Cooking without thinking: How understanding cooking as a practice can shed new light on inequalities in healthy eating

Kesteren, Rosa van; Evans, Adrian

doi:10.1016/j.appet.2019.104503

Cited by 25 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 84 publications

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“…The first is to find alternative ways to elicit a depth of data that would ordinarily require a researcher to be present with their participants. Second, because a key aim of the research is to understand practices rather than just perceptions, the methods are designed to enable us to investigate what participants do, as well as what they say (van Kesteren & Evans, 2020). We intend to recruit an ethnically and socio-economically diverse sample of 60-80 parents from across three case study sites in England: Bradford, Folkestone & Hythe, and the London Borough of Brent.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Is COVID-19 Shaping Families’ Relationships With Food and the Food Environment in England? A Qualitative Research Protocol

Isaacs

Squires

Hawkes

2021

International Journal of Qualitative Methods

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Rates of childhood overweight and obesity continue to rise in England, along with a growing gap in obesity prevalence between children in the most and least deprived areas. To address child obesity, the UK government is increasingly considering how to intervene in the (food) environments that shape people’s purchases, rather than focusing solely on individual health behaviors. With the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns having rapidly reconfigured life in the UK, it is important to understand how these changes may have impacted food practices and engagement with food environments. This remote, longitudinal qualitative study seeks to explore how the COVID-19 pandemic and its impacts are shaping families relationships with the food and the food environment. A sample of 60–80 parents/carers of school or nursery-aged children will be recruited from across three case study sites in England to take part in semi-structured interviews and set of flexible creative activities at three time points over the course of a year. Findings will provide practical policy insights for England’s obesity prevention strategy as well as methodological insights in terms of conducting research into lived experience remotely.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Is COVID-19 Shaping Families’ Relationships With Food and the Food Environment in England? A Qualitative Research Protocol

Isaacs

Squires

Hawkes

2021

International Journal of Qualitative Methods

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“…A practice-based approach is antithetical to this abstract and compartmentalised worldview (Reckwitz, 2002;Nicolini ,2012) and has already made wide-ranging contributions to cooking scholarship (van Kesteren & Evans 2020;Truninger, 2011;Halkier, 2009;McCabe & de Waal Malefyt, 2015). Though a broad church, all theories of practice start with the premise that our actions are fundamentally situated and habitualconducted with minimal conscious attention rather than rationally decided upon from scratch every time.…”

Section: What Is Healthy Eating? a Comparison Of Nutrient-focused And Practice-based Understandingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cooking up an injustice: A critical examination of the role of cooking programs in reducing health inequalities

Kesteren

Evans²

2021

Crit Diet

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The way we eat is one of the biggest causes of preventable illness and death, particularly for those living in more deprived areas. Public health interventions often include courses teaching cooking ‘from scratch’ as an affordable means of dietary improvement, but this paper questions the effectiveness of such programs. Using an in-depth case study of a leading healthy cooking programme, including ethnographic observations of seven cooking classes and interviews with 35 participants and three members of staff, we show that the impact of this programme was limited by its adherence to conventional ‘nutrient-focused’ framings of healthy eating. Teaching based on this framing created confusion by separating nutrients from foods, hampered embodied learning of skills and ultimately failed to address how learnings could be integrated into the everyday lives of participants Unable to engage with inequities in access, preparation time, food environments or other sociocultural influences on eating habits, courses built on similarly nutricentric foundations will never be able to address the major barriers to healthy eating faced by their target participants. As an alternative, we propose that cooking courses grounded in a more ‘practice-based’ understanding of healthy eating would be more effective at changing dietary behaviours, especially in areas of higher deprivation.

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“…However, they only analyzed eating out, not food consumption on the whole. The authors of [61] investigated cooking instead and also prepared a quantitative survey by qualitative interviews. A complex combination of multiple qualitative and quantitative methods was employed by [62] to dissect what they call taste regimes.…”

Section: Food Consumption As Everyday Practicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Addressing the Sustainability Paradox: The Analysis of “Good Food” in Everyday Life

Exner

Strüver

2020

Sustainability

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This paper investigates food consumption in terms of socio-spatial practices as complex patterns of meanings, competencies and materialities that shape daily life. The praxeological approach that we advise might improve food sustainability policies by tackling the current sustainability paradox: persisting unsustainable food consumption despite significant media coverage of food sustainability issues and considerable political attention to this matter. Acknowledging the importance of both individual action and collective conditions in shaping food routines, we argue that the sustainability paradox might be overcome through integrating the analysis of social structures and individual behavior, and consequently addressing the determinants of sustainability in daily life. To this end, we analyze narrative interviews on “good food” regarding cultural meanings, individual competencies, and diverse materialities that govern food consumption, identify common themes and discuss their relevance for food policy. We show that food is part of complex orderings of socio-spatial practices, including embodied knowledge, patterns of commensality and constraints of orchestrating daily life, which cannot be addressed appropriately by targeting individual consumption behavior only.

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Cooking without thinking: How understanding cooking as a practice can shed new light on inequalities in healthy eating

Cited by 25 publications

References 84 publications

How Is COVID-19 Shaping Families’ Relationships With Food and the Food Environment in England? A Qualitative Research Protocol

How Is COVID-19 Shaping Families’ Relationships With Food and the Food Environment in England? A Qualitative Research Protocol

Cooking up an injustice: A critical examination of the role of cooking programs in reducing health inequalities

Addressing the Sustainability Paradox: The Analysis of “Good Food” in Everyday Life

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