Engagements in situationally appropriate home cooking

ABSTRACT

The article analyses engagements in home cooking from a practice theoretical perspective. The focus on engagements reveals what people regard as worthy of doing and as appropriate cooking performances in specific everyday situations. For producing a more nuanced account of situationally appropriate cooking, the theoretical perspective is complemented by Thévenot’s regimes – familiarity, planning and justification. The data consist of videos and video-stimulated recall (SR) interviews: five Finnish families with children video-recorded their dinner-cooking for one week using wearable cameras and described their performances in the SR interviews. We applied an abductive theory-based and data-driven analysis. The results show that the regime of familiarity sustains cooking performances and that the regime of justification addresses negotiations of common good. However, the regime of planning appeared to be the most crucial: through flexible planning, the participants strived for a balance between maintaining familiarity and negotiating justification to achieve satisfaction. Planning was enacted in different time spans: in action, tentatively and anticipatorily. The variations of planning may offer new insights into promoting changes in families’ food practices. Overall, we suggest that an analysis of engagements by this method combination enables understanding of how families navigate through everyday life to perform situationally appropriate cooking.

KEYWORDS:

• Cooking
• engagements
• practice theory
• regimes of engagement
• video method
• families with children

Introduction

How often and in what ways cooking takes place in the everyday lives of families has caused debates in the media and concern for various organizations and policymakers (e.g., Halkier 2010; Cappellini, Faircloth, and Harman 2018; Murcott 2019). The academic literature observing cooking from a nutritionist perspective echoes these public worries about the lack of cooking skills, scarce meal planning and the increasing use of convenience foods (e.g., Hollywood et al. 2017; Lavelle et al. 2016, 2017; McGowan et al. 2017; Surgenor et al. 2017). The main purposes of such studies have been to examine effective ways in which to promote cooking from scratch and to help people engage in “good” (e.g., wholesome and regular) cooking practices.

However, many household practices such as cooking are mainly based on situated and embodied routines, which can hinder engagement in promoted practices (van Kesteren and Evans 2020). Moreover, present child-centered “intensive parenting”, together with family members’ overlapping practices (e.g., paid work, shopping, transporting, cooking, cleaning, exercising) cause complex scheduling and negotiations concerning situationally appropriate practices (Harman, Cappellini, and Faircloth 2018; Ochs and Kremer-Sadlik 2013). When preparing food, people resolve different situations by mixing and flexibly applying both convenience food and raw ingredients, which simultaneously transforms the definitions of cooking (Halkier 2010, 2017; Wolfson et al. 2017). Thus, to avoid simplifying the “good” and “bad” cooking typical in discussions, and blaming parents for their situational coordination of cooking, we need more knowledge on how parents enact the practice on an everyday basis, and a better understanding of its complexity.

Against this background, our study focuses on achieving a more nuanced comprehension of the variety of situationally appropriate cooking and an in-depth understanding of its complexity in family life. The complexity of current cooking has been emphasized in, for example, sociological studies of families (Dyen et al. 2018; O’Connell and Brannen 2016), parenting (Harman, Cappellini, and Faircloth 2018;), eating (Warde 2016), commensalism (Julier 2013), challenged food consumption (Halkier 2009, 2010), and gendered foodwork (e.g., DeVault 1991; Holm et al. 2015; Kinser 2017; Szabo 2011). Many of these studies focusing on everyday food practices as such have applied “contemporary practice theory” to strengthen their theoretical basis (e.g., Murcott 2019; Neuman 2019, 82), and our study follows this approach. However, previous studies have not emphasized situational engagements in cooking. By situational engagements we mean occurrences when people carry out their routinized everyday cooking and simultaneously reveal, either consciously or unconsciously, what is worthy of doing in complex everyday family situations. This directed us to study both the routinized performances in situ and the accounts of the occurrences. Thus, we applied both video and interview methods, which is exceptional in cooking studies, as they usually rely on interviews or quantitative data (e.g., Halkier 2009, 2010; Holm et al. 2015; Kinser 2017; O’Connell and Brannen 2016).

In the following section, we define engagements in cooking using previous practice theoretical conceptualizations. However, these concepts do not grasp the spectrum of appropriate cooking and its situational value. Thus, we complement the practice theoretical approach with Thévenot’s (2001, 2007) three regimes of engagement, which enable us to reach more nuanced understandings of how people engage in everyday cooking situations. We exemplify this by using video and interview data collected from five Finnish families with children. Overall, the study aims to advance the understanding of situational engagements in appropriate home cooking, and thus contribute to academic and public discussions on cooking practices and promotions directed particularly toward families with children.

Defining engagements in cooking through practice theory

The common basis of contemporary practice theory is the notion that practices (such as cooking, shopping or cleaning) are both socially recognized entities and spatially and temporally carried out performances (e.g., Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012; Warde 2005). It has been suggested that between practice-as-entities or “social practices” and practice-as-performances or “enacted practices”, there is a bridge called “envisioned practices”, which are plans for enacting practices (Thomas and Epp 2019). Routinized cooking can also be performed by creatively improvising in-action, but the social practice limits the set of possibilities as well as the individual’s visions (Warde 2016). Therefore, people are considered practitioners or carriers of social practices (Reckwitz 2002).

