Caring for and about cooking from scratch : ethnographic explorations of a community cookery school

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Caring for and about Cooking from Scratch

Ethnographic Explorations of a Community Cookery School

Georgia Luling Feilding

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MSc Medical Anthropology and Sociology Supervisor: Dr Kristine Krause Second Reader: Dr Rebeca Ibáñez Martín Submitted to the University of Amsterdam

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Figure 1 (On Title Page) Rolling Pastry

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank everybody at the cookery school for welcoming me and making this research possible, in particular the class members who shared their stories and for all the delicious food. I also want to thank my supervisor, Kristine Krause, for her insight,

encouragement, care and calm support and for inspiring and energising me during every conversation we shared. Thank you to Rebeca Ibáñez Martín as my second reader and for your interest in my thesis.

I am hugely grateful to everyone who assisted with proof reading and for valuable input. My wonderful sisters, Freya and Isadore, without who’s support this would not have been possible. And my dearest friend Naomi not only for hosting me while I conducted the research, but also for encouraging me to do this course and invaluable support throughout it. Thank you also to Granny Clo, who’s love and support has continued all the way from hospital.

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Prelude

There is a buzzing energy in the room. It is an unusually busy session, with seven women participating, all arriving at different times, being absorbed into the communal cooking activity as the teacher gives them a task. It’s a very a warm June day, and only a small top part of the window open so the air in the kitchen feels sticky; most of the people in the room, look a little flushed, with perspiration on their faces. There are too many simultaneous strands of activity to follow distinct tasks. The teacher draws everybody’s attention together: “Right, what are we making?” Before anyone can start to list the dishes, Kimberly chips in “memories” from the back of the room, and she bends over with laughter, I and those near her laugh with her. The teacher who didn’t hear her, asks, “what did you say?”, she repeats “we’re making memories” and he joins in the laughter too. The teacher calls out what is left to do and then the noise levels creep up again. At this point, I realise I would be most helpful washing up. A few of the women complete the last touches to assembly of the dishes at the table, while some watch and others whisk away the remaining used bowls and chopping boards and knives to bring to me, now in full washing-up mode at the sink. I turn around and somehow, out of the frenzy of activity, building as people joined, a collection of colourful dishes is served in an array of whatever plates and bowls could be found in the cupboards, in the centre of the table. The Greek Mezze feast has come together. The room is quiet for a minute, as everyone looks on the display, almost stunned by the result and perhaps no-one quite understanding how it happened. Later, after clearing up the teacher says to me, “Wow! Wasn’t that amazing!” and I agree it was.

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Introduction

Every day at a small community cookery school in a Southern English city, people come together to cook and eat. Those running the school believe that everyone can learn to cook from scratch and should have access to opportunities to do so they provide classes to include people in many different life circumstances, taking into account their diverse and complex social contexts, dietary practices and “experiences of food, bodies, communities and themselves” (Yates-Doerr 2012:309).

This thesis uses a material semiotic set of “tools and sensibilities” (Law 2019:1) to explore how the cookery school puts this vision into practice. It aims to bring into view the

interrelations between food stuffs, activities, utensils, the kitchen and the people that are attended to in this setting. These can be seen as “objects of care” (Law 2010). In speaking of care here, I draw on both meanings: caring about, being concerned about and caring for, looking after or attending to. The cookery teachers guide people to care-fully attend to food and the way it is done in the hope that better, more pleasurable, ways of relating to food will be possible. Learning to cook is just one of multiple reasons that brings people to the classes and does not fully encompass all the things that go on in this kitchen. The activity round the Greek Mezze session described above, a little like a musical jam session, seemed to take on an energy of its own that could not have been planned or pre-determined by the teacher. This thesis seeks to unravel what might be happening in instances such as these. Though being-cared for and learning to care for food and the tasty, messy or satisfying bodily engagements cooking entails, class members can find alternative positions from which to relate to others and themselves in more positive ways. I ask: What happens when people learn to cook? In doing so, I aim to bring into view the particular the specific

sociomaterial practices and relations that make up teaching and learning to cook and the different effects of these for the people that come to the cookery school.

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Why care for cooking?

