-elicited emotions. You can probably recall a smell that transports you to a favorite food consumed in the past. One of the reasons that food functions so well as a wayback machine is physiological. When you breathe in the smell of that apple pie, the aromas are perceived by the olfactory system as directly connecting with the limbic system, including the amygdala and the hypothalamus, which both deal with emotions as well as the hippocampus, which in turn sets down memories (Herz, 2018). Comfort Foods Comfort foods are a powerful illustration of food-elicited affect. Comfort foods refers to foods that are recognized for providing positive emotions and solace and which are often consumed in response to negative events (Locher

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et al., 2005), such as loneliness (Troisi & Gabriel, 2011). What becomes a comfort food is socially constructed: First, there is cultural agreement that certain foods can make us feel happy. Ice cream, cookies, chocolate, and macaroni and cheese come to mind in the United States. Variations in comfort foods may also be idiosyncratic; sardines and crackers may be comforting to some, whereas macaroni and cheese is the go-to for others within the same culture. In addition to their socially constructed nature, the preparation and consumption of comfort foods are often connected to important social relationships in our lives (Locher, 2002). What becomes a comfort food for us emerges from our interactions with others, frequently through early family interactions. To further understand what becomes a comfort food, Locher and colleagues (2005) asked American college students to bring a comfort food to class. Students shared why the foods were comforting to them. Some were nostalgic: the food conveyed memories of caring for others or being cared for, of sharing with significant others, and of one’s family of origin. For others, comfort foods were those viewed as indulgent, that participants felt guilty after consuming (remember chocolate?), or that represented important rewards or motivators. Other participants reported that comfort foods represented convenience (e.g., microwave popcorn or a candy bar) and physical comfort (hot chocolate on a cold day). Jordan Troisi and Shira Gabriel’s well-known work on chicken soup provides us with insight regarding the integral link between social relations and comfort foods (2011). In one experiment, they randomly assigned participants to consume either a bowl of chicken soup or no soup. Participants who considered chicken soup a comfort food (prior to the study) were more likely to think about their social relationships than those who didn’t eat the soup. In a second study, Troisi and colleagues found that thinking about a comfort food actually reduced participants’ negative emotions related to loneliness (if the participant had a secure attachment style) compared to participants with a secure attachment who didn’t think about a comfort food. This memorable series of studies underscores the importance of individual differences. The effect of chicken soups depended on whether participants considered it a comfort food. Likewise, thinking about comfort foods reduced loneliness only for certain participants. Along these lines, did you know that men and women have different orientations to comfort food? In a study of 277 Montreal residents, Dubé and colleagues (2005) identified significant asymmetry in comfort food consumption. Men were more likely to consume comfort foods after experiencing positive emotions. Women, by contrast, were more likely to consume comfort foods after experiencing negative affect. In addition, men were more likely to

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consume low-calorie comfort foods; women, however, tended to have a sweet tooth and were more likely to consume high-calorie sweet comfort. We should also note a physiological explanation for comfort foods. The high-calorie treats that become our comfort foods often activate the production of endorphins and dopamine that, in turn, help us feel better (Herz, 2018). Comfort food is a striking example of not only our food-elicited emotions but also their multiple and multilevel influences on just what is comforting; we see cultural, social, and individual differences. Our comfort foods represent a myriad of meanings, memories, and experiences over a lifetime of social interactions. Think about that when you next grab a chocolate bar to feel better. Emotions and Cooking Understanding the relationship between eating food and emotions is integral to understanding the emotional impact of cooking given the teleological nature of the behavior: that it is future oriented. We cook with specific goals in mind, including emotional goals for eaters as well as for ourselves. How does cooking shape our emotions? A Repeated Behavior Cooking is a behavior repeated hundreds and thousands of times in a lifetime. As a repeated activity, akin to cleaning or gardening, our cognitive scripts regarding cooking routines may be very well developed (Farmer & Cotter, 2021). Consequently, cooking may often take on a routinized or automatic quality for us (Molander & Hartmann, 2018). When cooking routines are well known to us, we experience what Daniel Kahneman has termed cognitive ease (2011), situations in which we need not direct more than the minimum number of cognitive resources to making decisions or solving problems. Cognitive ease is associated with positive emotions. In contrast, having to think carefully—to deliberate—creates cognitive strain, which is associated with negative emotions. We may not always give cooking a tremendous amount of thought or feelings (van Kesteren & Evans, 2020) until something unexpected occurs. Changes in social-environmental influences may create new cooking challenges. Events such as cooking from scratch, a special occasion, guests with restrictive diets, or a missing ingredient can interrupt the routine, creating challenges and attendant emotions in response to how the cook appraises those challenges (Lavelle et al., 2016a; Lazarus, 1991; Rawlins & Livert, 2019). Following the same recipe regularly can provide a cognitive ease for the cook, particularly for those cooks who are worried about diverging from

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the recipe. By contrast, following a new recipe may create more challenges for the cook, requiring greater attention and cognitive effort, resulting in greater stress (Rawlins & Livert, 2019). Cooking involves continuous activity over a period of time that can range from a few minutes to a few hours (Taillie, 2018). Not only is cooking a continuous flow of activity, but it also may be emotionally dynamic. A single cooking experience may include positive anticipation and happiness when we smell a familiar scent shifting to outright terror once the smoke triggers the fire alarm. Affect researchers are still developing methodologies that can capture the dynamic properties of quotidian activities such as cooking (Brouwer et al., 2019; Molander & Hartmann, 2018). Brouwer and colleagues sought to document changes in emotion over the course of cooking a stir-fry dish (2017; 2019). They had thirty-nine adult participants—who cooked regularly—follow a specific set of instructions to warm up the pan, add the protein and vegetables, stir-fry until the dish was cooked, plate the dish and taste the dish. While they carried out the instructions, cooks were wired to an EEG, an ECG, and equipment measuring electrodermal activity. Did I mention the protein? The researchers were interested in whether cooks experienced different emotions when they stir-fried chicken or stir-fried mealworms; this was a within-subjects design, so participants cooked both on two different occasions. Cooks showed different reactions to chicken versus worms when they were first exposed to the proteins, but they quickly acclimated to the worms. Participants enjoyed cooking the chicken more than the worms, perhaps due to having to taste their dishes. Cooking has positive effects on not only our short-term emotions but also our mental health over time. Kelly Lambert (2005) argues that physical and cognitive activity—particularly in solving problems—escalates in brain areas such as the accumbens-striatal-cortical circuit. Solving cooking problems likewise increases neuroplasticity—the creation of new neural connections. Both processes are linked to resilience and improved mental health. There are also positive neurochemical (serotoneric and dopaminergic) effects associated with the solving of cooking problems (Hamburg et al., 2014). Cooking evokes positive emotions as the cook focuses on the task at hand, to act mindfully, to be aware of the present (e.g., in the moment). Researchers and practitioners use the term mindfulness to refer to an enhanced level of consciousness, which consists of “enhanced attention to and awareness of current experience or present reality” (Brown & Ryan, 2003, p. 822). We can be mindful about environmental stimuli as well as our reactions to them in terms of attitudes, motivations, and feelings. The defining quality is that mindfulness is a focus on the present. Given that we are cognitive misers (see previous chapter), we only have a limited amount of awareness and attention. Consequently, focusing on what is going on right now reduces the amount of

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time we could, for example, ruminate about a past event or anxiously anticipate a future event. Being mindful of the situation brings affective benefits (Farmer & Cotter, 2021). In a series of experiments, Weinstein and colleagues (2009) found that undergraduates who had higher levels of trait mindfulness—who across situations tended to be more mindful—were more likely to make benign appraisals of challenging situations. For example, two cooks might burn the toast while cooking an otherwise fun and tasty breakfast. One cook may concentrate on the toast and the other on the remainder of the meal and how everyone enjoyed it. The researchers also found that individuals who tended to be more mindful were more likely to choose coping strategies that were engaging than avoidant (we will talk more about coping when we discuss stress later in this chapter) (Weinstein et al., 2009). Mindfulness can also be acquired. The developing of mindfulness is a key component of Buddhist practice, the concept of flow (Cziksentmihayi, 1990) and theories of positive psychology (Ryan & Deci, 2001; Seligman, 2011; Seligman and Cziksentmihayi, 2000). In reaction to traditional/mainstream psychology’s focus on psychopathology, negative disorders, and maladjustment, positive psychology is a movement with the goal of understanding positive well-being: why people are happy and how they stay happy. Although a longstanding focus of humanistic psychology, it is just in the past twentyfive years that positive psychology has emerged as an area of psychological research and intervention. Episodic Foresight Humans have the amazing ability to look into the future. Cooks do it all the time. They often plan a meal before sourcing it, preparing it, and serving it. Even if planning occurs à la minute—at the beginning of the cooking episode—the cook still anticipates the future. Cooks envision not only the dish they would like to prepare but also how eaters will react to it. We often choose dishes to cook or versions of those dishes with our eaters’ emotional response in mind. We anticipate an emotional reaction to an eater’s favorite dish, we anticipate how they will react to a new dish, or we think about how other eaters will respond to an unusual dish. In our own research with primary domestic cooks in American households (Rawlins & Livert, 2019), we found that planning dinner often involved trade-offs between anticipated emotional reactions of eaters and cooking concerns such as nutritional content of the food, available time, and what’s in the pantry. Cooks experience two forms of affective anticipation: how they anticipate they will feel when the meal is consumed (anticipated emotions) and how they foresee eaters will emotionally respond to the meal. There is an extensive body of research on the phenomenon known as affective forecasting (Ellis

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et al., 2018; Wilson & Gilbert, 2005): the process by which we anticipate how we will feel at some point in the future given a particular event. We engage in affective forecasting every day, thinking about how we will feel if we step on a scale and lose a pound, how we will feel when we finally get a new job, or how we would feel if we got engaged to our romantic partner. We are pretty good at predicting whether a future event would make us feel good or bad (Wilson & Gilbert, 2005). What is interesting to affect researchers is not that we frequently think about how we would feel but that we tend to make systematic errors when we do so. Termed the impact bias (Levine et al., 2012; Mellers & McGraw, 2001; Morewedge & Buechel, 2013; Wilson & Gilbert, 2005; 2013), researchers find that people tend to anticipate that a future event will affect their emotions more intensely and for a longer duration than it actually does. For example, a cook might think about how happy he might be if his holiday potato recipe wins a community cooking contest. When he wins, he is not as happy as he had imagined and that feeling passes rather quickly. Or perhaps he thought he would be crushed if he didn’t win, and when he loses, the world does not come to an end. Why is there an impact bias in affective forecasting? Several explanations have been explored. One explanation involves the phenomenon of focalism, when we think about the future, we tend to think narrowly and ignore how other events going on in our lives might impact us (Wilson & Gilbert, 2005). Another reason for the impact bias derives from its motivational properties. Imagining positive emotions in the future is fun. Looking forward to positive emotions as the result of a future event provides motivation for achieving that event. For instance, think about our cook in the previous paragraph. He may continue to think about the positive impact of winning the contest even as he becomes sleep deprived from late evenings of perfecting his recipe. Alternatively, he might have kept pushing himself by imagining how crushed he would be by losing (Morewedge & Buechel, 2013). The impact bias has been demonstrated for repeated activities such as cooking. For example, research subjects predicted that having to eat yogurt for dessert seven days in a row would lessen their liking for it. Researchers found, instead, that participants did not get tired of the yogurt as much as they had predicted (Kahneman & Snell, 1992). Critical to those who cook for others is projective affective forecasting. I use this term to refer to the emotions we predict that our eaters will experience as a result of our cooking. Whether cooking domestically or professionally, a cook has the goal of pleasing her eaters (Herz, 2018). Choosing ingredients, menus, and preparations requires extensive affective forecasting in terms of using past feedback (Johnny loves macaroni and cheese) or hypothesizing new reactions (Johnny loves macaroni; I bet he would like ziti). Or it might be

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a negative forecast (if I even slightly overcook this waffle, Sue will be upset and not eat it). Certainly, the anticipated emotions of eaters put quite a bit of pressure on the cook. One contribution to this area is provided by Dutch researcher Myrte Hamburg and her colleagues (Hamburg et al., 2014). They suggest that food offering—sharing food with others—can be seen as part of an interpersonal process, known as empathetic emotional regulation. According to the theory, when a cook sees someone in distress, he or she experiences empathy and, likewise, becomes distressed. The cook becomes motivated to relieve that distress by providing food. The cook experiences a decrease in empathetic distress, the eater also feels better, and the two feel closer as a result. Cooking that comforting soup for another represents a complex social interaction between cook and eater with positive emotional consequences for both. MOTIVATION AND COOKING In this third decade of the twenty-first century, we might wonder: Why do people take the time and effort to cook? Several hundred thousand years ago, if you didn’t cook your own food, you would starve. Nowadays, we enjoy a surfeit of sources of nutrition available—many very inexpensive—that do not require cooking. Our range of non-cooking sources includes eating out, picking up food, having food delivered, or purchasing food that requires no more than heating in a microwave. To understand why people still cook, we turn to the vast body of psychological research on human motivation. You probably know what motivation is, but let’s review the concept. The Latin root of motivation is the verb to move (Eccles & Wigfield, 2002). Motivation refers to the drive toward a particular goal: when we are motivated, we feel energized, engage in a task, and feel good about getting it done. Much of our day-to-day existence is shaped by our motivations. If we face adversity when completing a task completion or are just plain tired, motivation can offset that sense of depletion (Vohs et al., 2012). Motivations impact our behavior in terms of how hard we work at something (intensity), how long we work at something (persistence), and what kind of performance we carry out (quality) (Oka, 2005). A cook’s motivation makes the difference between his chopping lettuce, slicing radishes, peeling and slicing red onions, and mixing his own salad dressing and the cook tearing open a bag of prepared salad mix and grabbing the bottle of French dressing out of the fridge. Interest in what drives behavior has been longstanding in psychology. Early work focused on primary drives such as thirst and food and the role of reinforcements and punishments. In addition to Abraham Maslow and his

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hierarchy of needs model (Maslow, 1970), there are quite a few other theoretical approaches that explain motivation. Intrinsic Motivations for Cooking It may come as no surprise that humans are more motivated to do things that we enjoy than things we don’t enjoy: this concept is essentially known as intrinsic motivation. Although Confucius discussed intrinsic and extrinsic rewards (Sansone & Harackiewicz, 2000), we actually credit Harry Harlow with the term (Cameron & Pierce, 2008). You may not recognize Harlow’s name, but you might recall a black-and-white photo of a baby spider monkey hugging a furry artificial mother monkey while nursing from a wire monkey. That famous image was captured in the course of Harlow’s research on maternal separation (Harlow & Zimmerman, 1958). Harlow found in his work with monkeys that they would solve puzzles without a clear, extrinsic reward: they didn’t get a food treat, or pleasant touch, or whatever monkeys might like. Instead, he theorized that monkeys found solving puzzles rewarding in and of itself, thus intrinsically rewarding. The concept of intrinsic motivation has been considerably developed since that time. A major contribution was the work of Edward Deci and Richard Ryan (1985), who explored intrinsic motivation among schoolchildren and how providing external rewards could demotivate kids who were otherwise intrinsically motivated to read. According to Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory, humans have a basic need to seek out activities that are challenging, in which they can demonstrate their competence. As cooks, we become motivated to go beyond a box of macaroni and cheese once we have mastered it. For a long period of time, there was somewhat of a false dichotomy between intrinsic and extrinsic (externally rewarded) motivations. Contemporary formulations acknowledge the overlap between the two forms of motivation. One attributes intrinsic motivation to a behavior if there are no observable external rewards (Cameron & Pierce, 2008). Many behaviors are motivated by a mix of the two: for example, we may be motivated by the prospect of high salaries (extrinsic) by majoring in business, but we are also motivated to demonstrate competence and achievement (intrinsic) as we complete our business major. Cooking certainly can fulfill that role in individuals’ lives, particularly if other sources of challenges and competence are not so readily available. My observations of professional chefs cooking at home confirm the mixed approach: even though they cook for money, when cooking for friends in a very informal setting, they are still highly engaged in the task and enjoy doing it.

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Flow Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s widely known theory of flow (1990) refers to the positive feelings that some people experience when carrying out challenging tasks. These feelings are a significant source of intrinsic motivation, particularly for those who have a level of accomplishment or mastery with those tasks. During a state of flow, individuals experience an optimal level of stimulation, full concentration, control, and an intense focus (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Seligman, 2011). During flow experiences, individuals focus on the task at hand to the point that self-consciousness becomes minimized and time itself may be distorted. The level of challenge should be sufficiently high and the cook’s skills sufficiently developed for a flow experience to occur (Massimini & Carli, 1988). How do highly skilled chefs experience flow? A few years ago, my student Tashina Khabbaz and I interviewed professional chefs about their flow experiences in the kitchen (Khabbaz & Livert, 2016). We found that even in the crowded, hot, frantic environment of professional kitchens, experienced chefs found flow. As Chef Frank (not his real name) shared: I do things in the kitchen, I spin pans in my hands like tennis rackets. I didn’t know it till someone brought it to my attention, “do you realize that you do that all the time?” and I’m like, No, I had no idea. You just do, the quirky things you do, just go on autopilot and everything becomes silent. Like great athletes, like Michael Jordan, when I used to wrestle, people were screaming and yelling, I couldn’t hear a thing, I could hear my own heartbeat and couldn’t hear nothing around me. I don’t hear the machine but I can see the tickets rolling. It’s what athletes go through, sprinters. As weird as it is and as weird as it sounds, the more intense and the more insane, the more peaceful I become, the more relaxed I become.

For Chef Louis (not his real name), demanding shifts were preferred for the flow experiences they provided: You always hear this term if you haven’t already, “two tickets retardation,” when it’s really slow in the kitchen you make more mistakes, the busier you are, your brain goes on autopilot and everything is muscle memory.