At its most basic, a practice is a nexus of sayings and doings (Schatzki 1996) organized by a set of interlinked elements (Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012; Warde 2005). When enacting cooking by doing and saying, the practitioner integrates the elements of practice. Recent practice theoretical studies have mainly utilized two different conceptualizations of constituting elements of practice: materials, competences and meanings (Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012) or understandings, procedures and engagements¹ (Warde 2005). For analyzing the rich video data of cooking, our previous study applied all six of these elements (Torkkeli, Mäkelä, and Niva 2018). The analysis revealed an interplay between the elements, clarifying the elements of understandings, procedures and engagements in particular. This interplay is depicted as a triangle in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Triangle of elements of practice and their manifestations as doings and sayings in cooking

The sides of the triangle represent procedures joining materials and competences (such as principles directing how the ingredients should be handled), understandings connecting meanings and materials (such as opinions stating the social values of the ingredients), and engagements indicating the link between meanings and competences (such as goals enacting socially suitable and embodied practices). The curved line inside the triangle shows how the elements become discernible as the analysis focuses on either doings or sayings. The analysis of doings reveals competences and procedures, while the analysis of sayings concentrates on meanings and understandings. Thus, the triangle is like an “analytical apparatus” that facilitates focusing on just a few elements of cooking practice at a time without forgetting that the elements affect each other and intertwine while cooking is enacted (Torkkeli, Mäkelä, and Niva 2018).

In this article, we focus on analyzing engagements as both the implemented doings of cooking and the verbalized accounts of situational performances. Engagements can be goals, motivations, ends, and emotions for enacting a particular practice (e.g., Warde 2005; Halkier 2010). To specify, practitioners express engagements in cooking by carrying out what is worthy of doing in their everyday situations and by situationally and appropriately utilizing embodied competences (Torkkeli, Mäkelä, and Niva 2018). Consequently, for studying engagements, we need tools that facilitate the handling of situationally varying reflections on and evaluations of what is worthy. We were inspired by Thruninger´s (2011) cooking study, which combined practice theoretical elements and Thévenot’s regimes of engagement (2001) to seize a spectrum of valuations from the most intimate to the most public. Thus, we follow the example and apply Thévenot’s regimes as additional tools for analyzing the variety of engagements in appropriate cooking.

Elaboration of engagements by applying three regimes

“Engagements as an element of a practice” and “regimes of engagement” encompass a different scope of social phenomena. Regimes of engagement (Thévenot 2001) capture wider social phenomena than just one practice, spanning coordination in multiple situated practices (see Schatzki 2002, 28; Welch 2020 and their analysis of teleoaffective regimes). Thus, regimes offer an important fairway to also capturing other practices (such as shopping, cleaning, eating, and parenting) that influence cooking, although the present study focuses primarily on cooking.

Thévenot (2001) developed three regimes of engagement (familiarity, planning and justification) for highlighting the link between “engaged good and engaged reality”, which means that “the notion of good needs to be put to a reality test where it is realized in the evaluation of some performance” (Thévenot 2001, 69). For example, we may prefer traditionally cooking from scratch, but in situational performances of cooking, we cook a frozen pizza, as it saves time. Thus, the good of scratch cooking was put to the “reality test” of situational performances, revealing engagement in the good of time-saving and then various moral² aspects of cooking (see also Sutton 2014). Different notions of good are crucial for each of the three regimes of engagement (Thévenot 2001, 2007).

The regime of familiarity

In this regime, the engaged good of performance is based on the easiness and relaxation between the practitioner and the social and material environment. At home, in a familiar environment, performed practices are based on embodied routines that are formed through repeated experiences. Therefore, engagement in familiarity may force an observer to ask a practitioner “What are you doing and why?”, because the performances of that particular person in that particular location are unrecognizable to the observer. Engagement in personal and local good governs the regime of familiarity in the end and thus does not consider the public discussions related to a practice such as cooking. Consequently, engagement in familiar, personal and embodied events may be difficult for the practitioner to verbalize or reflect on, as cooking performances are not developed for public evaluation (Thévenot 2001, 2007).

The regime of planning

This regime reflects good related to satisfaction from an appropriately carried out practice. Engagement in a plan may be so normative and ordinary that it becomes invisible; for example, preparing for satisfying cooking can be seen as merely a conducted necessity. However, such satisfaction differs from carefree ease (related to familiarity) because it evolves by enacting future-oriented performances that often demand some evaluation (Thévenot 2007, 417). The evaluation of cooking processes occurs not only during the performance but also between the cooking and other everyday practices such as transporting, (paid) working, cleaning, and eating (e.g., Halkier 2010, 31). Practitioners can envision future practices (Thomas and Epp 2019), which generates planning as a way of coordinating different performances through interaction with the social and material environment. Consequently, this regime acknowledges both the “instrumental-functional capacity” of the surrounding environment in planning and the “intentional planning” of practitioners, but in a way that does not emphasize intentionality over the socially organized normativity of performances (Thévenot 2001, 78, 2007). However, this regime generates plans of performances as “reality tests” of how situational cooking should be enacted to produce satisfaction.