The cookery school promotes cooking from scratch, cooking using raw or un/minimally-processed ingredients as it can be better, healthier or tastier. It is now well-recognised, within anthropological studies of health and care and beyond, that food matters (Harbers, Mol & Stollmeyer 2002, emphasis in original) to health and wellbeing, perhaps particularly in the UK contexts of increasing consumption of ultra-processed foods, itself linked to multiple non-communicable diseases and dietary-related health problems (Rauber et al 2018) and increasing levels of food poverty1_{(Ferrando & Dalmeny 2018)}2_.

In the UK, learning to cook has become a popular leisure activity for many people wanting to better their skills or learn new cuisines. On the other hand, cookery schools also seek to

redress the lack of food education provided in schools3 and in wider society. The cookery school, where this research is based, operates as part of a network of several grass-roots and community food projects that seek to fill various gaps in policy.

Figure 2 shows a list compiled by a group of support workers in a training and cooking session4_{. While the} cookery school may have little influence on the larger structural forces that may be preventing people from

1_{The Department of Health defines food poverty as ‘The inability to afford, or to have access to, food to make}

up a healthy diet.’ Other definitions highlight lack of access to fruit and vegetables, or being unable to access food in socially accessible ways. https://www.sustainweb.org/foodpoverty/whatisfoodpoverty/ (accessed 09.09.19)

2_{https://www.bristol.ac.uk/policybristol/policy-briefings/right-to-food/ (accessed 23.09.190)} 3_{In 2015 The Department of Education introduced promising changes the UK curriculum around food}

education in schools. However, this review shows that there are several issues restricting the implementation and therefore real changes have not been felt (see Ballam 2018).

4_{The suggestion of “perceived costs” was originally simply “cost”, the teacher added perceived. “Not}

interested?” was added following a comment from another teacher saying, “it’s interesting that none of you mentioned that you or your service users are not interested in food…” The left column was added by the teacher as ‘less obvious’ reasons.

Figure 2 “What are the reasons why people don’t cook?”

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cooking, the food industry and policy, they hope to make cooking possible for people within the “unpredictable and often-contradicting demands of everyday life” (Yates-Doerr

2012:305).

The cookery school provides classes to people in many different circumstances including precarious situations (such as recovery from substance addiction), lack of kitchen or cooking facilities, learning disabilities, Downs Syndrome, anxiety, mental health issues, cognitive and physical impairments, financial insecurity, living alone and not feeling motivated to cook for one, or those who have always been cooked for or relied on highly processed foods5_{. The} cookery school aims to open up the possibilities of the pleasures of food (Vogel & Mol 2014) recognising potential of food pleasure in caring (Brijnath 2011; Mol 2010). The pleasure of food is central to promoting cooking from scratch, but not in place of nutrition, the two can be cared for together (Harbers, Mol & Stollmeyer 2002:216-7; Vogel & Mol 2014). In

attending to how care happens through sociomaterial relations I aim to build on studies about care practices outside institutional or conventional healthcare settings, showing how kitchens can be “sites of care” too (Yates-Doerr & Carney 2016) and also directed towards non-human entities, for example work on caring for cattle (Law 2010) tomatoes (Heuts and Mol 2010) and soil (Puig de la Bellacasa 2019). I also hope to add to literature that brings food practices to the fore of debates around nutrition and public health (Ibáñez Martín 2018; Yates-Doerr 2012).

I will first introduce the setting and what is involved in creating a welcoming and inclusive space for learning to cook. This also sets the scene for one of the main tasks of this thesis: to highlight and to value the work and skills involved in the daily practices of the teachers and volunteers at the school. In doing so I hope to carry out “exnovation”, to unravel and tease out details of the everyday practices and routines that happen in this setting yet remain

5_{I use these categories here to reflect the different groups of people that attend or gain access to these}

sessions, however, as I hope to show these categories of ‘difference’ are not so relevant in the context of the classes.

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unarticulated (Driessen 2019a:14), following an ethnographic approach taken by Annelieke Driessen who is inspired by the work of Jessica Mesman (ibid.).

In this spirit, the first chapter will unravel what is involved in cooking from scratch as a practice. It will analyse how teachers teach people to know food differently and attend to its material qualities and differences in texture, smell, taste and appearance. I then consider the role of the language entwined with bodily and material doings in teaching people these practices. I will trace how teachers and volunteers continually pay attention to how class members relate to the space and the cooking tasks and the different ways that bodies are invited to participate in the practices.