These flow experiences were instrumental to motivating chefs—most of whom had fifteen years or more in restaurants—to stay in the industry. We might expect that some domestic cooks may attain flow as well, but the daily experience will depend on their social environment (it is hard to focus when there are children around). Indeed, several of the home cooks we talked to described flow conditions (Rawlins & Livert, 2019). One example was that

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Cynthia and Christina traded the responsibility for making dinner from day to day. They both identified as confident cooks who most of the time had a positive experience while cooking. Even though they relished improvisation in the kitchen, time scarcity and meals that were overly complex made cooking less enjoyable. Task-Related Motivation Do you ever go to one of those family restaurants and there on the table is a puzzle consisting of golf tees and a small board with a number of holes arranged in a pyramid? Do you ever, to your surprise, find yourself playing it? Sometimes we are motivated by the task itself (Eccles & Wigfield, 2002). This includes tasks that provoke our curiosity as well as novel tasks that we expect we can do well (Sansone & Morgan, 1992). Much of the research investigating this form of motivation is focused on the academic context and how to make coursework more motivating to students. Kitchen activities and challenges may provide such motivation. I’ve heard professional chefs discuss the challenges of an unfamiliar preparation or ingredient (animal or vegetable) in terms that suggest a high level of curiosity and motivation to try it. Motivational Goals What are your goals for tonight’s dinner? Is it simply to feed everyone? Would cold cereal and milk with saltines satisfy that goal? Probably not. We can distinguish between two types of motivational goals (Eccles & Wigfield, 2002; Sansone & Morgan, 1992). We can be motivated toward acquiring competence and mastery. Alternatively, we can be motivated toward performance: an evaluation that would be reached by those who are observing what we do. We can be motivated by two potential performance goals: (1) to do well and look good and (2) to not be perceived as failing. Imagine a domestic cook making a consommé from scratch. At one point, the process involves the formation of a “raft” near the surface of the broth that acts to filter to solids floating in the consommé. For a cook motivated toward competence, the appearance of the raft is highly rewarding in terms of demonstrating competence. For the cook motivated by performance, whether his eaters like the soup and finish their bowls may be far more important than the raft. Or, if the cook has a history of burning soups, avoidance of that negative outcome may be foremost in his mind. In our study of domestic cooks in the United States, each cook identified his or her primary motivation when making dinner (Rawlins & Livert, 2019). Based on these, we identified four different cooking types: family, traditional, keen, and drudge. Family cooks sought when cooking primarily to nourish

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their family; they were motivated to provide dishes that the family would eat. Family cooks also had to deal with additional and conflicting motivations to provide what consisted of a prepared meal (vs. takeout), a healthy meal, and to regularly provide favorites to their eaters. In contrast, traditional cooks were highly motivated to re-create dishes and experiences that they recalled from childhood. They also had goals of satisfying their eaters and health, but we found that some of their goals of re-creating dishes conflicted with what they considered healthy. Keen cooks were motivated to experience new dishes, to master procedures and ingredients, and to experiment. The types were not exhaustive or mutually exclusive but reflected how individuals experienced cooking dinner from night to night. Drudge cooks were those who were not motivated to be domestic cooks and did not enjoy the experience. In some cases, drudge cooks had enjoyed the cooking experience earlier in their lives: before the size of their household grew along with many temporal coordination challenges. Our domestic cooks reported their experiences in a cooking journal representing over three hundred dinners. In the journal, cooks reported their cooking-elicited emotions associated with the meal. We found that the type of cook—based on their motivations—predicted what emotions they experienced while cooking. Family-first cooks reported feeling more rushed than other cooks, perhaps due to their orientation to getting everyone in the household fed. In contrast, traditional cooks felt less rushed than other cooks. This could be due to their familiarity and confidence regarding the dishes they are preparing. These are dishes from memory that may be easily recalled and even modified and which have proven in the past to satisfy both cooks and eaters. Keen cooks, however, were the happiest and reported feeling creative as well. This could be due to their focus on task and particularly their goals of learning and experimentation. Keen cooks may also be able to attain a sense of flow in their cooking routines akin to the experience described by Csikszentmihalyi (1990) in terms of a balance of simplicity and complexity and a focus on the present. Limits of Motivation Theory We should note the limits of motivation theory to understanding cooking. For those of us who cook for ourselves or others, cooking is not a unique or oneoff performance (van Kesteren, 2020). We may cook thousands of meals and dishes in our lifetime, and the frequency and depth of what we cook varies across our life span. The degree to which motivations impact our behavior depends on their alignment with one another: perhaps you are both motivated to cook something healthy for your loved one and motivated to serve something that would please her. The impact of motivations also depends on the

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cooking context: the social setting, the cultural milieu, material affordances and constraints, and the temporal environment (Rawlins & Livert, 2019; van Kesteren, 2020). If the cooking context is familiar to us, then we are more likely to rely on habit, unconscious considerations, and behaviors with which we have developed automaticity. COOKING STRESSORS AND STRESS Is stress always bad? Vast numbers of research studies have documented the negative outcomes of high levels of stress, which include increased mortality and morbidity. In the workplace, non-optimal levels of stress may lead to early burnout, boredom, and employee loss. We attribute the term stress—in humans—to Hans Selye (1978); he had actually adopted the terms stress and strain from engineering. Stress refers to the amount of force on an object (Le Fevre et al., 2003). Strain refers to the reaction of those materials to stress, which may consist of deformations (e.g., cracks) or even breakage. Stress has had a terminology problem ever since. The term stress has been used by researchers and practitioners across a number of disciplines to denote the events and the forces in the environment, moderating influence, and the responses to the environmental events. Let’s establish some definitions. Stressors refers to outside forces, the events in our environment that have the potential to elicit negative reactions. Stress refers to our reaction to these stressors, which depends on how we interpret them. If we interpret the stressor in a positive way, we would term the psychological reaction eustress (Crum et al., 2013; Le Fevre et al., 2003; McEwen, 2017). Distress refers to a negative interpretation of the impact of stressors. McEwen (2017) suggests that distress can be further characterized as tolerable stress, with which a person can successfully cope, and toxic stress, with negative coping and physiological reactions. The body physically reacts to stressors by getting ready to respond, to take action to engage the stressor or to avoid it. Physiological reactions to stressors include activation of the central nervous system; activation of the HPA axis (hypothalamus, pituitary, and adrenal glands); and increased hormone secretion (Crum et al., 2013; Le Fevre et al., 2003). Chronic activation of these systems as a result of continuing stressors and/or ineffective coping can take a physical toll on health. What is the relationship between stressors and stress reactions? One influential approach is that of Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe (1967), who empirically identified a set of stressful life events (e.g., divorce, college graduation, chronic illness) that had the potential to evoke stress. Greater quantities of stressful life events over the same period of time were linked to

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more negative stress reactions. More recent stress models underscore the role of not only counting stressors but also appraising those events. We interpret stressors as well as appraise the coping we can bring to bear to deal with them (Crum et al., 2013). From this perspective, the meaning we make of potential stressors is as important as which ones and how many we experience. Research suggests that the most common stressors tend to be chronic (McEwen, 2017): they are present for long periods of time, not necessarily at extremely high levels. The protracted presence of stressors may lead to long-term coping reactions such as neglecting friendships or reducing physical activities that hold negative consequences for physical and mental health (McEwen, 2017). Cooking Up Stress Much of the stress of cooking is likely to be associated with chronic and lower intensity stressors that we experience over a long period of time. As an illustration, Michael Reicherts and Sandrine Pihet (2000) tracked the experience of six Swiss adults who had been professional cooks for six months. Each cook reported their stress and well-being regularly over the course of fifteen days. Surprisingly, their levels of distress were no different from other adults who had taken college courses at the same time. The stressors that the professional cooks experienced were chronic and low level, rather than acute, such as changes in schedules and interactions with supervisors. In my interviews with professional chefs, changes in work schedules are one of the most frequently mentioned stressors for kitchen staff. Haukka and colleagues (2011) reported similar findings from a two-year longitudinal study for restaurants in Finland. The researchers were interested in the relationship between stressors and reports of musculoskeletal pain, a common physiological response to stress. Over two years, there was a strong relationship between pain and certain facets of their work in the kitchen, including low job control, low supervisor support, and poor co-worker relationships. Time to Cook Domestic cooks face a wide array of stressors, the most significant of which is likely to be time. Chapter 3 focuses on issues related to time. We are all familiar with time scarcity: you don’t have enough time to do what you need to do. Not having enough time means that the cook will have to change the menu, change the preparation, change ingredients, or change the time at which the meal is served. All of the variations can be stressors for the cook. Domestic cooks in our study (Rawlins & Livert, 2019) reported that time

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scarcities were most responsible for taking the joy out of cooking, making cooking feel like a chore. Another temporal stressor involves when to serve the meal; temporal synchrony refers to this alignment of the cook’s schedule with those of eaters. For domestic cooks, the challenge is to have eaters at the table when the food is served, which is easier said than done in multiple-person households and those with children. Not only may adult members of a household have conflicting schedules owing to work or other obligations, but twenty-first-century children often have temporal conflicts of their own as a result of daycare, sports, arts, school events, and so forth. Managing Tastes Challenges associated with satisfying eaters may present another set of stressors to the domestic cook (Cairns & Johnston, 2015). Each eater brings to the table a unique set of taste preferences (which sometimes unexpectedly change), diets, and longstanding preferences that must be negotiated every time a cook prepares a meal. Cooking compromises can be difficult. In our study of domestic cooks (Rawlins & Livert, 2019), cooks described having to keep a mental tally of which eater (frequently children) had been recently served a favorite dish and which eaters were in line for one of their favorites. It should be noted that this potential source of stress depends on the cook’s motivations as well. Satisfying eaters is much more of a goal for cooks who value everyone eating their meal as opposed to the cook who values providing new experiences to his eaters. Multiple stressors can also co-occur; thus the challenge of managing tastes and diets can be significantly amplified if time is also scarce (Kneafsey et al., 2021). Stress Outside of the Kitchen Since we are talking about stressors and cooking, we should note the stressors that originate outside of the kitchen impact how we cook. Researchers have linked stressful experience in other contexts (e.g., work) to our cooking behavior. Parents facing stress from work or other sources will often make trade-offs in their cooking practices at home (Devine et al., 2006; 2009); in those situations, parental expectations regarding meal quality may be relaxed. For example, a study of 2,300 working parents in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area examined the relationship between work-stress demands on parents and the children’s diet cooked by them. They found that stressors at work were associated with less healthy food cooked at home for their family (Bauer et al., 2012). Likewise, Monica Beshara and colleagues (2010) examined stressors and cooking among 120 Australian working mothers with children eighteen years and younger in the household. Through a seven-day cooking

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journal, they found that time scarcity impacted the women’s confidence that they could cook a healthy meal; this confidence predicted the healthiness of the meal served to children. Fulkerson et al.’s study of working parents (2019) found a similar relationship between household disorder and parental stress with meal frequency and the healthiness of the meal. Alternatively, Hamburg and colleagues (2014) have argued that cooking can play a key role in coping with stress. Cooking for others can reduce negative emotions both among eaters and among the cooks that prepare meals for them. Cooking for someone who is experiencing stress provides a time and place for social interactions that can include supporting conversations, discussion of stressors, and general social support. We should also note that some stress researchers regard distress as potentially beneficial. Despite negative physiological and psychological impact, stressful experiences can lay the groundwork for later thriving (Park & Helgeson, 2006). One can experience distress but still grow in the long run. While this idea may sound contradictory, we should recall the importance of how people interpret and make attributions regarding the events in their lives. Humans have a basic motivation to make meaning of their lives (Fiske, 2004; Frankl, 1963), particularly in situations of trauma (Park, 2010) or other experiences that threaten an individual’s global meaning system. Such situations may involve cognitive accommodation to reduce threats to our worldview. Although we may think of stressful and traumatic events as primarily negative, our very human reaction is to integrate them into our worldview, to put a positive spin on them (Crum et al., 2013).

Chapter 7

Personality and Leadership in the Kitchen

Long before the emergence of today’s cooking competition shows, chef travel shows, and other media portrayals of cooking, there were vivid stereotypes of chefs. The popular depiction of professional cooks is that they are bossy, overbearing, impatient, and ill tempered. Mostly depicted as male, chefs throw pots and terrorize the kitchen. (Mind you, there have been other chef stereotypes; just watch The Muppets.) In contrast, we tend to describe domestic cooks as warm, nurturing, and caring, which is not surprising. Domestic cooks have traditionally been female and often moms or grandmothers. Aside from long-held stereotypes of cooking personalities, what does psychological theory and research tell us about cooks, whether at home or in a restaurant? Personality has been of interest to psychology since its emergence as a science. Everyone is—to some degree—a lay personologist (someone who studies personalities): not only do we describe people in terms of their physical appearance, but we also describe them by distinctive behavior. We perceive individual differences—person-to-person variance—in shyness, warmth, talkativeness, honesty, dependency, and assertiveness, to name a few (Ross & Nisbett, 2011). People do seem strikingly different from one another in many ways, and we often use these differences to label people: spoiled princess, risk taker, or life of the party. Psychologists consider these personality characteristics to be stable across situations. Think about Aunt Jane. Aunt Jane is quite talkative, whether she is attending a birthday party, in a movie theater, or at a funeral. Or what about Uncle Dick? Uncle Dick always seems nervous, whether he is riding in a bus, sitting at home reading, or even having breakfast. Behaving in the same way across situations—cross-situational consistency—is a fundamental part of how we define personality. Empirically demonstrating this consistency has proved a longstanding challenge for personality researchers, a topic we will take up in the later part of this chapter. 125

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Let’s imagine that you know an executive chef at a local restaurant; we’ll name him Chef Gordie. The kitchen staff consider Chef Gordie a typical chef: short tempered, direct, assertive, and inpatient. Not the most appealing personality, right? Your own experiences with Chef Gordie, however, have been quite different. His daughter Sally is in the third-grade class that you teach. Sally loves her daddy, and whenever you have met with him, he has been warm, humorous, and patient and seemed a really caring person. He listened carefully when you explained how his daughter was doing in class. Sounds like a great guy. So how should we describe Gordie’s personality? Does he have multiple personalities? TRAITS AND OTHER PERSONALITY FACTORS The discipline of psychology has achieved moderate success in describing and understanding personality (Rauthman et al., 2015). Early pioneers Gordon Allport and Henry Murray introduced the subdiscipline of personality psychology nearly one hundred years ago. Researchers generally define personality in terms of individual differences—typically patterns of behavior—that transcend time and specific situations (Reis & Holmes, 2018; Sauerberger & Funder, 2017). One of the most enduring labels for these patterns is traits. Traits are the prevailing concept in personality psychology and are employed by both lay people and researchers when describing other individuals’ personalities. Other person factors include characteristic adaptations (such as motivations, goals, values, and habits) and life stories, which are the narratives that we tell ourselves about ourselves (McAdams and Pals, 2006; Reis & Holmes, 2018). Traits are enduring ways in which individuals differ from one another. Often personality researchers organize traits into taxonomies (Ross & Nisbett, 2011). Trait research in psychology dates back to Allport’s early work, but we could observe the concept as far back as Sigmund Freud’s theories of personality at the beginning of the twentieth century. According to Freud, your friend’s compulsiveness (i.e., arranging paper clips, ensuring that the napkins are all folded in the same way) was due to unconscious processes at work since his or her childhood. In fact, longstanding traits in psychology include introversion/extroversion (dating back to Freud’s student Jung), emotional stability (from Raymond Cattell), and humble/assertive (also from Cattell). Personality psychology evolved over the twentieth century with a significant reset in 1968, the year in which Walter Mischel published an influential critique of traits and their usefulness in explaining behavior. (We will return to Mischel’s critique a little later.) From the 1970s onward, there has been a

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significant resurgence in research and conceptualization of personality traits, the most notable being the development of the Big Five. The Big Five Paul Costa and Robert McCrae are generally credited with the development of the Big Five taxonomy of traits (1992). The Big Five is based on Hans Eysenck’s formulation of the NEO framework (1991), composed of neuroticism, extroversion, and openness to experience. Costa and McCrae expanded these original three to include conscientiousness and agreeableness. In more contemporary formulations, neuroticism has been relabeled emotional stability emphasizing the positive aspect of the trait. Openness encompasses a predisposition for sensation seeking and risk taking. Conscientiousness is also known as work ethic. Extroversion is the tendency to proactively engage others in social situations. Agreeableness has also been referred to as positivity. An immense body of research in psychology and beyond has demonstrated the usefulness of the Big Five framework in predicting a broad array of outcomes including health status and overall well-being as well as patterns of friendship-making, to name a few (Ching et al., 2014; Lee et al., 2013; Mathisen et al., 2011; Persich & Robinson, 2020). Within the workplace, meta-analyses have revealed that individual differences in the Big Five are predictive of job performance (Barrick et al., 2001), job satisfaction (Judge et al., 2002), leadership (Judge et al., 2002), and counterproductive work behavior (Berry et al., 2007). There is also emerging cross-cultural evidence for the predictive value of the Big Five. For one, the Big Five traits have been shown to predict state affect: how one feels at a particular point in time. Ching and colleagues (2014) had college students in the United States, Venezuela, the Philippines, and Japan complete a Big Five inventory. Subsequently, the researchers regularly texted their mobile phone devices and asked them to describe how they felt. Across cultures, the Big Five framework predicted the subjects’ emotional state. In a similar vein, personality psychologist David Funder and colleagues (Guillaume et al., 2016) examined how well the Big Five traits predicted what people were doing at the same time during the day. Translating their study questions in fourteen languages, over fifty-four hundred subjects in twenty countries completed an online questionnaire in which they completed the Big Five and indicated what they were doing the previous day at 7:00 p.m. local time. The researchers found—across countries—that openness and neuroticism further predicted individual activity. What traits are associated with the professional cook? One source of insight is the formidable database known as the Occupational Information Network (O*NET), sponsored by the United States Department of Labor