The regime of justification

This regime is based on a variety of common goods, which highlights “common forms of public evaluation” (Thévenot 2001, 78). Thus, in this regime, evaluation or critique means the negotiation of the legitimized generalities of good materials or authorities, which is sharply distinct from the more functional evaluation utilized in the regime of planning (Thévenot 2001, 2007). The regime of justification comprises six “worlds of justification”: domestic, fame, market, industrial, civic, and inspiration (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006; Thévenot 2001, 2007, 410). All these six worlds lean differently on notions of common good.³ However, engagement in one world of justification can shift to another, depending on the situation (Thévenot 2001, 79), and the negotiations and compromises reveal that different notions of good appear simultaneously (Thévenot 2007; Forssell 2017, 37). In the family context, the good of cooking can be evaluated in relation to pleasing a practitioner’s timetable or family members’ preferences, and to producing gendered tasks or togetherness, such as normatively good parenting (e.g., Harman, Cappellini, and Faircloth 2018; DeVault 1991; Halkier 2010; O’Connell and Brannen 2016). However, cooking performances represent the “reality test” of the negotiated good.

We use the three defined regimes to study engagements in home cooking in families with children. Our research questions are: (1) How are the three regimes of engagement manifested in cooking performances, and (2) How is situationally appropriate cooking carried out? We answer these questions by analyzing the cooking videos and video-stimulated recall interviews.

Method and data: cooking videos and stimulated recall of performances

Many qualitative cooking studies have collected empirical data mostly by interviewing (e.g., Halkier 2010; Meah and Watson 2011; Short 2006; Wolfson et al. 2016). Talking about cooking may stimulate participants to primarily discuss the meanings and motivations related to the practice (Martens 2012). However, we collected data by videoing everyday cooking performances (e.g., Torkkeli, Mäkelä, and Niva 2018). The video method reveals situational and embodied aspects of cooking that may be difficult to verbalize (Martens and Scott 2017; Pink 2012; Wills et al. 2016). Thus, the video data facilitate the grasping of situational cooking as comprehensively as possible and focusing on the sayings and doings of the practice, which supports the practice theoretical analysis (Warde 2016, 39), especially the analysis of engagements. We applied the video method for capturing the situational flow and ruptures of everyday cooking and for having stimulating data to recall, verbalize and explain the situational performances of the recorded occurrences.

The data were collected from five families with two working parents and two to four children aged 5–16, living in the metropolitan area in Finland. The families volunteered for the study by answering a web-based questionnaire consisting of ten multiple-choice questions, which covered frequency, planning, satisfaction, shopping, and the division of responsibilities related to cooking. The questionnaire was sent to potential participants through the first author’s networks (e.g., social media and leisure contacts). Thus, someone whom both knew linked the first author and the family that researchers did not know from before. The questionnaire included a link to a video in which the first author presented the study and the video method. These arrangements aimed to create an atmosphere of trust, as the study concerned an intimate part of everyday family life.

The first author arranged the data collection and its analysis. In the first meetings at the homes of each family, one or both parents, and sometimes also the children, described the family’s everyday cooking and their attitudes toward it. The researcher’s aim was to determine whether the family had any repeated structures in the organization of their cooking. The discussions revolved around schedules, meanings and the repetition of cooking-related practices, creating a pre-comprehension of the role of cooking in the middle of overlapping everyday practices (see Halkier 2010; Martens and Scott 2017; O’Connell and Brannen 2016). During these first meetings, the video cameras were tested and the researcher instructed the families to keep a log of the dishes they cooked during the week. Mutual consent on the ethical principles of data collection and reporting was signed.

The families were invited to video-record their dinner-cooking situations for approximately one week. We chose dinner-cooking as the focus because dinner remains the primary and most complex meal prepared in homes in Finland (Holm et al. 2012; Mäkelä 2009). This was also the case in the participant families. The families recorded the videos independently without external observers, using a wearable camera fixed to the temple at eye level (Lahlou 2015). The camera recorded vertical, 160-degree audio-visual videos from the main practitioner’s perspective, allowing both the hands and the surrounding environment (the kitchen and the other participants) to be seen and heard throughout the cooking session. The videos were made between February 12th and April 11th in 2018. The duration of the videos ranged from a few-minute displays of cooking to 47-minute sessions. The videos were short if the cooking included warming up previously cooked food or contained mostly pre-prepared convenience food, and longer if the cooking was more complex in its procedures.

Immediately after each data collection week, the researcher watched the whole footage and began a video analysis. Within a week of the recordings, the researcher returned to the families for video-stimulated recall (SR) interviews (Mackenzie and Kerr 2012). The interview questions were based on the videos’ preliminary analysis and directed the focus of these otherwise informal interviews. The verbalizations of feelings and occurrences during the week and the reasoning behind the cooked dishes expanded and deepened the video data. The participants recounted their situational cooking performances in more detail by recalling and watching the video clips that the researcher had chosen or which they particularly wanted to see (Lahlou 2015; Pink et al. 2017). All the interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed by a professional transcriber. Table 1 shows the details of the participating families and the collected data.