In the next chapter I zoom in on tasting, setting out the teachers’ strategies for encouraging class members to care about taste. I will then join the practices of caring for food together with the ways through which teachers make cooking relevant to the diverse life

circumstances of class members; within the specific, embodied relations involved in learning to cook in this space.

The final chapter presents several different stories illustrating how knowing how to cook plays out in different sociomaterial interactions, opening up new ways of relating among people inside and outside class. I will explore the different forms of relating between class members as they engage in cooking while also drawing attention to the contingency of care, by highlighting moments where class members are unable to join in with the activity. This chapter will end by reflecting on what might happen to various forms of vulnerability as people participate in classes. I will show how people are able to occupy alternative positions, from which they can relate positively through their differences.

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Theoretical Inspiration

Every day during my fieldwork I observed people engaged in various activities such as “making bread dough” depicted above. In this setting, both language and non-verbal activities such as the sticky interaction of hands with bread dough are involved in learning how to cook. In order to attend to both of these elements simultaneously, I draw upon the material semiotic approach because it resists the split between language and the material world and instead enables my analysis to attend to how the two are intertwined in world-making practices (Mol 2014; Latour 2004; Haraway 1992; Law 2019). I draw on different scholars working within a “varying but overlapping set of methods, sensibilities and concerns” (Law 2019:2, emphasis in original) in order to ask: What happens when people learn to cook?

This lens encouraged me, especially through my own participation in the different practices, to attend to them as routinised ways “in which bodies are moved, objects are handled,

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subjects are treated, things are described and the world is understood” (Reckwitz 2002:250). The practical tasks involving material objects at the cookery school are relevant to the meaningful interactions and relationalities as they unfold between class members, teachers and volunteers. This approach does not assume the social and material as distinct realms, but as both co-producers and co-produced in practice. In this spirit my analysis foregrounds the sociomaterial relations (Driessen et al 2017, Driessen 2019a & 2019b) and resists setting the standards of what I was looking for in advance which risks excluding less visible, or unexpected, relations that may unfold in practice (Driessen 2019a). I aim to put into words some of the multiple realities involved in learning to cook that are formed through the weaving together of heterogeneous elements, in this case, foods, bodies, kitchens, utensils, smells, tastes, words, actions, ways of knowing and so on, within the specific practices in this setting.

Sociomaterial practices of care

The material semiotic lens has been particularly effective in making visible work that is often overlooked or invisible, but crucial to caring for people and things. Here I am indebted to a rich body of work on care practices (Buch 2015:282). These scholars, many of whom are studying European contexts, bring into view the strategies, skills, knowledge, experience and creativity of those performing care work with an aim to value what is often under-valued (Driessen 2019a; Mol 2008; Mol, Moser, Pols 2010), including that involving food (Driessen & Ibáñez Martín 2019; Harbers, Mol & Stollmeyer 2002; Mol 2010; Mol 2011) or carrying out “food work” (Heaven et all 2013).

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Every morning the first person to arrive at the cookery school begins the long list of practical tasks required to make the classes happen, including the time-consuming unravelling of the aprons that get tangled in the washing machine, depicted in Figure 4. I was amazed6_{by the}

amount of work happening on a daily basis cookery school made possible by the dedication of teachers and several volunteers, “angels sent from heaven”7_{. This thesis aims to} use material semiotic sensitivities to share with the reader how I saw care operating as a mode of doing (Mol, Moser, Pols 2010; Law 2010; Puig de la Bellacasa 2011) in multiple forms and within multiple relations in the specific local practices I observed at the cookery school.

The fleshiness of food and bodies

A focus on practices also has implications for the way food, as a material entity, is treated in my analysis. Anthropological studies of food, drawn to its universal material ubiquity, have highlighted its symbolic potency as a vessel of memory (Sutton 2001) and vehicle through which social relations identities are constructed and expressed (Mintz and Du Bois

2002:109). In contrast to meaning-centred analyses of food and those that seek to uncover the inequality of global relations (Mintz 1985) a practice-based approach does not separate the meaning of food from the local practices which it is part, thus resisting the imposition of a pattern. This allows me to attend to the way food is involved in relations between people for whom food means many different things, while, at the same time, doing justice to the

6_{As were many teachers, staff and volunteers I spoke to.}

7_{During an interview with the Operations Manager she described her colleagues as “angels sent from heaven”}

referring to the amount of time and energy they give to the organisation.