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(US Department of Labor). O*NET lists over one thousand occupations in all sectors of the US economy. For each occupation, information regarding job tasks, requisite skills, training, employment prospects, and credentialing are available. (Go ahead: go online and look up “Lion Tamer.”) Much of this data is constantly updated through surveys, job analyses, and other evidence-based sources. O*NET provides a ranking of sixteen work styles associated with success in each occupation; these work styles nicely map onto the Five Factor Model. According to O*NET, the top work styles for chefs and head cooks are dependability, initiative, and attention to detail (high conscientiousness), leadership (high extroversion), and stress tolerance (high emotional stability). A similar personality profile is found for cooks/restaurant and cooks/ institutional: dependability and attention to detail (high conscientiousness), self-control and stress tolerance (high emotional stability), and cooperation (high agreeableness). I’ve employed the Big Five in my research with professional cooks. In one study, we collected data from chefs and cooks in a large hotel kitchen on a university campus that produces hundreds of covers a day. The participants consisted of twenty-nine experienced cooks, having an average of eighteen years of experience in the professional kitchen. Given their longevity, we might expect that there was an acceptable fit between their personality and the professional kitchen environment (Graham et al., 2020); otherwise, they would have likely sought other work. What was the “personality” of that kitchen? Cooks had relatively high scores on extroversion and conscientiousness, suggesting a predisposition toward organization and task accomplishment. Engagement and communication were also important. Interestingly, cooks were relatively low in terms of openness to experience, suggesting that a tendency toward risk-taking behavior and curiosity were less important in that kitchen. Students attending culinary training schools aspire to become professional chefs. They look forward to formulating novel menus and directing their own crew of cooks. In terms of personality traits, what types of individuals enter culinary training? Trait-wise, do they look like the chefs they would like to become? Some insights may be gleaned from a research program I have carried out with chefs-in-training at a leading culinary academy. In three different studies conducted between 2015 and 2022, 914 culinary students completed personality inventories, including the Big Five, during their first few months at the academy (Livert et al., 2015; Roberts et al., 2015). Across the three samples, the student data was strikingly similar to those of culinary professionals, with highest scores on conscientiousness and extroversion. We’ve noted earlier in this section that the Big Five traits can, to some degree, predict state affect (how we feel in a particular situation) as well as what situations we choose. In our data—we found that students pursuing

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baking degrees varied from culinary students on emotional stability: bakers typically had lower scores than their peers. Bakers work in kitchens that are more subdued than those with stoves and grills. Their products require longer timelines and generally more planning. In restaurants, pastry chefs usually have different hours than other kitchen staff and often work alone. This difference—which emerged in the three studies mentioned above—was surprising to me given my informal conversations with chef instructors. One consistent observation shared by the instructors was that baking students were introverts, compared with culinary students, who were extroverts (Livert, 2004). Yet our data didn’t reveal a significant difference between cooking students and bakers in extroversion. Instead, cooking students were higher in emotional stability than the bakers. One possible explanation for the difference is that baking students may, on average, be less resilient to stress. Consequently, the more predictable and less chaotic nature of baking may appeal more to them. Other Traits and Personality Variables We have spent some time examining the Five Factor Model in our discussion of personality. Starting with the Big Five makes sense, particularly given the extensive body of research confirming the usefulness of the trait framework. However, there are other traits and individual differences to consider as we think about a cook’s personality. Time In chapter 3, we discussed the significant role of temporal perspectives on most aspects of cooking. Just as with the Big Five, individuals differ in their relationship with time. People vary in temporal focus: the past, present, or the future. Another individual difference concerned time urgency: how cognizant one is of the passage of time and the need to accomplish tasks within a temporal period. We also discussed how people differ in terms of pacing themselves when completing tasks. Some individuals prefer to work steadily toward a deadline. Others prefer an initial flurry of activity, less activity, and then more intense activity as the deadline looms. A third pacing style might be familiar to some as well: people who prefer to start late on a project as a deadline rapidly approaches. Sensation Seeking Are you looking for a thrill? Some people do so frequently; some people do so rarely. Another long-established personality trait is known as sensation seeking (also known as novelty seeking, arousal seeking, excitement seeking).

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Psychologist Marvin Zuckerman is credited with developing the concept in the late 1960s. Since that time, over four hundred publications have documented how individual levels of sensation seeking predicts a wide range of behavior, including volunteering, sexual behavior, relationships, smoking, drinking, drug use and abuse, risky driving, sports, career choices, and other activities. Cooks with higher levels of sensation seeking are more likely to enjoy spicy foods (Herz, 2018); spicy foods don’t burn their mouths any less, they just like them more. In fact, one of the original items in the sensation seeking scale involves a preference for trying new foods (Lyman, 1989). Neophobia Speaking of new foods and new experiences, what about people who don’t like novelty? The term neophobia refers to individuals who really do not like new experiences. According to Patricia Pliner and Karen Hobden of the University of Toronto (Pliner & Hobden, 1992), food neophobia refers to individuals who dislike unfamiliar foods. These individuals are also typically low sensation seekers (Bell & Marshall, 2003; Eertmans et al., 2005). Yes, there are food neophobes—that is, people who consistently avoid trying new foods. If you have had children, you may have observed how hesitant they can be at times to try a new food or even a tried-and-true food in a new shape (I base this on experience with my kid). A recent multinational study (Jaegar et al., 2021) employing samples of American, Australian, and New Zealand adults found that food neophobes are more likely to prefer familiar food (not surprising), convenience foods, and unhealthy foods (healthy foods sometimes require trying something new). A domestic cook who has high food neophobia thus is less likely to source novel foods, try new dishes, or employ new techniques. A professional cook who is neophobic is likely to experience some difficulty, as the role often entails cooking new dishes with new ingredients at work. In my extensive interactions with chefs, cooks, and cooking students over the years, the experience of a new taste or combination or preparation is held in high regard; it is considered basic to the cooking experience. Consequently, I would expect that food neophobic cooks have shorter careers in the profession. Individual Differences in Tasting and Perceiving Flavors This book is about the psychology of cooking—not so much about eating. Nonetheless, an understanding of tasting and flavor perception is important to understand. Cooking relies significantly on the cook’s taste and the perception of flavor. Individual differences between cooks in their perception of taste and flavor strongly impact their everyday practices. Some working definitions are in order.

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Taste refers to the perception that arises specifically from our tastebuds. As you may recall from grade school, there are five tastes: sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami. There is some debate about a sixth taste: that of fat (Mattes, 2011; Montmayeur 2009). (That could explain the magic appeal of bacon to many people!) We speak of tastes as these five (or six) categories, but there is, in fact, a robust debate regarding whether tastes should be considered distinct qualities or are better represented by a continuum (Erickson, 2008). Taste buds are found on the tongue, but also in other areas of mouth, such as the soft palate. At least three different types of cells in the taste buds are sensitive to varying chemical compounds in food. Just how different do we taste? (Note that we are talking about tasting and smelling food here, not tasting or smelling people!) Just ask Linda Bartoshuk, professor of food science and nutrition at the University of Florida. Bartoshuk is acknowledged as one of world’s experts on olfaction and taste (Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions, 2019). Bartoshuk’s work has brought us the concept of supertasters: people who possess a greater density of taste buds and, as a result, are more sensitive to tastes (Hamm & Kissileff, 2022). This genetically based individual difference can certainly provide a cook with an advantage in terms of flavor acuity. However, there are downsides: supertasters are also more sensitive to capsaicin, the active compound in hot peppers! How did Bartoshuk discover the supertaster individual difference? It wasn’t through counting taste buds; physiological evidence for supertasters emerged separately. Instead, Bartoshuk was motivated to find new ways of measuring the intensity of a taste. A longstanding challenge to researchers’ investigation of people with highly impaired taste sensitivities concerns magnitude estimation. If you are very sensitive to taste and sample a spoonful of a spicy soup, you will rate it quite spicy. However, if I have an impaired sense of taste and sample the same soup (ideally with a different spoon), I will also rate the soup as spicy, even though I am not objectively as sensitive as you are. Bartoshuk solved that problem of varying taste sensitivities through the use of cross-modality magnitude matching. Supertasters are sensitive to multiple tastes, and researchers had participants rate how sour (for example) a sourball candy was in comparison to the loudness of a tone. Sounds are perceptually unrelated to tastes: supertasters should perceive the same pitch of sound (assuming no hearing deficits). Participants indicated whether the stimulus taste was less sour than the tone was loud, about the same, or twice as sour as a tone was loud (Hamm & Kissileff, 2022). Our perception of flavor is the result of the confluence of information from our gustatory system (taste buds), retronasal olfactory system, and somatosensory systems (food texture and temperature) (Rozin, 1982). Research has

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highlighted the importance of retronasal olfaction to the perception of flavor: smells that are transmitted from our mouth to the nose (as opposed to the orthonasal olfaction from what we breathe in through our nose) (Bartoshuk et al., 2019). How about a fun flavor trick? Go to the spice rack in the kitchen and pour some cinnamon powder onto a spoon. First, taste a little bit of the cinnamon. Now, smell the cinnamon without tasting it. Lastly, close off your nostrils with your fingers and taste the cinnamon without smelling it. Notice how we utilize multiple sensory inputs for the full picture of flavor? We are very good at recalling food aromas (Keating, 2022). How about your own odor memory? Do you remember the smell of a particular dish, the smell of your dog after the skunk said “go away” to him, or that pizza you loved in college? The latter example is my story: I haven’t tasted a slice since 1995 but still vividly recall the smell, taste, and texture of Obie’s Pizza in Nashville. There is some evidence that differences in perceiving tastes, smells, and— consequently—flavors may be associated with other personality differences as well. Remember the Big Five set of traits? As it turns out, people high in sensation seeking (a facet of openness to experience) are more likely to prefer spicy foods (Herz, 2018). The mouth burn from spicy foods is the same for high- and low-sensation seekers (unlike the differences between supertasters and others); they just like the experience of spicy food more. Interestingly, a preference for bitter food is correlated with a psychopathic personality (Herz, 2018). Keep in mind that these relationships are correlational; a statistical association between two variables does not imply a causal relationship. Also, many correlational relationships are due to other variables (sometimes called third variables) that create the statistical connection. Is your romantic partner a sweet person? The personality label “sweet” refers to behaviors such as being emotionally moved by cute things, being kind and considerate, tenderness, and being a warm person. Do sweet people like sweets? In a well-publicized series of five studies, Bryan Meier and his colleagues (2012) examined the connection between taste preference and non-taste-related individual differences using conceptual metaphor theory. Conceptual metaphor theory holds that metaphors are important to the way we think about ourselves and can strongly influence how we organize our perceptual experiences. The researchers found that college students who liked sweet foods were likely to score higher on a self-report scale of agreeableness and prosocial activity; they were also more likely to volunteer in a flood cleanup project. Using an experimental paradigm, Meier and associates also found out that participants who tasted sweet candy were more likely to score higher on agreeableness and to volunteer for a good cause than those who preferred to taste a non-sweet snack. In fact, in some of their later studies, the researchers designed a sweetness manipulation in which participants had

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either a sweet treat or a non-sweet treat. Those who were in the sweet condition were more likely to volunteer. Want to get someone to volunteer for your organization or donate money? Sweetness helps. Cooking Mindsets The term mindset refers to a “mental frame or lens that selectively organizes and encodes information thereby orienting an individual toward a unique way of understanding an experience” (Crum et al., 2013, p. 717). The term derives originally from the work of psychologist Carol Dweck, who identified mindsets related to the variable of intelligence over the life span (fixed vs. malleable). Cooking mindsets not only have specific cognitive elements but also are thought to have affective and motivational consequences for cooks. Although these are empirically validated, the body of research supporting these mindsets is not quite as robust as that of traits theories such as the Big Five traits or individual differences in taste and smell mentioned earlier in the chapter. We shall consider food involvement, food agency, and domestic cooking types as examples of differences in cooking mindsets. Food Involvement How much does food mean to you? If you consistently couldn’t care less whether your lunch is a cup of noodles, an apple, or buttered toast, you might possess low food involvement. Note that I wrote consistently: individual differences emerge across situations and social settings. Every now and again even the most food involved person doesn’t care about lunch. Food involvement (Bell & Marshall, 2003; Eertmans et al., 2005) refers to the importance of food in one’s life. High food involvement individuals tend to make finer distinctions when tasting food and think about food more often, enjoy cooking, and like to mix or chop food. In a study of 894 participants, Bell and Marshall (2003) found that those with higher food involvement scores were better able to discern taste; for example, high food involvement individuals could better distinguish between different cranberry juices in terms of low, moderate, and high sourness. Eertmans and colleges (2005) found that, in a sample of Belgium college students, high food involved participants were more likely to consume items in six or nine food groups, including the use of spices, compared to their lower food involved peers, who consume less varied items. It is reasonable to assume that greater food involved individuals are more likely to be engaged cooks.

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Food Agency A newly emergent line of research concerns the degree to which individuals possess food agency (Lahne et al., 2017; Trubek et al., 2017). Developed by Amy Trubek and her collaborators, food agency refers to a broad set of abilities, knowledge, and capabilities that represent the degree to which individuals feel confident in their ability to achieve cooking goals within their unique individual, social, and cultural contexts (Trubek et al., 2017, p. 297). Measured by the self-reported Cooking and Food Provisioning Action Scale, its components include attitudes about food preparation, cooking self-efficacy, and understanding the larger structure in which food is produced, distributed, and made available to them (Lahne et al., 2017). Scale items include “I feel that I am confident that I can deal with unexpected results” and “I find cooking a very fulfilling activity.” Food agency is theorized to emerge from a lifetime of everyday practice, reflection, and discovery. Domestic Cook Mindsets In my work with sociologist Roblyn Rawlins, we identified four types of domestic cook mindsets through ethnographic interviews and collection of food journals (Rawlins & Livert, 2019). As mentioned in chapter 6 on affect and motivation, the four mindsets consisted of the family cook, who is most concerned with producing food that will be consumed by family members, given the various constraints of the household; the traditional cook, who seeks to re-create the culinary experiences from their own family of origin; the keen cook, who enjoys the provisioning ingredients and cooking and considers challenges learning experiences; and the drudge cook, who finds everything about domestic cooking unpleasant. These mindsets were not necessarily exclusive—some of our respondents could be grouped into more than one category—and we found that mindsets could change over an individual’s life. For example, a keen cook might take on a family cook mindset after they have children. These four mindsets predict how cooks responded to challenges that arose from available ingredients, household schedules, and other uncertainties. THE COOK OR THE KITCHEN? One of the aspects of personality that I find intriguing is that one really has to understand situations in order to understand personality. As we noted at the beginning of this chapter, an individual’s personality and traits refer to similarities in behavior, affect, cognition, and motivations that are consistent

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across situations. This has created challenges for personality researchers starting in the late 1960s, but the field is finally getting past that. A bit of history is in order. We flash back to 1968 and Walter Mischel’s milestone article raising fundamental questions regarding the usefulness of personality as a predictor of behavior (Mischel, 1968). Mischel’s argument was straightforward: if personality traits are consistent behaviors across situations, then the correlations between personality measures and behavior should be relatively high. Instead, Mischel noted, the average correlation was quite low, around .20 to .30. In other words, personality didn’t explain very much. He argued for more consistent, specific, and aligned measures of personality and psychology. Flash forward to the 2020s, and we see some discernible progress in the theory and research about personality. One area of progress has been in the emergence of more empirically robust and predictive measures of personality, such as the Big Five. Studies predicting behavior from both personality and situational influences are finding that personality can account for up to a correlation of .40, equivalent to that of situational influences (Funder, 2009). Another area of achievement has to do with how researchers construe situations. Several lines of research have focused on articulating the connection between situations and behavior enacted within them, putting aside variations due to individual differences in personality. Roger Barker’s innovative research in the 1950s and 1960s identified behavioral regularities within various real-world settings (Barker & Wright, 1971), which has been elegantly expanded by Edward Seidman (2012). For example, what do people do when going to the post office? What behavior is common to a playground or parking lot? Rauthman and his collaborators’ work (2015) has focused on three aspects of a social situation: the physical and temporal features of a setting, such as the layout of a kitchen, number of people in the kitchen, temperature, and so on; the psychological meaning of the setting to individuals within it, such as a familiar and comforting setting or one of conflict and anxiety; and groupings of similar situations, such as domestic kitchens, public housing kitchens, and catering kitchens. Some situations tend to be stronger than others. Strong situations are characterized by very clear norms and consequences for those who deviate from them: they possess stronger pressures to behavior in a certain way. Contrast a marine boot camp with a picnic in a park: strong and weak. The classic studies by Stanley Milgram on obedience and by Philip Zimbardo on prison behavior employ very strong settings (Milgram, 1974; Zimbardo, 2007). The strength of the situation is critical to the influence of an individual’s personality within it. Even talkative people talk a bit less and in a more muted way at a funeral than they would normally. An introverted person may not make