Table 1. Summary of research participants and data

Families	Main features of organizing cooking	Practitioners i.e., recorders of cooking	Number and duration of videos	Participants of SR interviews	Duration of SR interviews
Family A 2 parents, 2 children aged 7 and 9	Weekly plan of dishes, grocery shopping once a week, recipe-oriented	Mother A and Father A	7 dinners + lunch on Saturday 4 h 46 min	Mother A and Father A	1 h 58 min
Family B 2 parents, 4 children aged 9, 11, 14, 16	Many hobbies, different diets, daily grocery shopping	Mother B	4 dinners 1 h 16 min	Mother B and some of the children	1 h 19 min
Family C 2 parents, 2 children aged 9 and 12	Plan of main ingredients, grocery shopping 1–2 times a week	Mother C	7 dinners 3 h 24 min	Mother C, Father C and children	1 h 7 min
Family D 2 parents, 3 children aged 10, 13, 16	Varying plan of main ingredients, almost daily grocery shopping	Mother D and Father D	7 dinners 4 h 21 min	Mother D and Father D	1 h 32 min
Family E 2 parents, 3 children aged 5, 9, 12	Plan of main ingredients, grocery shopping a few times a week	mostly Father E	6 dinners 1 h 19 min	Mother E and Father E	1 h 14 min

Data analysis

The analysis is based on an abductive content analysis process (Goodchild, O’Flaherty, and Ambrose 2014; Timmermans and Tavory 2012), in which theoretical conceptualization is complemented by data-driven notions of the cooking process. The triangle of cooking elements (Figure 1) was developed in a previous practice theoretical sub-study (Torkkeli, Mäkelä, and Niva 2018) and directed the focus of the video analysis, which was on the doings of the performances and thus on the cooking procedures and competences. Next, the analysis of the SR interviews elicited the sayings of the performances, which revealed the understandings and meanings of cooking. The data were simultaneously projected against the three regimes of engagement, which were enriched by the data-driven nuances of engagement in planning. Figure 2 illustrates the analysis.

Figure 2. Analysis of cooking videos and SR interviews reflected through regimes of engagement

The video analysis (i.e., analysis of doings) revealed the practitioners’ embodied procedures, which looked easy and fluent in the home environments, and in turn represented engagement in familiarity (Marker I in Figure 2). However, some personal procedures were difficult for the researcher to grasp, despite the dishes being regarded as well known. Such events formed the frames for the questions in the SR interviews and were discussed in depth with the participants.

Both video and interview data were utilized in the analysis of the regime of planning. The video data focused on observing the cooking procedures. The majority of the procedures were common and socially recognizable (such as peeling potatoes, boiling water, stirring sauces, seasoning meats), although the practitioners cooked without a recipe and utilized situationally available materials without accounts on the videos. This form of performance, progressing through interaction with the instrumental-functional capacity of the home environment, was conceptualized by the data-driven analysis as “in-action planning” (see Marker II, in Figure 2). Occasionally, some practitioners also explained their intentions on the videos but in most of the videos, the practitioners cooked in silence.

The SR interviews (i.e., analysis of sayings) revealed the intentionality of the cooking processes through the practitioners’ accounts of performances and verbalized the acceptability of the cooking. The researcher coded the transcripts using the Atlas.ti program. The coding addressed all the three regimes of engagement. Thus, familiarity (Marker I) and “in-action planning” (Marker II), perceived by analyzing the doings, might be complemented by analyzing the sayings. This is illustrated in Figure 2 as the “SR interviews box”, which also covers parts of Markers I and II. The analysis of saying, which focused on the accounts of how the enacted cooking performances were organized, produced two further forms of planning: “tentative” and “anticipatory planning”, which differed from each other especially in precision (Marker III in Figure 2). Finally, the regime of justification was analyzed in the interview data as reports of negotiations and compromises (Marker IV in Figure 2). If both parents participated in the everyday cooking and in the SR interviews, the family’s engagement in the cooking’s various types of good became highly evident and concrete.

To conclude, the analysis seized all the three regimes of engagement intertwined in the cooking performances. The performances were based on familiarity (easy cooking at home), carried out through planning (evaluations through interaction with the environment) and justified by common good (reported reasoning). Moreover, the data represented “reality tests” of the notions of good and revealed the situational variety of appropriate home cooking. In the next sections, we present how each of the three regimes of engagement were manifested and how the situationally appropriate cooking was enacted.

Results: illustrations of varied engagements in cooking

Regime of engagement in familiarity

A home, as a private place, is a suitable breeding ground for engaging in familiarity and easiness. However, routinized procedures and embodied competences are difficult to verbalize, so instinctive movements, the fluent use of utensils, and cooking without measuring all illustrate engagement in familiarity. The cooking procedures and materials were familiar, and Mother A, for example, cooked rice based on her previous experiences and without counting or measuring, because it was easier.

Author 1:

Do you often boil rice in a way that you strain it or …

Mother A:

Normally no, but err. when I have to adjust the cooking instructions, I feel it’s awfully hard to calculate (the amount) for two or four eaters, so then I just throw in some amount, and then it’s often too watery …

Similarly, Mother D also reasoned her way of cooking rice in a large amount of water, because it was easier and “no one complained” about the result. Familiar ways of doing can continue as long as they are free of significant problems or criticisms. However, although practitioners might recognize the contradictions of their personal and local procedures in relation to normative ones (i.e., cooking rice according to the instructions on the package) they may justify their engagement in familiarity by its easiness. Due to perceived easiness, the practitioner did not measure the amounts of rice, water or seasoning, and, “just threw in some amount” or described the amount of pepper by gesturing through body movements and the sound of a mill (Father D).