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bodily engagements with the materiality of food, including texture8_{, taste, material}

environment that are attended to as part of care in this setting. The list is virtually endless, pointing to the complexities of care (Harbers, Mol & Stollmeyer 2002). Science and

Technology Studies scholars questioned why the natural properties of food, notably its relations to the body, were left to the natural sciences arguing that food also matters (ibid.:207) because it keeps us alive, can make our bodies (and minds) function better or worse, can make us feel happy, full or disgusted. My ethnographic descriptions reflect my informants’ attention to the physicality of food. However, like them, I do not treat food items as merely objects to be known or handled, but as actors that are involved in the cooking, eating, learning practices, highlighting the key shift made by Science and

Technology scholars, who understand the doing to be distributed across human and non-human actors (Abrahamsson et al 2015)9_.

A similar sensibility informs my exploration of tasting practices, again departing from theories of taste which insist on the separate realm of the social for example, in order to explain how taste structures social relations (Bourdieu 1979). While contextualising taste socially enabled Bourdieu to challenge social inequality by linking taste (as appreciation) to income and education (Mann 2015b:404), the physiological sensation left out of this kind of analysis is crucial to understand tasting in the present setting. The anthropology of the senses went some way to bring the sensuousness of food and the sensing body back in (Sutton 2001; Holtzman 2006) and to challenge Western assumptions, particularly the division into 5 distinct senses (Mann 2015a). Going beyond this, the material semiotic approach makes it possible to overstep the split between knowledge and experience (Mann

8_{Texture is one important aspect of food and food-related care. In certain care settings, where people have}

impaired eating, chewing, swallowing capacity, texture takes on a new significance, such as eating with dentures (Mann 2015a) food needing to be mashed or cut up in a certain way in nursing home contexts (Harbers, Mol and Sollmeyer 2002; Mol 2010) or eating with a feeding tube (Pols and Limburg 2016).

9_{However, this is not the same as granting agency to things. At the same time this perspective recasts doing as}

relational, departing from a traditional notion of agency, so things become matter related and in matter in

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2015a; Mann et al 2011 Mol 2014, Mol 2010; Mol 2011). Tasting is at once social and material, as Anna Mann tells us: the bodily sensation of tasting cannot be separated from the other practices that surround, precede and order tasting within multiple and diverse practices (2015a). In order to link up learning to cook and the potential of pleasure within the practice of tasting, I will also draw on Gomart and Hennion’s sociology of attachment and Driessen’s (2019a) application of this thinking to explore the conditions that bring about and invite people to experience bodily pleasure; the “potential sensorial effects” of food is only conceivable in relation to someone who has been trained to be “a skilled consumer” and vice versa (Gomart & Hennion 1999:239).

Teaching/learning how to cook

The kind of knowledge the teachers wish to share cannot be distilled knowledge from the cooking processes (Yates-Doerr 2012:304) that are taught by the teacher and practiced by the class members. Knowing how to cook happens in practice. The term articulation is helpful in understanding what is happening when people learn cooking as a knowledge practice. Language is involved in this process but it cannot be separated from the bodily and material doing in the cooking practices.

Bruno Latour (2004) applies the notion of articulation to the training of people, or their noses, for the perfume industry. In contrast to a model which posits a subject knowing about the world (objects) through language as an intermediary, this notion describes how the trainees “learn to be affected” by certain differences (Latour 2004:207-8). In articulation, the artificial set-up, the odour kit is “co-extensive with the body” (ibid.). My analysis of what happens at the cookery school will attend to how class members (and of course also

teachers and volunteers) are being “effected, moved, put into motion by new entities whose differences are registered in new and unexpected ways” (Latour 2004:210). This way of approaching knowing brings attention to the conditions, including and the material set-up

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upon which knowing is contingent (Latour 2004) which is central to the ethos of this pedagogical setting: that everyone can learn how to cook10_{, with the right conditions. I} explore the way teachers articulate a way of knowing, caring for food.

Class members, through joining the cooking, then also articulate in verbal and non-verbal practices. A second layer of the term articulation that I will draw upon is that inspired by Donna Haraway (1992). At the cookery school many different kinds of relating are happening beyond language; discursive practice is only part of articulation (Haraway 1992:324).