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many new acquaintances at a party but will make an effort at a college orientation meeting when there are strong pressures to meet other newly enrolled students. We might assert that a professional kitchen is a stronger social situation than a domestic kitchen, that individual personalities are more muted in the professional kitchen than the cook’s own kitchen. There has also been a refocus of the personality versus situation debate. Recall Kurt Lewin’s fundamental theorem in social and personality psychology: B = f(P, S) where behavior (B) is a function of an individual’s personality (P), the situation (S), and the interaction of the two: f(P, S). Much of the debate in personality research has been rather stuck on determining just how much of behavior is due to P and how much to S. Reacting to this history, noted personality psychologist David Funder argues for the pursuit of research that incorporates combinations of the Lewinian function (Funder, 2009). The following are three formulations suggested by Funder. What is the influence of personality on behavior? Do individuals who possess individual differences actually behave differently? We might seek to document what types of cooking behavior consistently are performed more frequently by cooks high in sensation seeking. In the professional kitchen, what behaviors are typical of cooks who are time urgent? What is the influence of situations on behavior? What cooking behavior is associated with households with children, with dependent elderly, with food insecurity? What behavior is associated with cooking in a large kitchen, an institutional kitchen, or a small kitchen? What is the influence of personality on situations? Does a keen cook host more dinner parties or encourage unexpected guests and other challenges? Do they frequent local markets and vacation near significant culinary destinations? Does the introverted cook choose smaller kitchens to work in? Does the cook with lower positive emotionality seek out venues that are predictable and less stressful? THE PERSONALITY OF KITCHEN LEADERS [Chef] and I at the [restaurant] got into it a couple times, he had the camera on and was doing a pasta demo for us and our sister restaurant. There was whole new ovens and ranges. Pots above your head, he didn’t want anyone knocking into the ranges, didn’t want to hear a sound. He’s doing the demo, I’m trying not to bother him. I go to squeeze by with a rondeau, and it’s like “dink,” the tiniest noise. He kept talking and it took him a second to register. He just berated me for like 15 minutes, how stupid are you, do you not pay attention. He’s like Spiderman, his senses are like amplified. Everyone is just staring at me. At first I know this is my fault, but like come on. He keeps going on with the demo, I

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guess because I didn’t react he keeps yelling at me again. He stopped again and then turns around and goes on with the demo and then stops again and starts yelling at me for a third time because I just think it’s funny. I said I really find this funny and he starts laughing a little. Like half an hour of just yelling at me. There’s nothing you can do about it. I tried to say sorry like thirty times. (Executive chef in the Hudson Valley) It’s not my job to cook everything, it’s to make sure that everybody that works here has the tools to do what I need them to do and part of that is the right emotional environment where people feel good about what they do and that their emotional needs are being met. And those are different for different people. I have a lot of workers who are immigrants and have two jobs and the most important thing for them is routine and stability so they can have that one day off a week from both jobs. (Executive chef in Philadelphia)

In the domestic kitchen, kitchen leadership often emerges by default. As we have noted earlier, traditional gender roles result in women taking on the role of primary domestic cooks for the household most frequently, although this pattern is slowly changing. In fact, the concept of the kitchen leader may not be appropriate to most households, as she (or he) primarily carries out this role without a staff. Extended family gatherings, holidays, and parties might be exceptions in which the primary domestic cook takes on the responsibilities of an executive chef. Aside from chef responsibilities, the leader of the domestic kitchen also exerts power over eaters in a different way: as curator of the household’s collective culinary experience. We (Rawlins & Livert, 2019) were made aware of this situation when interviewing domestic cooks whose mothers or grandmothers were considered the culinary stars of their extended families. Often, these cooks (mostly women) took pride in passing on skills and recipes. On some occasions, these cooks exerted power by not doing so. They would decline to provide their venerable recipes, and they would decline to teach the next generation to make the pie just like they did. For these cooks, power was associated with preventing dissemination of their kitchen secrets rather than the power of sharing them. By contrast, professional kitchens very clearly have formal leaders (e.g., executive chefs), even if the staff is small. The French-inspired traditional professional kitchen was characterized by a well-defined hierarchy—the brigade system—which still exists in many establishments in some form. We still speak of the individuals making up this brigade system, such as the head or executive chefs, sous chefs, and cooks. Yes, Chef! Just who becomes a leader in the professional kitchen—who is the chef— can have significant effects on the kitchen staff and their output. To really appreciate the impact, observe the physical kitchen and the cooking staff for

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an hour or so with Chef A and then a month or two later with Chef B with the same staff. The contrasts in workflow, climate, and stations can be sizable. Gary Fine talks about this contrast in his classic book Kitchens: The Culture of Restaurant Work (1996), a must-read for my readers. The impact of chef’s personality and leadership behavior on the kitchen is weighty, particularly given persistent employee churn and labor shortages in the industry. First of all, how do psychologists think about leadership? When I teach about kitchen leadership, I like to share Peter Northouse’s definition of leadership which is “a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal” (2021, p. 6). To this definition, I often add that leaders (as opposed to managers) typically have some vision of change—a desired state—that they hold for the restaurant, hospital cafeteria, or catering kitchen. Note that this definition locates leadership as a process between the chef and kitchen staff, that the influence process is essential, and that there is a commonly understood goal. All of these facets can be impacted by the chef’s style and personality. Studies of leadership through the early part of the twentieth century were primarily “great man” approaches. Biographies and scholarly works focused on the individual differences possessed by notable leaders in business, politics, and the military that non-leaders lacked. With the advent of trait psychology in the 1930s, leadership and personality researchers turned to enumerating the various traits possessed by leaders. Research from the mid-twentieth century and onward (Northouse, 2021) identified a casserole of traits assumedly possessed by leader: Stogdill’s synthesis of trait studies (1948); Mann’s review of leadership in small groups (1959), Stogdill’s follow-up analysis (1974), and Lord’s meta-analysis (Lord et al., 1986). Across this expanse of work, Northouse suggests (2021) that five traits emerge: intelligence, self-confidence, determination, integrity, and sociability. But what about leaders in the kitchen? The Big Five Personality researchers have mostly employed the Big Five personality framework to understand what traits are associated with leadership in the kitchen. Lee and colleagues (2013) examined the degree to which the Big Five traits impacted innovation in the kitchen such as developing new ideas, methods and skills, building support for innovations, and integrating innovations into standard procedures. Their sample consisted of 267 chefs who worked in high-end, five-star hotels in South Korea. They found that more conscientious chefs as well as more agreeable chefs were more likely to report innovation in their kitchens.

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Researcher Gro Ellen Mathisen and her colleagues examined the degree to which a chef/supervisor’s scores on the Big Five were associated with bullying. Bullying impacts nearly 10 percent of working populations (Mathisen et al., 2010), and this figure may understate its extent (Johns & Menzel, 1999), particularly in the professional kitchen. Studying over seventy Norwegian restaurants, they collected questionnaire data from one supervisor and an average of three employees in each kitchen. Their findings revealed that bullying was more prevalent when the chef/supervisor had lower conscientiousness scores. In addition, employees’ experience of stress and bullying was higher when the chef had lower positive emotionality. Emotional Intelligence and Kitchen Leadership Emotional intelligence is generally recognized as the ability to monitor one’s own emotions and that of others, to strategically regulate one’s own emotional displays, and to use emotions to guide decision making and behavior (Law et al., 2004; Mayer et al., 2008; Mayer & Salovey, 1997). A large body of research has documented the correlation between a manager/leader’s emotional ability and workplace outcomes such as job satisfaction, satisfaction among subordinates, reduced turnover among subordinates, leadership effectiveness, and profitability. Research also confirms the role of emotional abilities in the restaurant/professional kitchen. A study of managers in a franchise restaurant chain found links between manager emotional intelligence and employee satisfaction (Sy et al., 2006). Likewise, in the United Kingdom, Langhorn (2004) found in a cross-sectional sample of restaurant/pubs that managers’ emotional management skills were linked to kitchen team satisfaction, turnover, and profit growth. We should note there is a diversity of emotional intelligence theories and associated measures and still lack of a clear consensus whether emotional intelligence/ability is a personality trait or ability (Roberts et al., 2008). Working with culinary industry experts and psychometricians (Livert et al., 2016), my research team has also explored the importance of emotional intelligence to kitchen leadership. We interviewed a sample of restaurant chef/owners and executive chefs in the Hudson Valley, New York City, Philadelphia, San Antonio, and San Francisco. Most respondents had achieved local or even regional fame within the industry. One chef described the importance of self-regulation and developing it in their own kitchen staff as strengthening their own emotional abilities: There was another instance when one of my other sous chefs, Chris, who’s very talented and works very hard but one of his challenges is being less demonstrative with his emotions. When he gets frustrated, everyone sees it. So I’ve been

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working with him on that side that says it’s okay to be frustrated since that’s often a sign that you care about what you’re doing. But, when you’re a leader, to be overly demonstrative in your emotions can be counterproductive. Holding too much in, you’re not communicating, but letting too much out creates an uncomfortable work environment, not a macro environment that people perform best in.

The importance of self-regulation becomes clear to those who newly assume kitchen leadership roles. According to a New York executive chef, When I started at [restaurant] he pulled me aside at one point and was like, you just really need to calm down. One time at [restaurant], I got mad at this kid working, he was a sommelier there. He used to just not care and would go to run the desserts, and he wouldn’t know anything and would not care. He was not helping one night and I was trying to get him to give me information and I just started yelling at him. The GM comes in and is telling me I have to calm down. And he would handle it later. So then I start yelling at the GM. I realized I was in the middle of everything and we just handled it later. And then he’s yelling at me standing up and I told him you can sit down and have a normal conversation and then we were fine. The funny thing about restaurants is you clock out and then have some beers with everyone. Very weird.

An executive chef in San Francisco shared his insight regarding how he navigated a potentially anger-inducing episode. There was somebody who had worked here previously [who] came back from New York and he wanted to be the chef de cuisine here and I was getting new equipment for the walk-in and new containers and was kind of reorganizing and then he started telling me it’ll never work. And he went on and on about it and I just stood in silence and thought “who the hell is this guy. He wants to work for me and he’s coming here to show me how much he can help me and he’s telling me how to organize my walk-in.” And I just stopped and stood and stared and let him keep talking. And because he had been in management he came to me at the end of the day and said “I am so sorry. I was out of line. I have no business telling you how to run your kitchen.” He got it. I didn’t have to fight fire with fire. That, to me, doesn’t demonstrate that you’re in control.

Finally, an executive chef shared an incident demonstrating the importance of emotional abilities throughout the staff: [I’d] been separated from my wife for about 5 weeks. I was doing my best to focus on my job but you can only do so much and [my sous chef] came to me and pulled me aside because the night before . . . people knew there was something going on. The night before, I was so despondent that people were asking him about it and the next day he pulled me aside and said “you know,

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you’ve been teaching me how to do what you do for four or five years now. You don’t need to be here right now. So much of what we do here is driven by your personality, and if you’re at a place right now where you’re bringing negative energy then it’d be better if you weren’t here for a few days.” And I told him how much it meant to me to be working with him at this point in my life and I started to cry and then he started to cry and that’s the kind of thing I wouldn’t see happening in a lot of other businesses.

Whenever I talk about emotional abilities/intelligence with professional chefs, they immediately recognize its relevance to everyday life in the kitchen. They always have a story to share with me. Thinking about Leadership Traits Whether we are talking about Stogdill’s work in the 1950s or the Big Five, there are several difficulties with a trait approach to understanding leadership (Northouse, 2021). First, the approach focuses on characteristics of the leader without reference to the work setting or the followers within that setting. It suggests that there is a “right” combination of traits that a leader should possess anywhere (Northouse, 2021). Again, think about the executive chef of a white table restaurant and the head librarian of a large public library down the street. Are the same traits of equal importance or usefulness? A trait approach exclusively presumes that one is a leader or not. After young adulthood, traits are thought to be relatively stable. However, skills can be acquired at any point in our life span. Using a trait approach exclusively to understand leadership leaves out the galaxy of other influences that shape behavior in the professional kitchen. Trait approaches also do not take into account the outcomes by which we evaluate leadership. How do you measure leadership success in the kitchen? Some obvious metrics come to mind, such as revenue or profit. Others might include employee turnover, absenteeism, and tardiness. But maybe there are other metrics possible, such as what proportion of food is wasted, what is the quality of the food, or how creative is the cuisine. A FINAL THOUGHT Anthony Bourdain (2000) promulgated his own theory of personality types in the kitchen. Although not based on rigorous systematic data collection, it was built on Bourdain’s keen observational skills and long experience in the kitchen. He suggested three types of kitchen workers: artists, who are rare and high maintenance; specialists, who have well-developed skills and take on a role like a craftsman (e.g., pastry chef); and exiles, who have trouble

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succeeding in other occupations but seem to have found a home in the professional kitchen. Could we map Bourdain’s types onto the Big Five? Artist cooks are likely high in openness and perhaps lower in positive emotionality. Specialists might be high in conscientiousness. Exiles? Well, I am not quite sure. Clearly the domestic and professional kitchens provide a rich setting for examining individual differences in cooks and how they impact cooking.

Chapter 8

Cooking Skills and Confidence

Does making toast require skills? Making toast requires selecting bread that is not moldy or stale, familiarity with the toasting equipment, and knowledge of how to control the toaster to arrive at a desired level of brown. The cook should also have a sense of what the consumer of the toast prefers in terms of bread and toasting. Finally, will there be enough time to toast the bread? What about boiling water? The cook needs to know how much time is required before the water will boil, what pot or pan would be best to heat the water in, and whether salt or another ingredient needs to be included. All cooking requires some skills on the part of the cook. This chapter begins by introducing some of the ways that researchers conceptualize skills as well as a significant debate regarding trends in domestic cooking skills. We then take a psychological perspective and introduce the importance of understanding cooks’ beliefs about their skills, otherwise known as confidence. The implications of confidence and self-efficacy for cooking are also explored. Understanding cooking skills requires an understanding of cooking’s complex nature as well as the recognition that what individuals believe about their skills has big implications for what we do in the kitchen. SORTING OUT CONCEPTS: SKILLS, COMPETENCIES, AND CONFIDENCE It is important to distinguish between skills, competence, and confidence. These concepts are distinctive but sometimes used interchangeably in the psychological and food literatures. Skills Skills generally refer to proficiencies or abilities that people acquire through experience and practice. Skills may be acquired as a child in the domestic 143

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kitchen, a chef student in a teaching kitchen, or an entry-level cook in an institutional kitchen. You developed skills through experience to effectively put a slice of bread in the toaster (and get it out without getting burned or shocked) and to handle a boiling pot of water (without injuring the dog, who is very interested in what you are making). Skills may be perceptual (e.g., smelling doneness), motor (breaking down a chicken), or knowledge based (e.g., what goes first in the roux). Contrast skills with aptitudes. For example, “supertasters” have an impressive aptitude: extremely good acuity in taste perception (Bartoshuk et al., 2019). However, this may put them at a disadvantage in the kitchen, as they may experience many strong tastes as aversive. Competence The term competence can likewise refer to skill, and the two terms are frequently used interchangeably. Another view holds that competence is both practical (experienced based) proficiencies and cognitive (knowledge-based) proficiencies (Bech-Larsen & Tsalis, 2018). Proficiencies acquired through cognitive-based learning (knowledge aspects of cooking skills, food skills, contextual skills) are also known as nontechnical competencies. Workplace researchers have used the term competence to more broadly refer to the confluence of knowledge, abilities, and skills required for specific tasks (Suhairom et al., 2019). For example, the US Department of Labor’s O*NET system employs this framework (O*NET, 2023). As Suhairom and colleagues (2019) note, competencies in the cooking profession also include creativity, service culture, and management; examples of competency measurements in the professional kitchen are numerous (e.g., Bisset et al., 2009; Hu, 2010; Zopiatis, 2010). Conceptualizations of competencies also reference the motivational underpinnings of proficiency. We are motivated to acquire competence as we feel a need to achieve a degree of control and experience mastery over various aspects of our world. As a basic psychological need (Bauer et al., 2018; Deci & Ryan, 2000), we seek competence in the workplace, in our social relations, in hobbies, and in our domestic life. Some individuals may feel most competent when parenting children or, alternatively, when mowing the lawn. The cook’s sense of competence implies that cooking fulfills more than the physical need of nourishing ourselves and others. It implies that self-perceptions of competence in cooking provide psychological well-being. Confidence and Self-Efficacy Confidence refers to beliefs about the effectiveness of our skills. For example, we may be less confident when poaching an egg than when we boil an egg.

