Gender, Cultural Schemas, and Learning to Cook

Abstract

While public health researchers stress the importance of home-cooked meals, feminist scholars investigate inequalities in family cooking, including why women still cook much more than men. Key to understanding these inequalities is attention to how people learn to cook, a relatively understudied topic by social scientists. To address this gap, this study employs the concept of cultural schemas. Drawing from qualitative interviews and observations of 34 primary cooks in families, I identify the ubiquity of a “cooking by our mother’s side” schema. This schema privileges culinary knowledge acquired during childhood through the social reproductive work of mothers. I argue, first, that this schema reproduces gendered inequalities over generations by reinforcing women as primary transmitters of cooking knowledge. Second, it presents an overly uniform picture of food learning that obscures diversity, especially by overemphasizing the importance of childhood and masking the learning that occurs later in life. Identifying and analyzing this schema offers opportunities to reconsider predominant approaches to food learning to challenge gendered inequalities in domestic foodwork.

Unequal foodwork: Situating the sociology of feeding within diet and nutrition disparities

“…Persistent cultural norms still tie foodwork to femininity (Cairns & Johnston, 2015;Fürst, 1997;Oleschuk, 2019) and moralize it such that "good" 2 feeding is synonymous with "good" mothering (Brenton, 2017;Karademir-Hazır, 2021;Parsons et al, 2021). Foodwork is encompassed in contemporary standards of ideal motherhood, what Hays (1996) calls intensive mothering ideology.…”

“…In the United States, women still spend more than twice as much time cooking at home as men (Taillie, 2018; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2022) and are primarily responsible for foodwork in four out of five married heterosexual couples with children (Schaeffer, 2019). Persistent cultural norms still tie foodwork to femininity (Cairns & Johnston, 2015; Fürst, 1997; Oleschuk, 2019) and moralize it such that “good” 2 feeding is synonymous with “good” mothering (Brenton, 2017; Karademir‐Hazır, 2021; Parsons et al., 2021). Foodwork is encompassed in contemporary standards of ideal motherhood, what Hays (1996) calls intensive mothering ideology.…”

Informaali ruokakasvatus ja jaettu ruokataju osana ruokatyötä

“…Wilk, 2010;Wright, 2015) sekä etenkin sukupuoleen liittyvien näkökulmien (mm. Cairns ym., 2018;Oleschuk, 2019) kautta. Tutkimuksissa tarkastelu rajautuu usein ruokaan liittyvän toiminnan moninaisten merkitysten ja vaikuttimien sekä ateriakäytäntöjen tavoitteiden jäsentämisen tasolle, jolloin perheenjäsenten väliset erimielisyydet ja ristiriidat tai näiden pohjalta syntyneet kompromissit eli sopuratkaisut jäävät vähemmälle huomiolle.…”

“…Osana tätä tapahtuu sosiaalistamista eli sopeuttamista arjen käytäntöihin (mm. Anving & Sellerberg, 2010;Grønhøj & Gram, 2020;Oleschuk, 2019). Kasvatustieteen termein tätä sopeuttamista tai jatkuvaa muutospyrkimystä määriteltäisiin informaaliksi kasvatukseksi.…”

The emotional management of motherhood: Foodwork, maternal guilt, and emotion work

“…Today, mothers in the United States are primarily responsible for foodwork within families: in four out of five married heterosexual couples with children, mothers are primarily in charge of foodwork (Schaeffer, 2019), and women still spend more than twice as much time cooking at home as men (Taillie, 2018). Alongside these temporal demands, persistent cultural norms still connect foodwork with femininity (Oleschuk, 2019) and moralize it in ways that equate “good” feeding with “good” mothering (Brenton, 2017; Karademir‐Hazır, 2021). As a key site where motherhood is judged and scrutinized, maternal foodwork represents a task through which mothers cultivate their identities as mothers, caregivers, and socially conscious citizens (Parker et al, 2019).…”