The procedures and understandings that deviated from the norms seemed to develop through the creative utilization of the materials at hand, and originally, as a solution to a problem. For example, Mother B had her own way of using a small serrated tomato knife for cutting all her ingredients (Figure 3). According to her, this rooted procedure originated from the problem of bigger knives being too blunt. Mother C in turn picked the nearest knife to hand, regardless of the ingredients under preparation, and boiled pasta water simultaneously in two places, mostly in an electric kettle and a small amount in a pot for heating on a slow stove. In these examples, Mother B and C carried out familiar cooking tasks fluently. However, their engagement in personal and environment-specific familiarity stretched the normative procedures and understandings of cooking.

Figure 3. Mother B cutting root vegetables and onions in her hand with a tomato knife

These personal procedures also revealed rooted and inherited cooking performances that the practitioners no longer reflected on. Mother C efficiently cubed cold smoked fish with a fork and knife for a pasta sauce (Figure 4). At first, she could not explain why she avoided touching fish yet touched marinated raw meat with no problem. After several questions, she remembered learning the procedure from her father, who cut a few slices of raw salted salmon per day to put on his bread using a fork and knife to avoid contamination. Mother C continued this procedure in her kitchen, even though she was preparing a different product for a hot pasta sauce.

Figure 4. Mother C cutting cold smoked salmon

These performances, which leaned on familiar materials, routinized procedures, rooted understandings and embodied competences, are manifestations of cooking that is engaged in through familiarity and approved of because of its easiness. Such representation of a regime of familiarity can be interpreted as being a prerequisite for frequently repeated, everyday cooking performances. However, engagement in familiarity only evolves through the practice of cooking in a familiar environment with no frequent changes. Thus, familiarly had a two-way force. On the one hand, the easiness of familiarity supported the continuity of cooking, but on the other hand, it restricted the evaluation and updating of practice.

Regime of engagement in planning

Practitioners’ engagement in planning meant engagement in socially shared cooking performances, such as recognizable procedures of common dishes. Such normative performances of cooking formed socially governed structures for future-oriented plans and thus, diverged from the engagement in personal and local familiarity. Moreover, the engagement in planning revealed three variations according to how instrumental-functional or intentional the evaluation and organization of the cooking performances were, how flexibly or precisely the planning was enacted, and how short-term or long-term the plans were. (1) In-action planning occurred by evaluating the progress of ongoing cooking performance and the instrumental-functional capacity of the home environment. (2) Tentative planning was flexible and continual navigation in varying everyday life that could be enacted whenever and wherever. Finally, (3) anticipatory planning was considered intentional, long-term organization of cooking by drawing up lists and timetables.

First, “in-action planning” occurred when cooking was based on previous experiences and on observation of the instrumental-functional environment. The practitioner had an idea of the dish to be prepared. However, the situational interaction with the material and social environments during cooking advanced the plan. Such in-action planning was perceived by observing the doings of cooking, but afterward, the verbalizations of the situations clarified the intentions of the silently enacted planning.

For example, Mother C had purchased a large package of frozen fish fillets for a Thai curry. In the video, she started to prepare a sauce and put some coconut cream and seasoning paste into a saucepan. While stirring the sauce, she looked at the fillets a few times and evaluated the sufficiency of the sauce. After adding a few fillets, she silently counted the rest of them and checked how thawed they were. She considered the situation by looking alternately at the filets and saucepan a few times. Then she started to make more sauce and used all the fillets. She did not explain her intentions while doing this, but her gestures and contemplations revealed the in-action planning (whether to put the partly thawed fillets back in the freezer or to use them all), which she later confirmed in the SR interview.

In the videos, the practitioners “read” the changes in ingredients and evaluated the progress of the cooking. Thus, the cooking proceeded by observing and maneuvering the situational transformations of the ingredients and of the social environment. They made in-action plans of the next steps by reacting to situational changes and to reach satisfaction. For example, Mother B adjusted her cooking reactively according to the wishes of the children, preparing different foods for her older vegetarian daughters and her younger daughters. One day, she purchased falafel for herself and her older daughters, but her younger daughters did not want it. Thus, she cooked tomato pasta and toast with cheese and ketchup from ingredients that she found in her cupboards. In the following, Mother B explains the situation and her in-action planning.

Mother B:

They (young daughters), came home from exercising and said that they didn’t actually want to eat them (falafels) ((laughs)). So, was there anything else to eat?

Author 1:

So the daughters said they wanted to eat, but you had bought falafel especially for them?

Mother B:

Mm, maybe it was partly my own wish, as I don’t actually eat that kind of tomato pasta hardly ever myself, but I already had the ingredients, so that’s what I made.

…

Mother B:

Can you see me making toast?

Author 1:

Yes, it’s visible.

Mother B:

There weren’t any ingredients, in that case either ((laughs)), then I said that if you really want, here’s some ketchup and cheese. Then they were like yes, that’s ok.