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Psychologists frequently employ the term self-efficacy, which also refers to confidence regarding a specific task or outcome. In this book, I use skills and proficiencies to refer to the ability to complete a task. We will refer to cooking confidence as a more general belief of proficiency and self-efficacy as the belief about a specific cooking task. COOKING SKILLS/EXPERIENCE Planning to make an omelet? Skills are required to break eggs, grease a pan, mix the eggs, add some salt and pepper, heat the pan, put the mixture into a pan, know how to adjust the heat, manipulate the omelet, and recognize when it is ready to plate. Let us not forget the nontrivial skill of removing the omelet from the pan to a plate so that it survives in a recognizable form (I’m still working on that skill). Oh, I forgot to mention knowing how long to cook the eggs and knowing what an omelet looks like when it is burning (brown eggs, smoke, smoke alarm, firetrucks arriving). A myriad of cooking skills is required to prepare ingredients from raw sources (Lavelle et al., 2016a; Lavelle et al., 2017). One of the first that comes to mind is referred to as mechanical or motor or physical skills (Singleton, 1978). When observing chef students in an introductory skills class, I was struck by the essential activity of developing knife skills during the first few days of instruction. Students had to learn how to make consistent cuts and slices; they were then challenged to create cubes, torpedoes, and other exotic shapes. Avoiding injury was also an acquired skill. Perceptual cooking skills include the ability to recognize when you have achieved the correct knife cut, when bread is toasted and burned, or when to remove beans from boiling water if you want them blanched (Lavelle et al., 2017; Short, 2006). Conceptual cooking skills refer to the cognitive aspects of the cooking process (Lavelle et al., 2017; Short, 2006), such as understanding the results of a cooking process (this is the way to make roux), how the process works (why the roux will thicken), and alternative processes and their likely outcomes (microwaving flour and butter for ten minutes). Let us consider frying some cod for some fish and chips. We use mechanical skills to know how to skin and filet the fish, how to bread the filets, and how to drop the ingredients into the boiling fat without splattering. Perceptual skills are used to recognize when to drop the ingredients, when to remove them, and whether they are frying too quickly or too slowly. Finally, conceptual skills are used to understand whether we can fry cod in the first

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place, what temperature is required, how much time it takes, and whether we have selected the appropriate fat for deep frying. An incomplete list of cooking skills includes boiling, steaming, stir-frying, grilling, deep fat frying, making casseroles, microwaving, using knives, peeling, chopping, working with basic and fresh ingredients, cooking beans, making a tomato sauce from scratch, peeling a vegetable, and knowing when something is cooked (Kennedy et al., 2019; Lavelle et al., 2017). For example, Dean and colleagues’ (2022) cooking competency intervention with adolescents included the task of preparing a chicken chowder. The preparation included eighteen different cooking skills, including chopping with a sharp knife, measuring, mixing with hands, scraping ingredients, and adjusting temperatures. FOOD SKILLS/KNOWLEDGE Some researchers have distinguished food skills from cooking skills. What are food skills? Returning to our example of deep-frying fish, let’s assume that you do possess those cooking skills required to fry the fish. What other skills are required to put that nice plate of fried cod on your table? A domestic cook would need to purchase the cod and other ingredients, plan the meal, know a bit about food safety and how to store cod, and know whether the cod has any potential allergens. These peripheral skills that are involved in getting the dish on the table have variously been termed food skills (Fordyce-Vooram, 2011; Lavelle et al., 2017) or organizational skills (Short, 2006). Food skills include the knowledge and skills to select and prepare a nutritionally balanced meal, including planning a meal, shopping and purchasing, budgeting, selecting and cooking with recipes, knowledge of food safety, nutritional content, and the health impact of foods. This knowledge also includes “academic knowledge” such as food history, culinary geography, and even food chemistry (Short, 2003). A tremendous breadth of food skills is required in professional kitchen, so much so that formal certification is often required in sanitation, equipment, and food storage. This is also why culinary training programs have kitchen modes of instruction as well as lecture/laboratory modes for the acquisition of these skills. CONTEXTUAL SKILLS A third family of skills are termed contextual skills: the ability to work within the contextual constraints in which a cook prepares a meal. Contextual

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skills enable a cook to deal with limitations regarding available ingredients, financial resources, logistics (e.g., how do I get to the store?), and temporal issues. Temporal issues include the lack of time to cook a meal or the need to coordinate serving a meal to eaters with conflicting schedules (Rawlins & Livert, 2019). Some scholars consider contextual skills such as dealing with budget constraints a food skill (e.g., Lavelle, 2017), but I would argue that it is important to underscore the degree to which domestic cooks (and professional as well) constantly deal with cooking constraints. Another group of contextual skills concerns the taste preferences of eaters. Restaurants and other retail food venues deal with this issue by offering a menu that provides sufficient variation to make everyone happy (or at least that is the goal). If it is not on the menu, then you might be out of luck (unless chefs do something special for you). By contrast, domestic cooks must accommodate all the taste preferences of their eaters. Cooking for children who will consume only chicken nuggets presents challenges, particularly for the cook aspiring to provide a balanced meal for his or her children. The ability to produce a meal for eaters with different taste preferences and schedules that adheres to nutritional goals represents a contextual skill. Stress such as time scarcity or the simultaneous supervision of children (or needy adults) requires the ability to multitask, rapidly monitor the production of a meal, and avoid a breakdown (Short, 2003). And while we are thinking about domestic cooks, we could add that the ability to utilize leftovers represents another skills domain that we might classify as contextual. Francis Short’s study of thirty UK cooks (2006) underscores the contextual nature of cooking skills. She observed that a cook baking bread following a specific recipe without interruption requires considerably different skills than baking the bread with kids at home, interruptions, and laundry under way. Short notes that the cooking skills—kneading, rolling, and mixing dough— might be the same, but the context is always unique. Each domestic cook develops these contextual skills. We have discussed three families of skills employed by cooks to prepare a meal. Cooking skills/experience are technical, perceptual-motor, and conceptual proficiencies. Food skills/knowledge refers to the knowledge and abilities related to planning a meal and acquiring ingredients. Contextual skills are employed by the cook to deal with daily challenges to preparing a meal. How do researchers measure these various proficiencies?

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MEASURING SKILLS, COMPETENCE, AND CONFIDENCE Measurement of cooking proficiency depends on the conceptual approach that the researcher adopts. For example, cooking skills acquired from experience can be measured by self-report (I have prepared fried fish) (e.g., Bech-Larsen & Tsalis, 2018) or by performance (the respondent fries a fish) such as the Children’s Cooking Task (Chevignard et al., 2008). The latter is clearly more cumbersome for researchers (one has to supply a kitchen with ingredients), so skill measures more frequently rely on self-reports. Alternatively, researchers may provide a list of various skills to respondents and ask them to report both whether they have performed them and whether they are confident about the skill (reflecting confidence/self-efficacy), as is the case with the CooC11 (Dean et al., 2022). Other approaches, such as the Cooking Skills Index (Martins et al., 2019), rely on the respondent’s confidence in the skill exclusively as evidence of his or her proficiency and forego the experience component. Measurement of food knowledge can be documented by having respondents answer content-specific items regarding washing fruits, avoiding salmonella, or freezing bread (Bech-Larsen & Tsalis, 2018), with food knowledge based on the proportion of items answered correctly. In their comprehensive review of professional culinary competencies, Suhairom and colleagues (2019) put forward a formulation consisting of both threshold competencies (representing the minimum proficiency of cooks) and differentiating competencies (representing a mastery level). Their depiction of technical competencies includes what have been termed cooking skills, food skills, and contextual skills, including product knowledge, technical mastery, nutrition and safety, and costing. THE COOKING SKILLS DEBATE Any discussion of cooking skills in the twenty-first century necessitates the review of a major debate among researchers and practitioners across many domains (i.e., nutrition, food studies, public health, family studies). The debate concerns deskilling: the loss of skills by domestic cooks, which is attributed to innovations in cooking technology and food preparation. The argument is most easily understood as use it or lose it: domestic cooks who rely on convenience technologies no longer use their skills, which get rusty. More important, domestic cooks no longer pass these rusty skills onto the next generation of cooks. Interestingly, similar debates occurred at the end of the nineteenth century in the United Kingdom (Short, 2006).

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Cooking Skills Are Disappearing! Research dating back to the 1970s has linked employees’ engagement in routinized technology to a decline in their skills, self-worth, and job satisfaction (e.g., Braverman, 1974). This deskilling of the workplace was thought to extend to the domestic realm as well, notably the home cook. Journalists as well as scholars argued that the utilization of convenience foods, ready-prepared products, pre-prepared foods, and cooking technology (e.g., the microwave) would result in the deskilling of domestic cooks, who would rely on these techniques rather than more complex and intensive cooking processes (Short, 2003; Stern & Kipnis, 1993). This routinization of domestic cooking would result in the cook’s loss of existing skills and lack of motivation to learn more complex techniques or to teach them to the next generation. Journalists such as Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman have bemoaned the disappearance of cooking skills in the average American home (Bittman, 2014; Gofton, 1995; Pollan, 2006, 2009, 2013). Whether or not there are significant declines in cooking skills, cooks are spending less time in the domestic kitchen (Jackson & Viehoff, 2016). There is a concomitant increase in the amount of money spent by households on convenience foods (Sugenor et al., 2017). Some researchers have documented a statistical relationship between the use of convenience foods, prepared foods, and preparation technology with the deskilling of cooks (Mintel, 2013). Is there a cause for alarm? Let us examine some issues related to the deskilling argument. Causal Direction Does the use of prepared foods and convenience technologies directly result in the deskilling of a cook? Or are cooks who are less confident about their cooking skills likely to utilize more convenient approaches as they emerge? What is the causal direction? For example, Horning and colleagues (2017) conducted a cross-sectional study of parents who cook for children between the ages of eight and twelve. They found a statistical relationship between parents’ confidence in their cooking skills and the use of prepackaged foods for the household: parents who used prepackaged foods were less confident about their cooking skills. Likewise, Stern and Kipnis (1993) found that confident cooks were more likely to cook fresh items and items from scratch. They suggested that rather than deskilling effects of convenience cooking on skills, respondents were making practical choices regarding cooking based on their evaluation of their skills to do so.

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A Third Variable to Consider Could there be something else over the past decades that is responsible for the relationship between deskilling and the increased use of more convenience foods and techniques? This is a third variable question: Could a third variable that affects both an individual’s cooking skills and his or her reliance on convenience approaches account for the relationship between them? Whenever I talk about third variables, I share a classic finding with my students and ask them to explain it. In a particular city, data indicates a positive association between the monthly sales of ice cream and monthly homicides. Researchers are perplexed: Are people consuming a nice double scoop of ice cream and then going out and murdering someone? Alternatively, does committing murder put people in the mood for some nice soft-serve ice cream? Of course, the answer is neither. The most likely explanation is a third variable that affects both ice cream sales and murder rates—namely, the outside temperature. During the summer in North America, the days are longer and warmer, and people stay out longer. There are more holidays, less school, and more parties, which mean more opportunities to become involved in interpersonal conflict. Because the days are warmer, ice cream also takes on greater appeal. Time—specifically, time scarcity—could be that third variable in the deskilling debate. Time scarcity can strongly influence how cooks make food choices, including how creative they can be. Over the past fifty years, the amount of available time one has in the day has decreased, which extends to the time available for cooking as well. Time scarcity leads cooks to employ prepared foods and convenience technologies to meet a household’s needs on a given day rather than cook a more elaborate meal, one from scratch, or one employing fresh ingredients. In addition to what we decide to cook, time scarcity limits the amount of time we have available to practice newly acquired skills, which typically are slower when we begin learning them (Jabs et al., 2007). ATTRIBUTIONS FOR COOKING SUCCESS (OR FAILURE) Another key consideration in the deskilling debate involves attributions. Attributions are the explanations we make to ourselves for our own actions or for the actions of others (Weiner, 1995). Internal attributions are when we explain our behavior based on a skill, ability, or some aspect of our personality that is enduring. For example, when Bob fails his math exam, he may attribute his performance to being bad at math. We also make external

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attributions that identify external causes for our behavior: Bob might attribute his poor grade on the math exam to a lack of studying for the exam. A similar attributional analysis could be applied to cooking skills. We might expect that confident cooks are more likely to make internal attributions for a successful performance. They credit success to their skill sets and motivation to cook. By contrast, less confident cooks may be more likely to make external attributions for success. They attribute their success to a recipe or the use of convenience foods or techniques. Confident cooks may attribute poor performance to external causes, such as a lack of time, a lack of ingredients, or kitchen distractions. Less confident cooks may engage in internal attributions for failure: I failed because I am a bad cook. Does the Use of New Technology Deskill? Deskilling arguments typically omit mention of the new skills that cooks must develop to deal with convenience technologies; sometimes these may be quite extensive. Silva’s survey of three cooking innovations (2000) depicts the new skills required by assumedly labor-freeing technologies. For example, oven thermostats were invented in 1915 with explicit instructions that the domestic cook (anticipated to be a woman) would have no need to open the oven door until the dish was ready. However, cooking time is not an exact science, and the cook still had to regularly assess the cooking process by opening the door. The thermostat changed cooking skills but by no means reduced their importance to the final product. Likewise, the microwave oven emerged in 1970s, with a rapid expansion in domestic kitchens in the 1980s (Silva, 2000), also requiring the domestic cook to develop a new set of skills. A recent example is provided by the Bimby. With its predecessors dating back to the 1970s, the German-manufactured Bimby food processor enables cooks to mix, scoop, weigh, grate, steam, and simmer (Truninger, 2011). Bimby has been a very successful product in the European market and certainly represents the type of routinizing/convenience gadget that is critiqued in the deskilling argument. Monica Truninger, at the University of Lisbon, attended and observed Bimby demonstration parties among a cross-section of Portuguese cooks (it is marketed similarly to Tupperware in the United States). Truninger found that Bimby salespeople had to develop a new set of cooking skills to use the technology to train would-be customers how to use it. Potential customers simultaneously adapted their existing skills to the task of producing favorite dishes with the Bimby. In this case, new technology required the expansion of existing skills.

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Gender and Cooking Skills One implication of the deskilling argument: If skills are indeed disappearing, then what should be done about it? First, a definitive case would need to be made that declining cooking skills are a nutritional (more unhealthy food) or cultural threat (loss of traditional cuisines). As noted, there is some evidence to that effect. So how do we counter the decline in home cooking? Most of the domestic cooking is still primarily carried out by women. Given that the increase in female participation in the workplace is one reason for the decline of time spent cooking, should women spend more time cooking and less time at work (Bowen et al., 2014; Rawlins & Livert, 2019)? Very definitely not. The more straightforward alternative is for men to spend more time cooking for their household. As noted elsewhere in this book, men often draw on traditional masculine norms when taking on the role of domestic cook, tending to cook on weekends or when there is more time available, specialty cooking such as grilling proteins (often outside), and employing equipment and complex preparations that are less suited to the quotidian demands of the typical day (rushing home from work to get the household fed). Greater time cooking with less adherence to these norms by men would provide more time for cooking within the household. To ensure the transmission of cooking skills from one generation to the other, male parents would also need to take on a greater share of instructing younger generations in cooking. A more basic issue is that cooking skills are perceived differently if they are possessed by men or women. Cooking for the household was simply one cluster of domestic duties for which women were responsible. Cooking was generally not considered equivalent to labor outside the home (Short, 2003). Consequently, domestic cooks’ cooking skills were not considered skills per se. Contrast this view of domestic cooks to professional cooks. With the growth of restaurants and other nondomestic kitchens beginning in the seventeenth century as well as the emerging profession of the chef, the cooking activities of the (mostly) men engaged in the professional kitchen were considered authentic skills. Apply the deskilling argument to the professional kitchen: Would we be as concerned about the deskilling of cooks? Certainly not in the same way. Most restaurant patrons are not aware of the use of convenience technologies in the back of the house. There is a profound entanglement of the deskilling debate and the gendered nature of cooking roles. In sum, the deskilling debate has several critical weaknesses. It relies on a narrow conception that fails to recognize the complexity of skills needed (from knife skills to time management) to put food on the plate. The causal direction between the use of convenience foods and loss of skills is unclear. The debate ignores the very significant impact of time scarcity on cooking. Cooking skills should not be viewed as a frozen set of skills (Short, 2003) but

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as a portfolio of skills that enable the cook to deal with multiple demands and contextual constraints. I would argue that all cooking takes skills. WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN COOKING SKILLS AND COOKING CONFIDENCE? After that first experience of making an omelet—however it turned out— some people are ready to do it again with vim and spatula. However, even with the same eggy outcome, some folks will be no more (or even less) likely to make the egg dish again. Why the difference? We can distinguish between the capability of carrying out an action and our belief in that capability. Perhaps our two breakfast cooks have different levels of belief in their ability to confidently pull it off: confidence is an integral part of cooking. Every day, we encounter people who are very good at what they do, very confident that they can do it, and sure that what they do will have the outcome they desire. We constantly reflect on our own confidence in a wide range of situations: from learning a new app to throwing a baseball to arguing a case in court. At this point, let’s recall that ubiquitous story we learn as children of the Little Engine That Could. (I am certainly not the first person to mention the story when talking about self-confidence; it has probably been invoked in hundreds of research articles and books.) If you recall the tale, a group of toys and fresh vegetables and their railroad cars were seeking a way to get over the hill to the children in the next town. Passing locomotives refused to take them, as they thought the job too trivial or they were in too much of a rush. Thankfully, a modest little switch engine agreed to do it. As the engine climbed the hill, it voiced the mantra “I think I can, I think I can”—an expression of self-confidence. As the train goes over hill and approaches the town, the little locomotive says, “I knew I could.” Unlike the switch engine, we don’t always take on a task, not out of a lack of perceived skills or abilities but because we lack confidence in our ability to succeed. Unless we believe that our behavior will attain the desired outcome, there is little reason to do it. This situation applies especially to difficult tasks: failure has notable consequences and is a potential source of embarrassment. WHY IS CONFIDENCE IMPORTANT? Over the past fifty years, extensive research has documented the vital role of self-confidence when individuals initiate behavior—that is, take on a task. We associate Albert Bandura with the most influential work on self-confidence with theories regarding agency and, especially, self-efficacy (1986, 2006).