Haraway’s notion of articulation aims to give a voice to multiple social partners that are unlike, but joined as “co-actor[s] in an articulated practice” (Ibid:312). This thesis will aim to describe the non-verbal ways of relating in this setting and how within these sociomaterial practices and relations, new positions for class-members to articulate themselves become possible. I will follow Jeanette Pols in presenting these as subject positions, drawing attention to the kind of “expectations” and “routines” these can entail (2011:196).

Figure 5 Hand contact while cooking

10_{There are political implications of Latour’s model that does not split the world into primary and secondary}

qualities, the former which can be known only by scientists and the later which are mediated by language, as perception, or cultural understanding of the lay person (2004:208).

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A third layer of articulation takes place as I aim to tell these stories. The teachers themselves are reflexive of their own practice and, as I will demonstrate, also sensitive (Driessen 2019b) to the experiences of classes members within the kitchen space and the cooking. I join my participants in engaging with cooking and with the sociomaterial interactions unfolding and hope to speak along with my informants, making their own articulations ‘visible’

(ibid.:313)11_.

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Methodology

Between April and June 2019 each time I cycled across the city to reach my field site to volunteer at the cookery school I participated in co-constructing “the field” along with my participants (Amit 2000:7). In my case this process even happened visibly as I worked together with my informants to materially re-construct the kitchen each morning. Another interesting dynamic about the location of my study is that my access was underpinned by pre-existing relationships and I was somewhat ‘re-entering’ a field (ibid.). My involvement with the cookery school began well before my fieldwork, as my farther is the founding director. Joining the cookery classes was however a new experience and I decided with the Operations Manager12_{which classes it would be appropriate to include in the study}13_before seeking consent from partner organisations. For a list of classes observed see Appendix B.

Participant observation

Participant observation was my main research tool, as the most suitable for studying practices and my own participation in them as a volunteer. My aim was to remain attentive to the several interconnected elements which constitute a ‘practice’, such as: “forms of bodily [and] … mental activities, ‘things’ and their use, background knowledge, states of emotion and motivational knowledge” (Reckwitz 2002:249). My methodological sensitivity inspired by material semiotics, as one strand within the family of practice theories (Reckwitz 2002), encouraged me to pay attention to the goings-on beyond language and also how

12_{I chose to leave the director, my father, out of the correspondence. Although it hard to know of the impact}

of this, I made it very clear that they had the option to decline my proposition of joining the organisation in a research capacity.

13_{We chose not to include 1. class for young people in a pupil referral unit, many of whom are in care as there}

was a risk that involvement in research might negatively impact their engagement and concerns about trust building in the time frame. 2. A class for people with varying support needs including learning disabilities, due to insufficient time to follow UK protocol regarding informed consent from people with impaired cognitive capacity. 3 A project with a local school, which already had a PHD student following it.

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people interacted with and through things. Then, in the process of writing fieldnotes I attempted to verbalise these practices (Hirschauer 2006).

I moved between joining in the class by helping with the cooking activities or assisting class members, speaking to class members and teachers and carrying out tasks in the background, before or after classes for example, washing-up or food preparation. This opened up my observations beyond the classes as structured moments in time in order to see how the different food practices feed into, through and out of them.

I engaged sensorially throughout the cooking, aiming to take up Paul Stoller’s call to “reawaken” my body to include sensuous details in ethnographic descriptions (1997:xv). I also joined in the communal eating element of the classes14_{, tasting the food that was} cooked myself while also participating in, or listening to, meal time conversations.

My observations were loosely structured around activities involving food and I also participated in a broad range of activities outside classes (see Appendix B). I used a small notebook which was often visible to participants.

I also engaged in informal conversations often unrelated to my research, including my own experiences and sometimes about their personal lives (checking with participants before recording any information). Talking about living in Amsterdam also turned into a useful way to remind people of my position as a researcher.

Semi-structured interviews

I conducted semi-structured interviews in the second half of the fieldwork period. For a list of respondents and how I approached people for interview, see Appendix C. I prepared

14_{With the exception of the Welcome Kitchen sessions where teachers/volunteers do not join in the eating}

because they are keen for the class members (who are homeless/at risk of homelessness) to eat or take home as much food as possible, rather than sharing it among more people.

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specific questions, on the classes, cookery school, food practices outside of cookery school but also tailored to each ‘position’ within the setting guided by topics within my

observations so far. Most interviews were relatively short lasting around 30 minutes.