Second, “tentative planning” was a continual process that could be enacted at a distance from the actual cooking performances. Four families said that they based their home cooking on such loose planning, which did not bind the practitioners to rigid timetables of shopping or lists of ingredients. For example, Mother B synchronized shopping and children’s transportations, and made spontaneous plans almost daily at the grocery store, as “it doesn’t matter how much food I buy, the refrigerator is always empty after two days”. Tentative planning enables reacting to material and social changes in everyday life. Thus, the practitioners described how their plans shifted flexibly according to their mood, unexpected guests, unplanned materials, or the wishes of others. For example, Father E had a tentative plan to buy some vegetable crepes and to utilize beans from the freezer for the vegetarian children who were coming for dinner. However, his mother-in-law surprised him by bringing him some frozen but half-thawed vegetable purées, which resulted in him making a soup from beans and purées. Thus, the practitioners engaged in tentative planning by intentionally storing ingredients that could be utilized creatively and leaning on previous experiences and familiar procedures but stressing situational inspiration in particular. This form of tentative planning revealed a navigation aimed at responding to continual changes and maintaining satisfaction before the cooking performance, which distinguishes it from in-action planning.

Finally, “anticipatory planning” was the least frequent and the most precise planning in the data. It was represented as written lists and timetables, whereas tentative planning was exemplified as flexible starting points of the process (e.g., buying ingredients). However, anticipatory planning was also subordinate to everyday situations: the plan changed if the situation changed. To illustrate, Family A had drawn up weekly menus for many years, as Mother A liked organizing things and testing recipes, which demands pre-planning. On Wednesday evenings, she searched for recipes, thought about the coming week’s events, and listed dishes and the required ingredients for the whole week. On Friday, Mother A was at home alone with the children. She had decided to utilize leftover vegetables to make simple sushi-bowls (sushi-inspired rice salad) according to a particular recipe. When her daughter saw the picture of the recipe, she wanted to follow the old familiar way and shape rice balls with her mother. Thus, the anticipatory plan changed in order to reach satisfaction, which was possible by transforming the dish and its intentionality – from efficiency to togetherness and tradition.

To conclude, the practitioners had engaged in planning to cook for family and the planning was governed by a continual pursuit of satisfaction. The three forms of planning (in-action, tentative, anticipatory), differentiated by their temporality and precision, complement the definition of the regime (Thévenot 2001). Overall, the regime of planning revealed a continually reflected appropriateness of cooking and what was situationally evaluated as worthy of doing.

Regime of engagement in justification

In this section, engagement in justification is depicted through the practitioners’ reports of negotiations, and the compromises made in cooking performances. They described the situational appropriateness and acceptability of their performances, and thus revealed the variety of good (worlds of justification) related to everyday cooking, which in turn, demonstrated the complexity of cooking for a family. Talking about cooking enabled speculations on the meanings of performances without actually implementing them as doings of cooking.

Nevertheless, the practitioners were able to reflect on and even justify the embodied and embedded doings interpreted by the researcher as engagement in familiarity. The parents from Families A, D and E said that everyday cooking had been a common doing in their childhood homes. This inherited relationship with cooking appeared to be an unquestioned justification for home cooking and the good of tradition, and thus resembled engagement in familiarity (e.g., Mother C and her inherited way of cutting the salmon). Cooking was a routinized practice with a strong linkage to purchasing familiar (basic and proper) ingredients, as convenience food was not an alternative.

Mother D:

We’ve kind of, stayed kind of, we don’t really go to the seafood counter very easily or to any other kind of new (food), but just the kind of basic good food that is made from basic ingredients. Something like that.

…

Father E:

After all, you want proper food. And then you realize, oh no, we’ve not been to the grocery shop and then you just have to quickly fry something, like ready-made carrot crepes or something. It makes me anxious.

Mother B said that her mother did not cook at home. She liked “good food” and had a gourmet-cooking club with her friends, but yet described tension between cooking for her family and her own food intake. This reflection during the interview showed that cooking included several interrelated, negotiable and potentially opposite goods (e.g., the good of the family, health and efficacy). Because of this, finding a simple, straightforward justification was not easy. She tried to restrict her own food intake by cooking meals that she did not like too much. Nevertheless, she willingly fulfilled the wishes of her children and made sure that her sporty children ate enough.

Mother B:

Well, I don’t very often ((laughs)), really, really actually kind of right now, it’s kind of a conscious choice, that I don’t really often make the kind of (food) that I really like, because I kind of have a problem, that if I make something that I really like, then I eat too much of it, and I’m currently trying to limit myself.

This illustrates the variety of appropriate cooking. The parents balanced their own preferences and those of their children, which could even be interpreted differently – “what is good for you is not necessarily good for me”. Therefore, the variety of good can only provide a rough illustration of the complexity of situational appropriateness. This complexity might be due to a differing justification for purchasing ingredients, for cooking meals, for feeding the practitioner and the family – tasks that are however, fundamentally linked together.

Overall, cooking for the family appeared to be situational balancing between making family life easier and the normative duties of parenthood. The basic duty was to feed the children, but the parents simultaneously considered what they wanted to teach their children through cooking. They described the justification of different situational compromises: making meals that children do not like, meals that children eat willingly and “making meals that are neither healthy nor unhealthy, but something in between”, as Mother A described.

Author 1:

How much do you think about whether your children eat or not?

Mother A:

Well, maybe (I think of) the big picture, that I don’t cook food they dislike daily, but once a week I can.