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Bandura’s social cognitive approach to understanding behavior focuses on imitation and agency: understanding the importance of thoughts on behavior (rather than B. F. Skinner’s positive and negative reinforcements or Sigmund Freud’s id). Bandura argued that humans are agentic: they constantly take actions intentionally and thoughtfully. What are the features of human agency and how are they manifested in the act of cooking? What is the role of agency in cooking? Agency requires intentionality (Bandura, 2006). When I make coffee, I do so intentionally: “It’s morning, I need coffee, and there are others in the household who depend on coffee for starting their day.” After a few thousand replications, making the coffee may seem rather automatic, a long-standing habit, but it is still certainly intentional. Cooking intentions may range from “I need to make dinner” to “I need to cook that steak soon before it spoils” or “Bobby is hungry and crying. What can I give him right now?” A behavioral intention also implies a plan of action. Our action plan may be vague: “I will start making coffee sometime after letting the dog out.” Alternatively, action plans can be explicit and take on the form of entries in our electronic schedule, a grocery list on the refrigerator, or recipes and timelines for preparation. Agency also requires forethought. A cook’s plan of action involves purchasing ingredients, food preparation, and the resulting meal. When you think about it, we spend an incredible amount of time in the future when we cook. Of course, forethought can vary from the slight (e.g., I see I have milk and cereal, voilà—breakfast) to planning tomorrow night’s family meal (e.g., do I need to shop tomorrow, what is in the freezer?) to the formidable planning required for a dinner party or holiday feast. In addition to intention and thinking about the future, a key aspect of human agency is the ability to self-regulate (Bandura, 2006). Not only do we initiate behavior, but we also adjust that behavior according to what we observe happening. The ability to self-regulate—modify behavior according to feedback in pursuit of a goal—is critical in most everyday settings and particularly in cooking. If your omelet is appearing to smoke, turn down the heat. Self-regulation is a very powerful concept. Educational psychologist Barry Zimmerman found that by increasing struggling students’ ability to self-regulate—through tracking their time studying, estimating their grades, reflecting on the study activities—struggling and high-risk students can achieve academic success (Zimmerman et al., 2017). In the kitchen, cooks constantly receive feedback regarding the smell, look, sound, and feel of what they are cooking, and learning to observe and interpret this feedback is a key part of learning to cook. When we make a roast, we might rely on the oven timer and thermometer, taking into account the weight of the meat. When the timer beeps, we will seek more feedback such as a meat thermometer, observe the roast, touch the roast, or even cut a slice

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to inspect. Think about cooking a casserole without any feedback. Imagine that you can’t smell it, see it, or touch it once it goes in the oven. You take out the casserole when the buzzer sounds and serve it regardless of how much it has cooked. Maybe your timing was perfect. How would you know? The final property of agentic behavior is one that we will discuss in some depth. When engaging in tasks, humans not only have intention, forethought, and feedback but also reflect on their abilities. My dog may be an excellent runner and certainly pursues squirrels with clear intent. However, he probably does not reflect on this ability during his quieter moments. His awareness of past performance in running will likely not impact how well he runs after a squirrel tomorrow. Unlike dogs, humans reflect. We reflect on how well we completed a task and judge our abilities to complete a similar (or somewhat similar) task in the future. This we term self-efficacy. CONFIDENCE AND SELF-EFFICACY Self-efficacy is the degree to which we believe that we can accomplish objectives by our actions. Why is self-efficacy important? If you don’t think you can change the tire when you have a flat, why try? Why not call the automobile club? Parents often find that small children become easily frustrated and don’t think they can accomplish a task. With a little parental encouragement, the child not only successfully completes the task but also has an increased feeling of self-efficacy. Next time, the child may engage in the task more actively and without reluctance. Cooking tasks are also often characterized by challenge or unexpected difficulty (e.g., making a complicated dish from a recipe); it is our belief that we can accomplish in the kitchen what we set out to do that keeps us on task. The role of belief in our abilities— self-efficacy—on performance has been shown for activities varying from sports performance (Moritz, 2000) to academic success (Zimmerman et al., 2017) to helping behavior (Alessandri et al., 2009). While many of us may use the terms confidence and self-efficacy interchangeably, these concepts are theoretically distinct. Typically, confidence refers to a general belief and/or feeling regarding one’s ability to carry out an action: a confident cook has a generally engaging and positive orientation to the kitchen. Self-efficacy refers to our beliefs and feelings regarding a specific task and performance. The domestic cook may feel confident regarding his or her overall cooking skills, but not so sure about their ability to make handmade pasta. Moreover, in some psychological research paradigms, the term confidence is often used to refer to the certainty with which we judge a decision that we make (Stankov & Lee, 2015). I might ask you, “Is the pasta ready?” And you might reply, “Yes.” If I ask you how sure you are that the

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pasta is ready, then I am measuring your confidence in that judgment. If I asked, “How confident are you that you could take care of cooking our pasta dinner tonight?” then I would be interested in your self-efficacy. An illustration of variations in self-efficacy is provided by Adams and White (2015), who examined cooking skills among domestic cooks in United Kingdom. Self-efficacy in cooking techniques were highest for boiling (93 percent) and lowest for stir-frying (74 percent). For cooking specific foods, cooks rated themselves highest for potatoes (94 percent) and lowest for beans (60 percent). Regarding types of dishes, self-efficacy was highest for ready-to-make meals (98 percent) and lowest for baking from scratch (69 percent). By the way, the researchers found that women were more self-efficacious than men. THE IMPACT OF SELF-EFFICACY ON COOKING We have talked about how self-efficacy can impact what we choose to cook and how we choose to cook it. Self-efficacy also impacts our motivational readiness: the point at which we are ready to try something novel or challenging (Kruglanski et al., 2014). If we feel efficacious, we are more likely to persist in an activity when the heat starts rising in the kitchen (Maddux & Kleiman, 2018). A variety of research studies have demonstrated how individuals’ beliefs in their own cooking abilities are linked to many aspects of food preparation activities. For example, Australian researchers Burton and colleagues (2016) surveyed over one thousand culinary gatekeepers: those who are primarily responsible for shopping, planning and preparation of meals for their household. They used an advanced statistical technique known as cluster analysis to classify the gatekeepers in terms of cooking confidence. Three groups emerged: those with low cooking confidence, moderate confidence, and high cooking confidence. Comparisons of the three groups found that greater confidence in cooking was related to motivations to cook more healthy foods, less use of convenience foods, and more of a fresh food focus. Another Australian research team (Beshara et al. 2010) found similar results with a sample of 120 working mothers who were the primary cooks for their children aged five to eighteen. Mothers with higher cooking self-confidence were more likely to cook healthy meals for their children. In fact, the degree of cooking selfefficacy was a stronger predictor of cooking healthy meals in the past week than time pressures. Burton and colleagues’ (2017) study likewise found that confident culinary gatekeepers paid greater attention to product information, did more meal planning, and used more shopping lists. Note that these studies are correlational with self-efficacy measured occurring at the same time

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as cooking self-reports. The causal relationship between the two could be in either direction: that confident cooks prepare healthier food or that cooks reflect on their preparation of healthy foods as an indication of their selfefficacy. This body of research would benefit from the use of longitudinal designs to tease out these relationships. These studies confirm the importance of cooks’ self-efficacy to their cooking activity and the resulting impact of the nutrition of their household. Of course, as we continue to note throughout this text, cooking decisions are variably determined by the cook’s beliefs, traits, and experience; the social influences within the household in which they cook; temporal constraints; and the goals for a particular meal. There are, moreover, potential relationships between these influences on cooking. For example, cooking self-efficacy may condition the influence of time on cooking. A cook who is less confident may be more distracted and disrupted by time scarcity to get the meal prepared than a more confident cook. Perhaps we should be more concerned about declines in self-efficacy than skills. University of Minnesota researchers (Horning et al., 2017) explored some of the reasons why parents of children aged eight to twelve utilized pre-prepared or highly processed foods (such as frozen foods and boxed foods) when cooking for their children. They found that parents’ self-efficacy regarding cooking was far more important in predicting the availability of less healthy food in the home compared to the household’s access to fruits and vegetables or its socioeconomic status. Other studies have likewise found that cooks with low self-efficacy are more likely to use pre-prepared and convenience foods (Bava et al., 2008; Brunner et al., 2010). HOW DO WE BUILD COOKING CONFIDENCE? Self-efficacy is essential for perseverance: it motivates us to keep trying when an activity is challenging or frustrating. As we have noted, self-efficacy can be quite specific (Maddux & Kleiman, 2018): although you may feel rather confident of your cooking abilities in general, you may have strikingly different levels of self-efficacy regarding your ability to make a pizza compared to your ability to fry a chicken. How do we initially form the impression that we can accomplish a task: that is, where does self-efficacy come from? We Build Self-Efficacy by Doing Direct experiences in the kitchen can boost our confidence in our cooking abilities (Peterson, 2012). Remember the day you learned how to ride a bike? If you did and your experience was like mine, you likely started

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with relatively low self-efficacy accompanied by a fear that you would have another fall or get a scrape. By the end of that experience (thanks to my big brother, Bill), I knew I could really ride a bike and my self-efficacy was in the clouds. The same relationship of performance to self-efficacy applies to cooking. We should note, however, that cooking is not like riding a bike, as our first time cooking may not be recalled as vividly. Instead, cooking consists of myriad discrete tasks that we learn over time. Depending on what age we learn to cook, our tasks may be quite simple to start, with our self-efficacy built slowly and task by task. Most cooking tasks are also serial in nature: frying eggs requires the skill to add fat to the heated pan, crack open eggs without getting the shells in the pan, and removing the eggs from the pan when cooked. If you can do only two out of three, you might end up with crunchy fried eggs, regardless of how well you remove them from the heat. Failure at tasks can undermine self-efficacy, particularly when we blame poor performance on a lack of skills. Failure may also reduce our self-efficacy during the early phases of acquiring proficiency at a new behavior (Bandura, 1997; Shieh et al., 2015). For cooking, early frustrations as a young adult may significantly influence the degree to which we feel confident in cooking. Successful performance of a task boosts our self-efficacy (Bandura, 1997) and we feel like we can effectively repeat the task. As we have seen, research has demonstrated a strong relationship between performance and self-efficacy. The relationship is quite reliable: when researchers want to change subjects’ self-efficacy in social experiments, they create situations in which the subject succeeds at a task or fails at a task (Bandura & Jourden, 1991; Maddux & Kleiman, 2018). Success doesn’t always lead to greater self-efficacy, however. What is important to consider is our interpretation of that success. As noted earlier in the chapter, people can make internal or external attributions for success. If we do well on a task and consider that an indicator of our own abilities rather than luck, our belief that we can succeed at the task in the future benefits. However, what if we succeed but don’t attribute our performance to our own talents? In a study of ninety-seven cooks in the United States, Stern and Kipnis (1993) found that cooks varied in the degree to which they used technology in their cooking (e.g., frozen foods, boxed foods, canned foods, or highly processed foods). Cooks who used more technology were more likely to make external attributions for their cooking success: they credited the technology. Moreover, those individuals had lower cooking self-efficacy. In a sense, even confident cooks may feel less confident as a result of regularly using cooking techniques that are less challenging (Stern & Kipnis, 1993).

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Our interpretation of success can also be swayed by who else is in the kitchen. Successes that we encounter when cooking with another (with our mother, husband, child, or friend) may be interpreted as less important if we believe the others in the kitchen possess greater skills or knowledge. We Build Self-Efficacy by Observing What we see but do not actually do may also boost our confidence in the ability to carry out specific tasks (Bandura, 2006). Vicarious experiences— watching others carry out behavior that has a successful outcome—leads us to feel as though “hey, I’ve seen that done, I can do it too.” Vicarious experiences regarding food preparation are ubiquitous. As children, we watch our mother or grandmother cook. Later, we observe our roommates or loved ones cook. Amateur and professional cooks often have long narratives of the kitchens in which they grew up. A key part of professional chef training is the stage, in which interns or those early in their training spend time in a kitchen in an unpaid capacity, to gain exposure to new cuisines and techniques. And then there is video. For nearly seventy years, Americans have been able to watch cooks prepare dishes on television and, more recently, the Internet. The on-demand nature of web-based instruction cooking videos permits the learner to start, stop, and repeat demonstrations. Our technology permits the video on our smart speaker or phone to be viewed from where we cook. The degree to which our observations of others impact our self-esteem also depends on who we observe. The more similar models carrying out the behavior are to us, the more likely we are to think that we can do it too (Bandura, 1997; Maddux & Kleiman, 2018). Consequently, we may be more emboldened by watching “someone like us” cook a challenging meal on television than a highly successful chef who appears superhuman. If you are a fan of the Food Network or other networks, is there a cook with whom you strongly identify? Food television, video, and websites provide a chance for vicarious experiences; do those who intensely watch such programs have greater confidence in their ability to create béchamel sauce? Positive Words Can Boost Our Self-Efficacy What others tell us about our abilities and probability of success also shapes our self-efficacy regarding cooking. Who tells us “you can do it” matters too. We take more seriously feedback received from people we respect, who are trustworthy, or who are attractive (Petty & Brinol, 2010). When faced with challenges, positive encouragement from a significant other may bolster our belief that we can get the job done. Likewise, feedback that calls into question our abilities has the opposite effect (Bandura, 1997). Encouragement in the

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family kitchen, from a friend, or even in the professional kitchen may boost our self-efficacy when the heat of preparation makes us doubt ourselves. Imagine Yourself Cooking That Dish Can you imagine yourself making ratatouille? Visualizing ourselves engaging in a specific task strengthens our belief that we can do it in real life. Considerable research has demonstrated the power of imagery on individual’s self-efficacy regarding coping with chronic pain (Zach et al., 2018), job interviews (Knudstrup et al., 2003), relearning how to balance after a stroke (Tang et al., 2015), musical performances (Hatfield, 2016), and playing soccer (Mashayekh & Aslankhani, 2014). Our images could draw on our previous similar experiences or from observing the process (Maddux & Kleiman, 2018). Mentally going through the steps of cooking may add to our feeling of control over cooking the dish; it also helps us think through challenges that would not otherwise arise until we did it. For some cooks, reading through a recipe may provide just that kind of structure. Feel Good about Your Cooking Emotions can boost or dampen our self-efficacy (Bandura, 1997; Maddux & Kleiman, 2018). Suppose that instead of ratatouille, you cook a souffle. As you cook this challenging dish, do you feel a sense of accomplishment (and maybe a little relief as it comes together)? These positive emotions will likely bolster your belief that you could do it again. Suppose, however, that when preparing the souffle, you feel anxious, frustrated, or even pain (careful of the hot pan). A long-standing body of research also indicates that how you label your emotion is important: Do I attribute my rapid heartbeat to my excitement at finishing the dish or to anxiety as I anticipate the worst? THE EFFECTS OF BOOSTING COOKING CONFIDENCE The importance of self-efficacy to cooking is underscored by its inclusion in food interventions designed to improve the nutritional content of food cooked at home. Self-efficacy is often used as a secondary or intermediate goal of nutritional interventions in which it is assumed that increasing a cook’s confidence in their abilities to prepare a meal will have a positive impact on the nutritional quality of diet that they prepare and their household ultimately consumes (McGowan et al., 2017).

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OVERCONFIDENCE Can cooks be too confident? Can we have unrealistically high self-efficacy expectations regarding our cooking? Of course! Individuals who have inflated self-efficacy beliefs about their cooking abilities may take on dishes and preparations that are too far beyond their capabilities or that will require more effort and resources than are available (Bandura, 1986; Maddux & Kleiman, 2018). Think you can prepare the Feast of the Seven Fishes for Christmas Eve? Ideally you are not experiencing false hope syndrome (Polivy & Herman, 2002, cited in Maddux & Kleiman, 2018): when cooks have an impractical expectation about the ease, efficacy, speed, and level of success of a preparation. High self-esteem may not lead to wishful dreaming but to complacency. We may feel so confident in our own abilities that we don’t set our own hurdle high enough: we are satisfied with preparing food that does not challenge us or expose us to new ingredients or processes or require new skills (Yang et al., 2009, in Maddux & Kleiman, 2018). Another way in which too high a level of efficacy expectations can be detrimental is when we need help. Individuals who are overly self-confident are less likely to seek help from others when they find themselves “in the weeds” (Maddux & Kleiman, 2018). You could pick up the phone and ask Mom how she dealt with an unexpected outcome, but you don’t. When they encounter inevitable challenges, overconfident cooks may limit themselves in terms of strategies for improving their performance. CONCLUSION Cooking skills, cooking competence, and cooking confidence provide three perspectives for understanding of how a cook thinks about his or her cooking. These concepts draw on several long-standing research themes related to human agency and motivation. Regardless of perspective, the context of food preparation remains important. Each meal presents its own challenges in terms of palates, preferences, resources, available time, and just how tired the cook happens to be.

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In this closing chapter, we first review what we have learned about cooks, cooking behavior, and food from a psychological perspective. We then turn to two future-oriented questions. First, what are the trends and factors challenging the occupation of cooking, and how will these likely impact professional cooks? Second, we reconsider the concerns around the decline of home cooking discussed previously and speculate on the future of cooking at home. WHAT DOES A PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE ON COOKING PROVIDE US? Let us take a moment to consider a psychological definition of cooking based on the topics covered in this book: Cooking is the act of preparing raw ingredients for consumption by oneself and others. Each act of cooking is embedded in a specific social, temporal, physical, and cultural context and reflects the motivations, experiences, and identity of the cook. What are some of the insights into cooks and cooking that have emerged from the psychological approaches examined in this book? Cooking Behavior Is Multiply Determined There is rarely one cause to which we can attribute how people think, feel, or act. Instead, we strive to take account of multiple influences on psychological phenomena and human behavior. One prominent example throughout this book has been the domestic cook’s decision regarding what to make for dinner. We have seen how the selection process is shaped by what dishes the cook is familiar with, motivations when planning the meal, self-efficacy regarding particular cooking techniques, perception of temporal scarcity, food memories, and broader personality traits. Accompanying these intrapsychic influences are those that arise from the social setting in which the cook cooks. 163

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These include anticipated eaters, schedules, dinner table norms, and relationships with others. Physical influences on the dinner decision include what ingredients are available, what food needs to be consumed before it expires, and the limitations of the kitchen and equipment. Let us not forget the cultural influences that channel our behavior but are often invisible to us. This includes the sociocultural significance of the day (i.e., dinner on December 24 compared to February 8), the cuisine of the household culture, and the eaters’ expectations. Cooking Behavior Reflects How We Interpret Our World A basic tenet of social psychology is that individuals are influenced by their interpretation of social situations more than objective aspects of those situations. Our understanding of the experiences of cooks is incomplete without taking into account how cooks interpret their world. For example, we just mentioned several influences on the cooks that are highly subjective and can vary in their meaning from cook to cook. These include the interpretation of temporal scarcity, evaluation of when perishable food has expired, or what constitutes a healthy meal. For example, we have discussed how ordinary products (such as Pillsbury Crescent Rolls) can hold significant meaning as a food memory from one’s childhood. Cooking Behavior Is Shaped by the Cook’s Physical Setting To understand cooking, we need also to take into account the physical space in which it occurs and the material goods that are required to carry it out. For the domestic cook, the kitchen may represent “their” space or at least space in which they hold a certain degree of control over others in the household. Placement of equipment, organization of the pantry, and the complexity of the refrigerator may both reflect the cook’s preferences and limit the preparations that can be undertaken. Available workspace, counters, and access to sinks and other physical facets shape the cook’s behavior. When they enter the kitchen to help, the participation of other household members and guests in cooking may be perceived as a welcome source of assistance or a threatening trespass into the cook’s space. Given the highly gendered nature of domestic cooking roles, we also might expect grilling and barbecue spaces to represent more masculine arrangements. Physical aspects of the professional kitchen likewise mold the behavior of cooks within it. The arrangement of equipment and passages, degree of crowding, and distance to walk-ins and the window can make activities during