Interviews with staff members were over an hour. For teachers and volunteers in particular, I asked questions about “the specificities of activities that informants tend to take for granted” (Heuts & Mol 2013:128) building on an ethnographic method that invites

informants to be their own praxiographers (ibid.; Mol 2002). What they explained in words helped me to further analyse and tease out non-verbal details of their practices that I had been observing.

The interviews all took place at the cookery school in the kitchen, before or after classes or in the community centre reception seating area, or if the weather was pleasant in the outdoor seating area. At each interview I gave the informant a copy of the participant info sheets (which they had already been shown prior to arranging the interview) and asked them to sign a consent form, including permission to record. While analysing transcripts I tried to keep in mind that they were ‘jointly produced’ by the respondent and myself in the context of the whole structure of the interview (Briggs 1986:2-3). When asking people to describe their own practices, there were elements that could not be explained to me in words, hand gestures or actions. I have therefore brought my own observations and direct experience of the tasks or kinds of interactions they described in the interviews into my analysis in order to articulate these practices and create ethnographic descriptions. In interviews with staff members I reflected on an extra, important dynamic which is my relationship with the Director of the organisation.

I am aware that the data that I collected from interviews may only represent the “voices” of those willing to come forward and speak. I tried to be attentive to other participants,

complexities and tensions in my observations and to triangulate these two types of data (Bryman 2012: 700).

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Ethical Concerns

In each methodology I treated the issue of informed consent as processual, i.e. not reduceable to a single signed document but relevant to every interaction and on an individual basis. Furthermore, I took responsibility for reminding people of my role as a researcher, checking before noting anything potentially sensitive and introducing myself to new or late arrivals. I made clear (verbally and in participant information sheets) that participants could withdraw at any time without impacting their involvement with the cookery school in any way. While planning my research I consulted various sources15_for ethical guidance, however, I continually reflected on the ethical implications of my research particularly in unforeseen scenarios (Green & Thorogood 2004:68). I mention two instances in particular here. In the Cooking for Nourishment classes quite often conversation would turn to talking about difficult personal experiences including those related to children of class participants and also ongoing health issues. Sometimes these stories would be partly directed at me, I chose to respond sensitively in order to respect that while cooking, these classes were also an opportunity for women to share things and get things off their chest and I did not want to disrupt these moments or mark them, for example, by stepping out of the room to avoid listening to these details. However, I did not record any of these details in my notes and will not share any of the information I was party to. I also agreed with the co-ordinator of this service that I would only speak to the women in a class context and not approach the women for one-on-one interviews as they have consistent contact with services and so we felt it was important to keep this class as a space free from the feeling of “having to explain themselves”.

15_{Sources for ethical guidance: AAA Code of Ethics (2012) and the AISSR ethical background check list}

retrieved from: http://aissr.uva.nl/research/ethics-and-integrity/ethics-and-integrity.html (accessed 23.09.19)

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A second unforeseen ethical challenge arose very late on in the fieldwork when I realised another of the members of Cooking in Company also had dementia. The other participant with early onset dementia, had himself explained this to me in the first week and was very open about his condition16_{. The second individual I had introduced myself to and interacted} with without knowing about his diagnosis. When I was told by a volunteer during an

interview in the last week of my research, I was very divided as to whether I should include the interactions I had had with this individual following this realisation. Furthermore, I wondered if it undermined my own skills as a researcher, or indeed as a volunteer, for not having realised this or followed up on my instincts when I had begun to notice a few

potential signs. On the other hand, I was really surprised at how someone who is potentially quite vulnerable could be included and participate in the setting without his condition being overtly noticeable. I reflected on my interactions with this individual and at no point had he seemed uncomfortable, in fact quite the opposite, always at ease and smiling. Ultimately, I decided that this dynamic deserved to be written about, and furthermore excluding him from my research would undermine the collective work carried out by him and others in the setting to enable him to participate in such a positive way.

All names used in the thesis are pseudonyms and I have also anonymised the cookery school and partner organisations to ensure anonymity of those whose stories I present. I have carefully considered how to present my informants so as to avoid causing any offence or internal tensions17_{. I will also be providing a report summarising my thesis for the cookery} school and partner organisations along with a one-page version for class members.

16_{Although I don’t know the details about his condition, from various conversations I ascertained he was}

taking medication that was enabling him to retain a good level of independence in areas of his life.