Mother C called such cooking of disliked foods “silent persuasion”. This seemed to be linked to teaching proper eating habits, which almost all the families discussed. Thus, parents might occasionally engage in cooking regardless of how their children accept the result. The parents wanted to develop their children’s food preferences by purchasing and preparing differently justified ingredients. On the other hand, Family D and especially Mother D thought that eating together was a form of caring and the values related to the ingredients or cooking were subordinate.

Mother D:

Eating should be a nurturing situation. It’s a comfortable, nice situation. But then of course you can teach good manners around the table and listen, but also everyone gets attention. … of course, they will learn to eat, and if not now, then they don’t have to, they probably won’t end up unhappy.

Father D:

They won’t die of hunger, in Western countries so to speak, you don’t die of hunger.

Families B, C, D and E mainly carried out cooking without recipes or anticipatory planning. This led to negotiations between parents, especially in Families D and E. The mothers justified their cooking without anticipatory planning or recipes by highlighting the opportunities for situational inspiration and the fathers argued for anticipatory planning using efficiency. The negotiations revealed the traditional power relationships of everyday cooking. The mother’s engagement in inspiration dominated the planning of the cooking. This revealed personal passions for cooking but also the complexity and exhaustiveness of everyday life that demanded more flexible reactions in everyday cooking situations.

Mother D:

This food issue kind of niggles at Father D, when we don’t have a weekly food plan, but it doesn’t bother (him) so much that we’d need to maybe ((laughs)) change it or anything.

…

Mother E:

But I guess when it comes to cooking, when everyday life is quite stressful and then you maybe don’t have time to complete all the work tasks that you have planned to do during the day, then kind of … You kind of don’t have the energy to think about it (food). Then it’s like ok, let’s try to make it through this day and then think about the next.

Overall, the interpretations of the regime of justification unfolded everyday performances as part of wider social phenomena rather than just the isolated practice of cooking. The recounted compromises and negotiations could cover all the understandings and normative reflections related to organizing everyday cooking without referring to the particular video-recorded cooking situations. As a consequence, the analysis of the justifications revealed more about the socially and verbally negotiable good of cooking than about situational performances.

Discussion

This study explored situationally appropriate cooking in families. Our aims were, first, to elaborate the practice theoretical notion of engagements in cooking through Thévenot’s regimes (2001, 2007), and second, to advance the understanding of how situationally appropriate cooking is enacted. We demonstrated how the regimes (familiarity, planning, justification) were manifested in the doings and sayings of cooking. In Figure 5, we bring together both the regimes and the elements of practice that were visualized as a triangle in Figure 1. As emphasized earlier, regimes capture wider social phenomena than just one practice (see Schatzki 2002, 28; Welch 2020), whereas the triangle illustrates and conceptualizes elements of only one practice; in this case, cooking. Thus, we placed the regimes of (1) familiarity, (2) justification and (3) planning outside the triangle in Figure 5 and interpreted them in the following manner:

1. The analysis of the doings revealed the regime of familiarity. Familiarity maintained the continuity of everyday cooking because of its easiness. Thus, easy cooking was carried out through personal procedures, and combining embodied competences and well-known materials. Furthermore, familiarity also maintained the rooted understandings and unquestioned meanings of cooking.

2. The analysis of the sayings addressed the regime of justification. Justification was negotiated in everyday compromises because of the plural good of cooking. Thus, the negotiations revealed publicly recognized understandings of cooking and linked the varying meanings of different materials. If the negotiated good was realized by doings, it occurred with particular procedures and competences related to the good.

3. The analysis of doings and sayings together revealed the regime of planning. Three different kinds of planning (in-action, tentative, anticipatory) were enacted that aimed for satisfaction. The evaluation of the worthiness of doings and the navigation of cooking was continual. Thus, planning revealed situational engagements that linked embodied competences and varying meanings in the particular material and social environment of cooking.

Figure 5. Regimes of familiarity, justification and planning affecting the practice of cooking

To conclude, Figure 5 brings together our prior practice theoretical research (Torkkeli, Mäkelä, and Niva 2018) and complements it with regimes (Thévenot 2001, 2007) enabling a better perception of how cooking is enacted as situationally appropriate. Thus, we illustrate the relations between the concepts that affect each other and may facilitate the exploration of cooking. Our interpretation acknowledges both the doings and the sayings of cooking, which was also an aim of the method. Although the data are relatively small, our study exceptionally grasps cooking, from silent performances to verbalized accounts, resulting in a more nuanced comprehension of home cooking.

In this study, the regime of familiarity and easiness appeared as a force that maintained the continuity of home cooking. Familiarity supported silent “cooking without thinking”, simultaneously preventing reflection on and the transformation of personal and embodied performances at home (van Kesteren and Evans 2020). This may hinder the success of interventions focusing on the promotion of meal planning or more regular cooking (see e.g., Hollywood et al. 2017; Surgenor et al. 2017). Thus, according to this study, interventions focusing on home cooking should take more account of the fact that the home environment supports easy, rooted and familiar procedures, which in turn may complicate the mobilization of recommended transformations.

