“Because I saw my mother cooking”: the sociocultural process of learning and teaching domestic culinary skills of the Western Brazilian Amazonian women

Abstract

This article describes and discusses the sociocultural process of learning and teaching women’s domestic culinary skills. Drawing on descriptive qualitative research, we conducted an in-depth analysis of semi-structured interviews with 16 cisgender women who cooked at home at least once a day and lived in Cruzeiro do Sul, Acre state, Brazilian Western Amazon. Our results suggest that women develop their domestic cooking skills at different moments. In childhood, the women interviewed were taught by their maternal figures and learned the required culinary skills to prepare “Rainforest Foods,” traditional foods in their original places. In adulthood, female employers taught them the culinary skills needed to prepare “City food,” meals made with ingredients, tools, and cooking methods available in the urban area. Notably, the women interviewed also reported being taught by their husbands to cook foods that met their tastes and eating patterns. In contrast, women teach their sons and daughters culinary skills to develop their food autonomy and promote the egalitarian division of domestic culinary work. These findings are essential to understand the sociocultural process of learning and teaching domestic culinary skills among communities or membership groups who lived in forest or rural areas and migrated to urban centers.

Keywords:

• Cooking skills
• femininities
• gender
• sexual labor division

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Gender schema theory suggests that a child learns his or her society’s cultural definitions of femaleness and maleness through specific sex-related content (e.g., division of labor). In sum, children learn to encode and organize information arising from a network of associations of masculine and feminine attributes and behavior (Bem 1983).

2 The HDI is a composite statistic of education, income, and longevity indices calculated to measure social and economic development within countries.

3 Cardoso et al. (2020) highlight that the women who participated in the two-year follow-up of the MINA-Brazil Study had on average 27.5 years of age; 10.9 years of schooling; 46.7% received monthly assistance from the Bolsa Familia government cash transfer program (BFP); and 40.5% were paid workers.

4 At the public health level, there is a strong emphasis on teaching individuals to cook from an early age. Based on scientific evidence, eating habits are integrally, and domestic cooked meals have better nutritional quality (Engler-Stringer 2010; Mills et al. 2017; Wolfson et al. 2016). Thus, cooking skills must be taught in compatibility with the child’s development. For example, children under three can wash vegetables, sprinkle flour, crack eggs, or spoon ingredients into scales.

5 Participants called themselves "unemployed" when they worked in the recent past. However, those who never worked or chose not to work after the birth of their child called themselves "housewives."

6 According to Pirani (2014), the Wealth Index is a composite measure of the cumulative living standard of a household. It is calculated using data on a household’s ownership of a selected set of assets, such as televisions, bicycles, and cars; dwelling characteristics, such as flooring material; type of drinking water source; and toilet and sanitation facilities.

7 The Bolsa Familia Program (BFP), implemented in 2003, is a social income transfer program for poor or impoverished families. The amounts of money that each family receives depend on the composition and the income of the beneficiary family. It could range from R$41.00 (≈US$8,33) to R$89.00 (≈US$18,09) per person.

8 Some interviewees suggested that domestic cooking skills are a personal "gift," and some men are gifted with this. The "gift" leads men to seek training or information about cooking tastily and proper foods.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) [8882.330823/2019-1]; Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) [2019/00031-0]; Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) [2017/05651-0]; Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) [2016/00270-6].