17_{Scheper-Hughes warns, anonymity can become a license for anthropologists to be ‘too free with our pens’}

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Positionality & Reflexivity

My familiarity with the setting, although beneficial in gaining access, as anticipated,

impacted my fieldwork methods and relationships. The most challenging aspect of this was that the teachers and staff often forgot to introduce me to people, so I had to try and work this into different moments. As a volunteer and having worked with the organisation before, I was quite often asked to do tasks by the teachers and staff that drew me away from the ‘action’18_{. This in itself was an interesting lens on the work and onto the ‘feeling’ described} by volunteers of wanting to be “helpful” and do whatever was needed. Acting as a volunteer myself gave me an embodied window onto the sheer amount of work required and the commitment from volunteers19_.

Another important aspect regarding my positionality was my relationship to the Cookery School Director (and teacher). I decided not to introduce myself in reference to this

relationship, nor to conceal the information, so as not to make participants feel pressured to be involved in the research.

As I reflected on my position within the setting, I realised how much I take for granted about food and the values that were prominent in this setting as they echo my own up-bringing as well as my commitments in my personal life since childhood. While talking with and

interviewing participants I was careful in the way I asked questions, keeping them open and as much as possible refraining from making assumptions about certain food ideas or

behaviours related to my own life experiences and values.

18_{On some days, the organisation were short on volunteers, so I was asked to help at a few classes, which I did}

in the capacity of volunteer only. I did not take notes in these sessions.

19_{One long-term volunteer talked about the physically demanding nature of this work. She explained that}

loves coming here but tends to go home feeling a bit ‘broken’ after a long day. Interestingly she also says she does not mind the mundane tasks like unravelling the aprons, almost enjoys them when she comes here because of the mindset it not being ‘work’. Others said they did not mind washing-up and seemed to value the ‘atmosphere’ and being a part of the project.

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I noticed half way through the fieldwork that in a way that my socialisation was more aligned with the roles of the teachers. This perhaps made it difficult not to view things from the angle of those who are trying to share knowledge with class members, in the hope that it will transform and improve their lives in some way. Instead of pretending my values have not influenced the way I interpreted this social setting, I have instead tried to be as reflexive as possible, particularly in attending to tensions and frictions that complicate any

straightforward success or empowerment stories. Pols teaches us that values are produced relationally and situationally through the interactions of people in care with the people and objects around them (2005:215). So, as a volunteer I was participating in producing these values.

Limitations

Although this approach was beneficial in ensuring a focus on practices, wider political dynamics may have been excluded from the frame. I focused most of my questions, observations and notes around food-related interactions and activity. This does cover the majority of activity in this setting, though it may have resulted in a lack of attention to other reasons that brought people into the cookery school.

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The Setting: A Community Cookery School

The cookery school began life two decades ago when a restaurant owner decided to teach adults and children how to cook. Gradually extending this work to local schools and projects, it grew into a separate charity, moving in 2011 to one of the most deprived areas of the city20_{where it operates from a busy community centre also home to several different} organisations, including a café and outdoor spaces. At present, the cookery school provides 43+ hours of community classes (free to access) every week as well as regular master

classes, weekend children classes, team building and outside catering events which generate income to supplement that received from grant funding21_{. Cooking sessions and consultancy} are also offered to other projects in the city, including a long-term partnership with a local care organisation where the cookery school offers consultancy and also regular training for staff members with a view to improving food provision at their care services. All of this is delivered by a team of about seven salaried staff, two full-time, five part-time. The support of volunteers, providing about 70 hours per week across these activities, is crucial in the daily running of this “fragile eco-system”22_.

Below, I briefly introduce the four classes that are drawn upon in my research. The names of the classes have been made up for the purpose of this thesis.

20_{The city is divided between high levels of wealth and one in four children living in poverty with food bank}

use having rising sharply in the last 5 years. The local area surrounding the community centre is home to several neighbourhoods that are in the top 10% most deprived in the country. Observations and conversations during my fieldwork reflected these statistics for example, visiting the local school, where one of the projects is run, I saw boxes of food donations collected in a matter of minutes by parents collecting their children.

21_{A theme that came up interviews with office staff was the short-term nature of the funding, usually in year}

cycles. Another restriction to funding is grants that are conditional on people attending a certain number of classes for the place to be funded which is at odds with the needs of the target groups, for example those suffering from severe social anxiety.