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service with its temporal and production pressures confusing, contentious, and a negative emotional experience. A cook’s station shapes what they produce. It is not surprising that new chefs in charge often set out to modify kitchen arrangements as one of the first orders of business when they arrive. Cooking Creates Identity We have seen a dynamic relationship between a cook’s identity and their cooking. Personal identities related to cooking include good cook, lousy cook, foodie, vegan, omnivore, or grill king. We learn about ourselves from reflecting on our behavior; consequently, the activity of cooking and its outcomes (great food or disaster) have the potential to transform our self-concept—that is, how we think about ourselves. Cooking can be a major component of our relational identities, particularly as a parent, child, spouse, or grandparent. All of these identities are constantly re-created through our social interactions in our microsystems, including home, work, school, place of worship, and others. How we think about ourselves reflects the ways in which we think about others. Identities thus have an integral social component. For some—particularly professional cooks—the label chef or cook represents a positive social identity that can be claimed. Cultural identities are exceedingly tied to food. Cooking food from one’s culture of origin provides an intense affirmation of an individual’s background. Both the domestic cook and the professional cook are highly gendered roles exerting strong influences on the person assuming them. Each day, individuals can re-create those roles, adapt the roles, reject the roles, and combine the roles. Cooking can be an integral part of the ongoing construction of one’s gender identity. For those who have experienced significant threats to identity due to incarceration, migration, or the loss of a spouse, cooking can assist in reclaiming them. Personal and relational identities can also be lost when one loses the ability to cook. Finally, we have suggested that each act of cooking has the potential to create a commensal identity among eaters, which also may include the cook, especially the home cook. Cooking Is Social Whether professional or domestic, a significant theme throughout this book has been the extent to which cooking is a social act. Social influences on the behavior of cooking extend from the memories and identities of the cook to the influence of eaters, to the sociocultural context of the meal. The ecological perspective enumerated by Urie Bronfenbrenner (1992) underscores this social embeddedness: cooking is a behavior that is carried out with a specific

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microsystem (e.g., household, commercial kitchen). A microsystem, such as a household, can be conceived of as the connections (relationships) between all members of that household, including the cook. Over time, microsystems achieve a certain level of equilibrium, characterized by behavioral regularities and norms. One implication of a systems perspective on the household is that the domestic cook’s behavior is maintained by the household system and that significant changes in his or her behavior or that of eaters requires system-wide change. Microsystems are embedded within an exosystem, comprising institutions and organizations that impact the domestic cook, although he or she may never have contact with them, including food distribution chains, retailers, regulators, and production. Finally, all of these are nested within a specific cultural and governmental systems, known as the macro system (Bronfenbrenner, 1992). Switch the nation from the United States to Italy, and many of the features of the macrosystem and microsystems will be different. Clearly it is easier to think about the social side of professional kitchens: most have more than one kitchen employee during service. Even with only two or three employees, the professional kitchen’s social environment encompasses explicit and implicit hierarchies, social norms, communications challenges, training, conflict, supervision, and onboarding processes. We have depicted the professional kitchen as a particularly strong situation, due not only to chains of command and interpersonal relations but also to the social pressure of performance in the midst of service. We also noted that despite the challenges, kitchen crews can also become highly cohesive, yelling during service and commiserating thereafter. Of course, even with one cook alone in the kitchen, professional cooking requires anticipation of how the dish will be liked by the customer, working with the front of the house staff, and dealing with owners, purveyors, and patrons. We have also explored the social world of the domestic cook. For those who cook for others, the eaters are a primary focus of the cook and what and how they cook. In the domestic setting, cooks and their eaters typically engage in continuous direct interaction. Eaters influence the domestic cook in terms of likes and dislikes, dietary habits, schedules, and the assistance they can provide in the kitchen. Preparing meals for friends, acquaintances, and neighbors requires similar anticipation of their reaction to and evaluation of what is prepared. What about domestic cooks who cook only for themselves? Even then, our relationships with others remain influential. While planning or preparing a dish they cook may recall prior social environments such as a family of origin or perhaps an earlier time when children, parents, or spouses were in the household. All domestic cooks are also influenced by many others, whether family of origin, those from whom they learned to cook, fellow food

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or cooking enthusiasts, or those to whom they look for advice or inspiration in cooking. Cooking Is Temporal Temporal synchronization is important to both domestic and professional kitchens. Domestic cooks must deal with the synchronization of preparation, although the consequences of not having everything ready at the same time may not adversely affect domestic eaters as they would restaurant customers. Synchronization of domestic eaters may be critical to the domestic cook, as multiple services of a meal (e.g., dinner) can be tremendously challenging, particularly if there are also caregiving and other household duties awaiting the cook. Rather than eaters, service in the restaurant requires temporal synchronization of the cooks so that all the dishes for a table are ready at the same time. If not, the table waits and some of the dishes made will be less than optimal when served. In contrast to the domestic kitchen, the timing of serving dishes to eaters may be more important than the quality of the food that is served. Mom might be a little behind in service, but we love her pasta dish. If the restaurant kitchen is late, we are unhappy. Temporal scarcity can render a pleasant domestic cooking session unpleasant, frustrate the cook, and shape menu and preparation decisions. Alternatively, cooking can change the experience of time. Many professional kitchen cooks prefer rushes of service in which time appears to fly by. In the professional kitchen, certain activities can lead the cook to experience a state of flow in which the passage of time is likewise pushed into the background. The practice of mise en place similarly helps the professional cook regain some temporal control in anticipation of the out-of-control rush later on. Cooking Is Emotional A psychological depiction of cooks and cooking is incomplete without consideration of the emotion of the kitchen. The deepening of our experience as cooks and acquisition of cooking skills facilitates the cognitive ease and accompanying positive emotions we feel while cooking: we know how to carry out the task leading to positive affect. Cooks also experience positive emotions as a result of encountering cooking challenges and successfully overcoming them. Cooking challenges help cooks experience mindfulness, focusing on the moment. Full focus and engagement in the cooking process brings for some cooks a sense of flow and positive emotions. Many cooks become adept at affective anticipation: thinking about how they will feel if their cooking activity succeeds (or fails), which may constrain which dishes they choose to prepare. We also coined the term projective

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affective anticipation to describe the process by which the cook anticipates how their eaters will feel when consuming their food. The development of mastery in cooking can shape motivation to cook as well. Cooks may, from early on, be intrinsically motivated to cook. Extrinsically motivated cooks—including those in the professional kitchen— over time may become more intrinsically motivated. Different domestic cooking types (e.g., family first) approach cooking tasks with varying motivations and goals and experience different emotions while cooking as a result (Rawlins & Livert, 2019). Cooking Reflects the Cook’s Personality Choices made in the kitchen and emotional experiences while cooking are shaped by the cook’s personality. Sensation seeking and neophobia both influence what a cook chooses to cook, obviously in diverging ways. Many studies suggest that professional cooks possess greater levels of the Big Five broad traits of conscientiousness and extraversion than the general population and that these may predict success and longevity in the industry. During chef training, students with high levels of conscientiousness were more likely to finish their program, had more successful externships, and earned higher overall grades, all predictors of resilience and success. COOKING CHANGES AND COVID-19 The Covid-19 pandemic provides a useful demonstration of the resilient nature of cooking. Covid-19 changed households in many ways. Lockdown restricted social interaction for those living alone, particularly for older persons, depriving them for long periods of time of face-to-face social support. Some households merged, so as to spend the lockdown period together for camaraderie and resource sharing. Work for a significant portion of employees moved home and online. Schools pivoted to online instruction, so that children were also at home, adding caretaking burdens. For many, the pandemic led to significant unemployment and financial strain. The Covid-19 pandemic brought substantial loss and negative effects to us all. It also provided evidence of the degree to which domestic cooking practices are amenable to change. An exquisite example of Covid-19-related household changes and cooking is offered by my friend Krishnendu Ray and Stephanie Jolly (Jolly & Ray, 2023). During the early days of the pandemic quarantine, Krish invited his friend Stephanie to live with him and his son, whose college had gone

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virtual, so that she could receive cancer treatment in New York. The addition of an adult to the household required negotiation of extant cooking norms and clearly some adjustment. Planning dinner plays a central role in structuring household activity and maintaining stability in Krish and his son’s lives. He preferred a daily routine of planning and provisioning dinner with fresh ingredients selected and purchased daily, a routine easier to maintain in New York City than in more car-oriented cities. In contrast, Stephanie valued a full larder, using leftovers, and often did not have strong preferences for their evening meal. Krish and Stephanie detail how they negotiated differences in their domestic cooking (and other) identities, autonomy, expectations for what to cook and how to cook it, taste preferences, and cooking practices and how their household cooking changed and evolved over time, all in the context of the ever-intensifying pandemic. The pandemic was also responsible for several positive trends in domestic cooking. The most significant is the sheer volume of the increase in meals cooked at home. Domestic cooking increased in the United States (Rodgers et al., 2021) and in other countries. Estimates of the scope of the increase vary. For example, Sarda and colleagues reported that 42 percent of French households in their sample increased the number of meals cooked, while another 7 percent cooked less. Rimante Ronto and colleagues (2021) in Australia found that domestic cooking had increased in two-thirds of the households they studied. Parallel studies of a convenience sample of households in the United States and Italy (Rodgers et al., 2021) found that the modal response in both countries was “a little more cooking.” We should note the increase in meals disproportionately impacted women in the household, who are more likely to be tasked with the primary domestic cooking role. While assuming more cooking duties, women were also more likely to have taken on more of the household burden of increased caregiving for children out of school, older adults, or those who join the household. As we have noted earlier, increased practice can lead to increases in cooking confidence. Indeed, several studies report an increase in cooking skills (e.g., Menon et al., 2022). Cooking more meals with additional time also results in additional meal planning as well as innovations in cooking. This might include cooking new cuisines (Menon et al., 2022) or trying unfamiliar cooking processes. For example, Easterbrook-Smith in New Zealand reported anecdotal evidence supporting a global increase in baking at home and the reasons why but does not bring to bear quantitative data supporting the trend (2021). Menon and colleagues (2022) reported a similar finding with domestic cooks in Mumbai, India, as did Ronto (Ronto et al., 2021) in Australia. The dietary impact of meals in some cases improved. A number of studies suggest an increase in cooking with fresh ingredients among Brazilian young adults (Dezanetti et al., 2022), in French households (Philippe et al., 2022;

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Sarda et al., 2022), and in China (Wang & Na, 2020). These improvements in cooking practices varied by characteristics of the cook. For example, cooks with greater self-reported skills were more likely to increase their use of fresh foods (Dezanetti et al., 2022), and households with greater higher incomes were more likely to increase their utilization of fresh foods (Wang & Na, 2020). In addition to increases in home cooking, roughly half of households in US and Italian samples reported less food waste (Rogers et al., 2021) despite the hoarding of food at the beginning of the pandemic. The transmission of cooking skills also increased in some households. Some domestic cooks were able to take advantage of the increase in available time during lockdown and the increased co-presence of household members to teach cooking (Philippe et al., 2022). HOW WILL COOKING CHANGE? In this final section, we pose two questions about the longevity of cooking. What are the trends and factors challenging the occupation of cooking and how will these likely impact professional cooks? What is the future of cooking at home? Whither Cooking as an Occupation? How will cooking as an occupation change in the near future? Several critical trends are considered, followed by their impact on some of the negative and positive aspects of cooking in commercial kitchens. Covid-19 and Ghost Kitchens The Covid-19 pandemic likewise had a profound effect on the commercial food industry. Restaurants and other public eating venues were forced to close or to significantly alter the conduct of their business, shifting to takeout only or setting up outdoor socially distanced tables. Restaurants also moved outside, establishing heated and even cooled spaces outside the restaurant on the sidewalk, parking lane of a street, or other open spaces. Many municipalities such as New York City modified regulations to accommodate this change. By some accounts, roughly 50 percent of the 10 million food industry workers in the United State became unemployed, even if for a short duration (Scheiber, 2020). Many had to shift from restaurants to grocery stores, commercial food manufacturing, and other areas for work. Covid-19 accelerated trends were already starting to change the restaurant industry.

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Establishments shifted to a pick-up-only modality, in addition to offering home delivery. This hybrid model emerged and continues as the pandemic receded: services and spaces dedicated to customer pickup alongside in-house dining. According to the National Restaurant Association (2019), the hybrid model will expand significantly in the future with various combinations of counter service, sit-down service, pickup, delivery, and meal kits that the customer prepares at a later point in time. Another model has been termed ghost kitchens (NRA, 2019) or dark kitchens (Dyachenko, 2022): establishments that closed all dining facilities while maintaining their kitchens with customer pickup and delivery. The industry anticipates significant growth of this off-premises model with, in addition to the conversion of restaurant space, the establishment of ghost kitchens in new spaces without dining areas. Many of the ghost/dark kitchens will offer pop-up versions for special events and occasions to provide a direct experience with customers. This growth will continue alongside the expansion of breadth and depth of food preparation at convenience stores and grocery stores. What are the psychological implications of these changes? A move toward off-premises dining will reduce the amount of direct contact between the customer and the cook (often conveyed by the front of the house staff). Customer feedback will rely on digital feedback with its focus on rating scales and very short comments. A greater number of professional cooks may find work at convenience stores and larger grocery stores rather than traditional restaurant kitchens. The increase in off-premises eating may also lead to centralization in which several ghost kitchens are located in the same production space, possibly resulting in sharing of cooks and staff. These changes could negatively impact the nature of kitchen cohesion and cooking identities associated with particular stations or preparations. Technology in the Commercial Kitchen In addition to the changing modes of dining, another trend concerns an increased reliance on digital technology in the professional kitchen, as well as artificial intelligence (AI). As of 2023, we are just starting to see robots enter the kitchen. Many of the cook’s activities—from flipping burgers to making a milkshake—have already been taken on successfully by robotic devices. The range of these behaviors will expand, as motion-capture technology can break down the motion of chef when he or she makes a roux, digitize it, and replicate it with a robot in whites (chef’s whites, that is). Aspects of the expert knowledge and perceptual skills developed over a lifetime of cooking increasingly can be replicated by artificial intelligence including sound, feel, and look of the

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food being prepared. It may not be too long in the future before judgments based on smell and taste may also be provided by AI. It is likely that kitchens themselves will get smarter. Ovens, refrigerators, mixers and other essential kitchen equipment will be outfitted with sensors and means of communicating with other devices in the kitchen, known as the Internet of Things (IoT) (NRA, 2023). In addition to increasing coordination and monitoring processes, the potential for the creation of large databases customized to each kitchen may provide advanced judgments and very detailed procedures for each dish. Imagine understanding what temperature, time, and kitchen equipment settings result in the best cheeseburger (as rated by customers in real time). The degree to which the connection between the IoT, robotic activity, and AI judgment platforms can replace the experienced cook’s judgment is unclear, but the potential is there. The nature of skills that the cook must develop will increasingly encompass interacting with kitchen smart devices. This situation truly changes the experience of training, as one’s cooking behavior becomes mediated by a screen. To that end, cook training may move more and more to screens. There are already kitchen monitors for viewing recorded demonstrations or remote live instructional sessions. We can anticipate that much of this activity could move to phones or smart speakers. These connections we discussed may also impact the role of the window and the chef/expediter who is responsible for ensuring the quality of the dishes that are served. Perhaps window devices can indicate minutes ahead of time what components are running behind. When put in the windows, devices can assess the quality of the dish. This critical role, relying on expert judgment and knowledge of kitchen processes, can be transferred from human to device, thus depriving the cook of behavior that may be a source of self-efficacy, pride, and identity. Will the impact on professional cooks and their training be positive or negative? The cook will have to develop skills in technological interfaces in addition to their culinary skills. Technology is constantly changing, making continuing education essential. Again, the professional kitchen has always been a classroom. Less experienced cooks join the staff and must learn the menu. The menu changes. New equipment is acquired. Special services may require the kitchen to learn new dishes or how to cook more covers than they ever have before. While we are on this topic, we might note that the degree to which customer preferences are integrated into kitchen production may significantly increase. Regular customers of an establishment can provide diet and preference data that could be integrated into preparation when they sit down at the table for a meal. Whether this personalization requires a cook’s interface—to

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see the individual customer requirements and alter preparation (or become part of the kitchen’s digitized production system)—is likewise unclear. Could the technological transformation of the kitchen change the occupation of cook? Analysis of current trends in the food industry suggests a shrinkage of the number of kitchen staff due to off-premises delivery, centralization, and robotics (NRA, 2023), potentially leading to job loss and/ or lower wages. The degree to which such changes transform the identity and self-efficacy of cooks is unclear. Cooking remains one of the vanishing occupations in which the work is physical and productive and social. Whether the greater integration of technology dampens these psychological facets of professional cooking is a source of concern. We have noted how experienced cooks may achieve a level of mindfulness and of being in the moment. Cooks achieve the positive emotions associated with a sense of flow. Successful problem-solving likewise brings neurochemical and affective benefits. Cooking success brings a sense of accomplishment and competence, both with positive affective impacts. Does the mediation of so many of these processes by robotics or digital platforms threaten these positive psychological aspects of the professional cook? Cooks are a highly flexible group, as I have observed. But it is conceivable that these impacts may downgrade the cook’s experience. Is there an implication for the currently highly gendered commercial kitchen? Over the course of the past 150 years, as jobs require fewer skills due to technology, women are more likely to take over these lesser-paying jobs from men. The invention of the typewriter deskilled the traditional male job of clerk; over time clerking jobs paid less and tended to be taken by women. If the occupation of professional cook becomes deskilled, will the wages also decline? Chef AI I’ve set aside this discussion from other food venue changes, as I think it would have a tremendous impact on the psychology of a professional cook. I am referring to the potential for developing algorithms that can analyze the immense amount of data regarding what we like to eat. Putting together information regarding customer food preferences, taste profiles, and chemical analysis enables the creation of new dishes and recipes. The same approach can be taken to the creation of new cocktails. We can credit these dishes to Chef AI, who probably will be given more endearing monikers. Chef AI’s recipes can be ordered at any venue that licenses them and has the ingredients; the venue becomes even less essential. Bartender AI could be at your neighborhood bar and the local pub when you travel. Aside from reducing the

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number of sous chef and executive chef jobs, the growth of Chef AI will no doubt threaten current cooking identities. Improving Professional Cooking? Commercial kitchens can be dangerous places. Kitchen staff squeeze around each other in cramped spaces. There are spills on the floor along with hot stoves and ovens. Cooks and other kitchen staff must carry hot and heavy loads. The cooks must quickly prep and slice using nicely sharpened knives which sometimes take off a fingertip. All of this activity occurs in an environment that is loud and distracting. Would the changes we have reviewed positively impact these physical threats and hazards? Yes, at least to the degree that the human cook’s risk of injury is reduced. It is likely that the reduction of kitchen drudgery would also be positive. However, we would should take note that what might appear as drudgery to the outside can be actually neutral or even enjoyable to the cook (slicing carrots might sometimes be a pleasant activity). What about the climate of the commercial kitchen? Would the advent of robotic slicing and frying dampen negative experiences such as bullying, harassment, and verbal outbursts? I am not sure that would be the case. As noted, the working kitchen is the location of strong social pressures and norms. The situational pressures that maintain such behavior would have to change, requiring de-norming and re-norming that begins when the aspiring cook first enters the kitchen. I am concerned about the potential for some of the trends we outlined to make professional cooking a little less social. The reduction of kitchen staff (and increase in robotics) combined with the lack of contact with customers who pick up or have their food delivered might reduce direct interactions with customers and the potential to receive feedback on a dish, meet a neighbor, or reminisce with a former patron. The formidable changes that have occurred as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and its intensification of change in the food industry will probably lead to greater instability in the occupation. A poor work-life balance is endemic with long hours, varying shifts, unexpected cancellations, and something approaching an eighteen-hour day at times. Cooks do their work when other people have birthday parties, go to movies, play with the kids, and are generally not at work. The cook must maintain interpersonal relationships, which is not always easy to do, with associate strains, divorce, and degraded parenting. Perhaps the increased digitization of the kitchen, along with greater off-premises eating and temporary format (i.e., pop-ups), will help balance the work-life balance for the commercial cook.