In families with children, everyday cooking performances are often “collectively sanctioned or approved in light of explicitly evaluated standards shared by others in the same social circle” (Warde 2016, 148). Thus, the transformation of daily practices according to official recommendations and public discussions about better (e.g., more sustainable or wholesome) practices may challenge and complicate family life and cause continual negotiations and compromises. However, in this study, families described being satisfied with home cooking. The video method might also attract satisfied families who are willing to reveal their everyday life. This can be seen as a limitation of our study, which aimed to grasp home cooking in as real a way as possible – with all their problems and ruptures.

Nonetheless, aspiring to satisfaction also emerged as one outcome of the study and as an answer to the second research question of how practitioners enact situationally appropriate cooking. Striving for satisfaction seemed to direct the cooking performances to suit everyday situations, which simultaneously and continually changed plans. As illustrated by the results, the regime of planning addresses how practitioners strike a balance between easy doings and the plural goods for reaching situational satisfaction in home cooking.

In terms of planning, it is important to note that in the attempt to underline the social constitution of everyday life, practice theory has become distanced from “planned behavior”, free will and the rational cognition of individuals (e.g., Warde 2005; Shove, Pantzar, and Watson 2012). In this article, we complement our practice theoretical notion of engagements with Thévenot’s regimes (2007), which he has also suggested as tools for studying the plurality of cognitions. However, Truninger (2011), who combined practice theory and the regimes in her cooking study, highlighted that the combination also poses challenges if people’s cognition is overemphasized.

Nevertheless, our study suggests that carrying out cooking always includes some form of planning toward “envisioned practices” (Thomas and Epp 2019). Families are often advised to enact long-term anticipatory planning when organizing home cooking in busy everyday life. In this study, the parents preferred short-term in-action planning and flexible tentative planning that enabled reacting to different changes in everyday life and updating plans for satisfied cooking. Thus, anticipatory planning does not necessarily direct toward satisfaction when enacting situationally appropriate cooking, as plans continually evolve through interactions with varying social and material environments.

Conclusion

The study approached engagements in home cooking from a practice theoretical perspective, complemented with regimes of familiarity, justification and planning. We used regimes to analyze the cooking videos of the families with children and the accounts of the situational performances. The results suggest that familiarity maintains everyday cooking, justification refers to negotiating the plural good of cooking, and planning involves continually striving for a balance between easy familiarity and the complex good of cooking. Three different ways of planning for satisfaction revealed a situational navigation through everyday life for appropriate cooking. This is, to some extent, cognitive work, even if it is maintained by easy familiarity. The regime of planning turned out to be crucial in this study. It helped us better understand the situational appropriateness of cooking and the navigation of cooking-related practice to achieve satisfaction. We suggest that further studies should pay more attention to cooperation in cooking-related practices and to temporally flexible planning in everyday life. Such knowledge may offer valuable insights into promoting more sustainable and wholesome food practices in the home context.

Acknowledgments

We thank all the families who took part in the study. We are also thankful to Professor Pirita Seitamaa-Hakkarainen and Professor Mari Niva. They provided expertise and valuable suggestions that greatly assisted this research. In addition, we thank the three anonymous referees for constructive criticism that guided us in improving the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The research is supported by a grant from Elli Suninen & Rachel Troberg foundation.

Notes on contributors

Kaisa Torkkeli

Kaisa Torkkeli, MEd, is a Doctoral Student at the University of Helsinki. She is interested in cooking at home as foodwork, which is also a topic of her current thesis project in home economics science. She focuses on cooking as temporal and spatial performances of families with children, and in addition, the organization of foodwork in everyday life. A video method is a crucial part of her PhD project.

Kristiina Janhonen

Kristiina Janhonen, PhD, works as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki. Her research work is directed to food education; adolescents’ food related learning at the intersection of informal and institutional contexts; understanding young people’s food practices through qualitative and quantitative methods; development of participatory research methods; and school meals.

Johanna Mäkelä

Johanna Mäkelä, D.Soc.Sc., is the Professor of Food culture at the University of Helsinki, and works as the Dean of the Faculty of Educational Sciences. Her expertise lies in sociology and food and consumer studies; particularly in social and cultural aspects of eating. In her prior research projects, Mäkelä has used both qualitative and quantitative methods and explored e.g., future food consumption, responsibility of the food chain, consumers’ food classifications and practices in everyday life contexts, Nordic eating habits, and fat wars.

Notes

1. The concept of engagements (Warde 2005) originally refers to the concept of teleoaffective structures, comprising ends, moods, tasks and hopes (Schatzki 2002). Instead of teleoaffective structures, Warde (2005) introduced the concept of engagements in an operation, in order to facilitate the reference to the element of practice.

2. Practice theoretical studies prefer the terms norm or normativity instead of moral (e.g., Halkier 2010, 37; Schatzki 1996, 102). However, the term normativity can be interpreted as “practical moralities” (Halkier 2010, 37) or acceptability (Schatzki 1996). In this study, we use the terms appropriate, accepted, good and worthy, to describe situationally evaluated norms.

3. Domestic refers to the good of locality, tradition and personal relationships; fame to the good of visibility, public (brand) recognition and opinion; market to the good of competitiveness, economy and price; industrial to the good of technical efficiency and expertise; civic to the good of solidarity, fairness and welfare such as health, and inspiration to the good of creativity, spontaneity and esthetics (Forssell 2017, 42; Thévenot 2001, 2007; Truninger 2011).