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Many predict that in the face of the increase of off-premises dining, robotic kitchens, and flying drone delivery of pizza, there will be a concomitant “return to basics” movement (NRA, 2019). The past twenty years have already witnessed the proliferation of artisanal kitchens, farm-to-table establishments, and food markets and other routes by which the customer can recover a more traditional face-to-face eating experience. Restaurants may also become integral to the preservation and expansion of “third spaces” in communities where individuals can gather for an extended period of time to eat, work, recreate, and socialize. Neighborhood cafes, coffeehouses, and even beer gardens may be resilient to the aforementioned trends and possible an area of growth for professional cooks. The restaurant is an essential part of the social fabric in communities. They provide social spaces and places for important social interactions. They become part of our place identities and memories. Owners and staff play active roles in their local areas. It is difficult to conceive of most neighborhoods without a restaurant where commensality can occur. WILL DOMESTIC COOKING CONTINUE IN ITS CURRENT FORM? Is it conceivable that home cooking as we know it will, for the most part, disappear? In earlier chapters, we have considered some major trends in domestic cooking. Over the past few decades, there has been a decline in the amount of time individuals devote to domestic cooking (Metcalfe & Leonard, 2018), a pattern noted in numerous countries around the world. Several reasons for this change include the increased participation of women in the workforce, the temporal requirements of parenting as well as caregiving for older adults, and changes in the nature of work. Many are concerned that the decrease in domestic cooking is associated with several negative consequences. Less cooking at home may result in the loss of skills by the cook as well as fewer opportunities to teach cooking to children (Utter et al., 2016). Another negative consequence is the increased reliance on convenience foods and prepared foods, which tend to be less healthy than home-cooked meals. Some argue that the increased reliance on prepared foods likewise contributes to deskilling. With these trends in mind, will people still choose to cook? What would keep us cooking? When we consider whether the practice of domestic cooking will continue, it is important to consider what Covid-19 illustrated: that changes in the amount of available time for domestic cooks can substantially alter practice. Moreover, restaurants were closed, people were working at home, and students attended school at home.

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Cooking Is Still Meaningful to Us Commensality is potentially created each time our eaters gather to eat our food: sharing the table creates a bond between those individuals at it. The positive experience of a shared meal can strengthen ties between family members, guests, or new members of the household. The domestic cook can claim responsibility for creating these positive social situations. Commensality in new households, during travel, or as a refugee can have a restorative effect and build new social fabric. Cooking for special events or holidays can imbue the cook with a sense of ownership for the event and the emotional experiences of the dinners, not just the food. Aiswarya and Ramasundaram (2023) have described how an exclusive reliance on delivered food in lieu of home cooking might alter the domestic cook’s experience as well as commensality within a household. Prepared food creates more available time for the cook, but at the same time it deprives the cook of the break that putting the meal together can provide. Sometimes cooking can be a respite from other obligations. Likewise, other household members who may share responsibility for cooking or serving no longer engage in that very social activity of working together to prepare a meal. Commensality changes when the food enters through the front door. For example, there are no longer smells and noises that indicate to household members that the meal is nearing service. Instead, there is a doorbell. Given that delivered food is usually individually ordered, there may not be common bowls or plates. The need to share, to monitor each other’s consumption to avoid conflicts, to negotiate who receives the last portion is also no longer necessary. Sharing what is on the table is not necessary. Thus, as we noted earlier, many household members may consume their portions in a different common area, such as a living room in front of the television. Alternatively, household members may take their portions to their rooms to eat. Each time the domestic cook cooks, he or she engages in an activity imbued with meaning to them. Obviously, some cooking sessions may be more meaningful than others. Cooking strengthens our identities as a cook, father, grandmother, romantic partner, and loyal friend. We noted earlier how important reestablishing these identities can be when they have been threatened by changes in the household, sickness, or even incarceration. Cooking likewise reinforces cultural identities, an essential benefit to individuals who have migrated to different cultures or even are visiting for the short term. Cooking in refugee settlements represents one such phenomenon. As we cook, we may recall prior preparations of the dish, whether we cooked it or observed others doing so. We think about positive social interactions with family and friends during that preparation.

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Cooking Continues to Make Us Feel Good Feelings of renewed identity, self-efficacy, and the creation of commensality can not only provide meaning to our lives on a quotidian basis but also lead us to experience positive emotions as a result. Eating the food we cook and receiving positive feedback from our eaters likewise feels good. Domestic cooks can also experience positive affect as a result of meeting their goals for the meal, ranging from getting everyone fed by a certain time to using up the leftovers to providing a healthy meal to making someone feel better on their birthday, or on a hard day, or because we have missed them while they were away (Rawlins & Livert, 2019). Cooking permits some domestic cooks to focus on the moment and ignore distractions: we can lose ourselves. An increased use of technology attenuates our experience, restricting the input of our senses, reactions, and memories thereof. Think of kneading dough for bread. Use of a dough hook—a popular kitchen appliance for bakers—provides a “thinner” experience than kneading bread by hand in terms of smell, sound, appearance, and feel. Delivered food and deskilling technology attenuate the experience of cooking. A drone-delivered prepared meal—rather than one cooked at home—might provide the cook with some positive emotions, but I would predict that they would be more muted. So we keep cooking . . . Cooking Strengthens Us For many cooks, the ability to prepare and serve and array of dishes and sides can be a source of confidence and self-efficacy. Both the domestic and the professional cook develop a wide array of skills to regularly get food on the table that will be consumed by eaters who bring their own food preferences and dislikes to the table with them. We have distinguished three groups of skills that cooking develops: cooking skills, food skills/knowledge, and an understanding of various cuisines. Finally, a cook develops skills to understand contextual demands of the table: eaters’ preferences, resources, temporal challenges, and shortages. Not only do we acquire this cornucopia of skills and knowledge as cooks, but we also reflect on and actively interpret them. As our experience grows and our performance improves, most cooks feel an increasing degree of overall competence and self-efficacy regarding specific dishes and techniques. Confident cooks are more likely to employ fresh ingredients and more nutritious food, with positive impacts for children and other household eaters. Confidence as a cook may also lead to developing confidence as a host, baker, or planner. Here, too, not cooking the meal may deprive the domestic cook of the sense of effectiveness experienced when doing so.

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Cooking also provides a creative outlet that we may not experience at work or in other parts of our day. Some cooks may be able to create new dishes and combinations, exemplifying backward creativity. A much larger proportion of cooks engages in forward creativity each day, coping with ever-changing resources, eaters, and other constraints. Many of us no longer create much with our hands: cooking connects us to the essential human activity of making something tangible, useful, and sometimes beautiful. A FINAL WORD In this book we have examined cooks and the behavior of cooking. Two major types of cooking have been explored: cooking in the home and cooking for pay. These contexts for cooking are quite different, and yet a number of commonalities have been noted. Current trends in both the commercial kitchen and the domestic kitchen suggest that this longstanding human behavior will continue to evolve. The essential human activity of cooking involves a range of psychological processes. Cooking reflects our own personalities, our social environment, our community, and the greater culture in which we live. Whether domestic or commercial, cooking gives us the opportunity to make something with our hands, to use our senses, and to immerse ourselves in the moment. The kitchen is inherently a classroom, whether for self-instruction or the sharing of family recipes or instructions regarding how to make a roux. Cooking identities have expanded and become more valorized as a result of the food media revolution, starting in the 1990s. It is through cooking that we reaffirm our roles as partner, parent, grandparent, child, friend or acquaintance. It creates the potential for commensality, which strengthens our social ties. Cooking is also a behavior that reifies traditional gender roles, takes valuable time, and can be drudgery. The commercial kitchen is a site for harassment, abuse, injuries, insults, and microaggressions and can foster substance use and abuse. The pay is not great, hours vary, and burnout is rampant. I would not argue that the experience of cooking is consistently positive for our cooks. However, cooking is one of the primary human activities and is likely responsible for shaping a number of practices that mark us as humans. We have discussed changes in cooking and their possible negative effects on the cook. However, I remain optimistic that the behavior will be resilient to fundamental change for a long period of time. Cooking is social in nature, and humans are, after all, social animals.

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Index

affective forecasting, 94, 113–15; biases in, 114; projective affective forecasting, 114–15 agency and cooking, 134, 154–55 aromas, 109, 132 artificial intelligence, 171–72, 173–74 attributions and cooking, 150–53 backward creativity, 101 Bandura, Albert, 153–54 Bartoshuk, Linda, 131 Big Five Personality Inventory, 33, 127–29, 138–39 Bimby, 151 bioecological model, 14. See also ecological model Bourdain, Anthony, 79, 141–42 Bronfenbrenner, Urie, 14, 165 chef stereotype, 125 Children’s Cooking Task, 148 chunking, 88 cognitive ease, 111 cognitive fluency, 88 cognitive miser, 87, 112 collective identity. See social identity comfort food, 109–11 commensal identity, 72–73

commensality, 7–13; and cooking, 12–13; and culture, 8–9, 11; and household configurations, 95–96; and meaningfulness in cooking, 176; as psychosocial process, 9–12; and senior housing complexes, 84; and Thanksgiving, 73; and time scarcity, 46 communities of practice, 35–36; and experience sharing, 36 competence, 144 confidence: cooking, 153–56; and selfefficacy, 144–45, 155–56 consumption, 1, 5–6, 13–14, 44, 46–47, 68–69, 100, 107 CooC11, 148 cooking behavior, 14–15, 163–65 cooking situation, influences on, 15–16 cooking games, 91–92 Cooking Skills Index, 148 Covid-19, positive and negative impacts, 168–71 cultural identity, 71–72, 80, 81, 83 deskilling, 148–53, 175; gender, 152 domestic cooks, 17–19, 23–30; mindsets, 134; planning strategies/ styles, 94–95 dual-process models, 86–88 209

210

Index

ecological model, 14, 165–66 emotions and food, 107–15 emotion theory, 105–7; appraisal, 106; basic emotions, 106; psychological construction, 106–7 errand tasks, 90, 91 evolution of cooking, 2–6; benefits, 3–5; brain development, 5; on gender roles, 5 executive function, 89 external validity, 90 fallacies: generalization hypothesis, 93; loss aversion, 93; planning, 92–93; sunk costs, 93 feasibility of creativity and cooking, 100–101 flow, 33, 49, 58–59, 113, 117–18 food agency, 134 foodie, 68–69 food involvement, 133 food knowledge, 146 food loss and food waste, 96–100 food sharing, 6 food voice, 24 forward creativity, 101 gender roles, 5, 23–24, 46, 63–64, 152–53 ghost kitchens, 170–71 group identity, 11 group norms, 12 hegemonic masculinities and femininities, 64, 76–78, 79 hurriedness. See time urgency hypermasculinized, 79 identities, 66–80; and cooking, 80–84 identity maintenance, 80–81 in-group, 11 interdependence in professional kitchen, 32 internal validity, 90 Internet of Things, 172

kitchen leadership, 136–41; Big Five Personality Inventory, 138–39; emotional intelligence, 139–41; traits, 141 kitchen spaces, 164 learning, distinctive forms in kitchen, 24–25 Maslow’s theory of motivation, 103 mere exposure effect, 61–62 meta-cognitive skills and professional cooks, 33 mindfulness, 49–50, 112–13 mise en place (MEP), 3, 33, 50, 55–56 motivation and cooking, 115–20; domestic cooks, 119; extrinsic, 116; flow, 117–18; goals, 118–19; intrinsic, 116; tasks, 118 multiple determinism, 163 negative dominance. See fallacies, loss aversion neophobia, 130 net affect, 10 objective time, 44, 47 observational learning, 35 O*NET, 127–28, 144 optimistic bias, 92–93 outgroups, 71 overconfidence, 161 peak of service, 56–57 perceptions: food waste, 98; time shortages, 44–49 personal identities. See identities personality: bakers, 129; Bourdain’s theory, 141–42; cooks, 126, 129; interactionist perspective, 136; situational influences, 134–36; time, 129 phenomenal self. See self-concept planning: brain functioning, 90–91; and cooking, 89–100

Index

planning errors. See fallacies precarious masculinity, 79 preferred pacing styles, 60–61 processual learning, 34 professional cooks, definition, 18 professional kitchen: climate of, 174; as learning context, 30–37 psychopathology, 13 puzzle tasks, 90, 91 relationship identities, 69, 73 role identity, 73–80; feminist theory perspective, 75; identity accumulation theory, 74; identity theory, 74; role identity theory, 74 rush. See peak of service scaffolding and social nature of learning, 25, 35 schematic. See self-concept scripts, 89 self-awareness, 65 self-concept, 65–66 self-efficacy: cooking, 144–45, 155–56; feedback, 159; imagery, 160; observation, 159; performance, 158 self-instruction, 28–30; recipes, 29; videos, 30 self-perception theory. See self-concept self-regulation and cooking, 154 sensation seeking, 129–30 skills and cooking, 143–47; conceptual, 145; contextual, 146–47; food, 147; measurement, 148; perceptual, 145 social composition of household, 17 social identity, 66, 70, 72, 73, 80 social roles, 5, 12; and gender roles, 5, 23–24, 46, 63–64; and incarceration, 81–83 social role theory, 63 soup, 105, 110 spoiled identity, 81 staging, 36 stored preferences, 91

211

stress and cooking, 120–23; distress, 120; stressors, 120; taste preferences, 122; thriving, 123; time, 121; worklife balance, 122–23 subjective time, 44–51 supertasters, 131 sweetness, 132–33 synchrony, 59–61; temporal, 16, 122, 167 synchronization and cooking time, 44 taste perception, 130–33 temporal arc of service, 54–59 temporal focus. See time perspective temporal nature of cooking, 167 temporal orientation. See time perspective temporal scarcity. See time scarcity temporal uncertainty, 52 third spaces, 175 time perspective, 49–50 time scarcity, 16, 45–49 timestyles, 47 time urgency, 50–51 training, culinary, 34–35, 37–39, 128– 29, 145, 146 trial and error: in domestic kitchen, 28–29; in professional kitchen, 35, 38, 40 Vygotsky, Lev, 25 working memory, 88, 89 zone of proximal development and social nature of learning, 25

About the Author

David Livert, PhD, is one of the few social psychologists who studies the preparation of food and professional kitchens. His research has examined chef personalities, conflict, teamwork, and how workers flourish in these stressful settings. A professor of psychology at Pennsylvania State University’s Lehigh Valley campus, he has investigated these issues among chef students at the Culinary Institute of America, food production teams in professional kitchens, and American chefs cooking in Vietnam. His paper examining conflict among kitchen teams won a Best Conflict Paper award from the Academy of Management. Along with Roblyn Rawlins, he is coauthor of the book Making Dinner. Livert’s research articles have appeared in scholarly journals including American Journal of Preventive Medicine, American Journal of Public Health, Journal of Drug Issues, Journal of Social Issues, Multivariate Behavioral Research, Professional Psychology, and Sociological Methods. His awards include a Lawrence Kogan Fellowship in quantitative methods at the CUNY Graduate Center and a University Research Collaboration Fellowship at Penn State. He received his undergraduate and master’s degrees in psychology from Vanderbilt University and his PhD in social psychology from the City University of New York Graduate Center. A native of Jacksonville, Florida, Livert currently resides in Easton, Pennsylvania, with his wife and son.

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