22_{The Operations Manager explained to me that it just takes one “disaster” or one of the team to be off sick}

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Cooking in Company is cooking club running every Monday morning for over-55s. It was the first community cooking session established over 6 years ago aimed at reducing social isolation and for those who want to build, or re-build, confidence with cooking.

Cultivating Chefs is a 12-week free cooking course, training young people to be chefs and to enter the hospitality industry, particularly aiming to provide opportunities for young people who are not in work, training, or education.

Cooking for Nourishment is a weekly cooking session for women who attend a service for recovery from street sex work and addiction.

Welcome Kitchen is a weekly cooking session for people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness, many of whom are also receiving mental health support.

The Kitchen & Garden

Figure 8 on the following page presents rough sketch of the kitchen layout. Figures 6 and 7 depict the garden.

Figure 7 The garden in May

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The kitchen is light and well organised, creating the visual sense that “everything has its place”, but simultaneously characterful and welcoming. Each day there is huge amount of work to maintain this space. This includes: washing-up, drying-up, cleaning, collecting, buying, sorting, storing food, disposing of food: composting, recycling, food waste (non-compostable) and emptying these bins to relevant places _{(compost and food for Jude the pig} both at the small plant nursery/ rescue animal farm on the community centre site), also management of surplus food23_{, laundry, watering the garden, harvesting herbs from the} garden, and so on.

23_{Donations of surplus food are received as part of a contract with a local supermarket. Some is re-distributed}

to partner projects. This is often usable, but requires significant coordination and work to sort through.

Figure 9 Various utensils

Figure 11 Knives and other tools

Figure 10 Photo on the store cupboard wall depicting how neat it can be as a visual reminder to try and keep it that way.

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“Setting up” the setting

I think the thing that surprises me the most is the variety of people who come through this kitchen and their different stories and the fact that they can all just be accommodated, it just sort of seems to happen and that’s the massive skill of the people who work here I think, it doesn’t happen by accident, it’s like that invisible thing, they create the environment where people can just be….. themselves.

Long-term volunteer

This volunteer highlights the “massive skill” behind creating an environment that “just

seems” to accommodate a diverse mix of people. In the spirit of exnovation (Driessen 2019a) I aim to bring the practices and skills into view. I argue that this “invisible thing” may be what Annelieke Driessen terms “sociomaterial awareness” in order “to articulate a sensitivity to ways in which the material environment co-shapes way of living” (2019b:4) in a Dutch care home. She shows how a collective awareness of the role of the built environment in ordering dementia24_{and an active experimentation of different ways to arrange the space, can invite} different forms of activity, enacting alternative, hopefully better, orderings (2019b).

Sociomaterial awareness in different forms shapes various practices that happen at the cookery school. Here I bring together my own verbalisation25_{of the practices I observed with} insights gained from conversations with teachers and volunteers to explain how this

sensitivity is at play in setting-up for a class.

24_{Driessen builds on Ingunn Moser’s (2011 in Driessen 2019b:3) work on “modes of ordering”, to shift the}

focus from the noun order, to the process of ordering. In my case, the set-up becomes setting-up.

25_{Some teachers said they found it hard to describe what they do when they plan and set up for a class so}

here, I take up Hirschauer’s (2006) call to put the silence of the social into words through ethnographic description of the practices I observed.

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As well as the daily tasks that are necessary for the classes to run, teachers carefully plan the preparation and laying out of the various ingredients and utensils with an awareness of how the initial moments can affect people’s experience of the session Carefully attending to “customer experience”26_{and getting “everything looking lovely [and so that class members]} can sort of see what they are making” and feel “welcomed straight away” does not only apply to the master classes where people are paying for the sessions but spans across all the classes. Teachers and volunteers who assist arrange objects in such a way that invites people to participate. A colourful or intriguing display of food or equipment may ignite hunger27_or

26_{As described by Operations Manager, during an interview, to explain how she likes “designing a pathway” of}

experience for classes and events.

27_{Jacob, a young chef, told me when he comes into a class he feels “hungry and ready to make some food”.}

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have other effects. This can be especially helpful for the first time arriving in a class. Nancy, who arrived at a Welcome Kitchen session, on discovering there was an apron provided for her and all the equipment ready to use, said in a surprised and energetic tone “oh wow, is this apron for me?... I wasn’t expecting this”. She was equally excited when provided with take away containers, and allowed to take the food home with her. This shows the

importance of the planning and placing of objects, such as food, aprons and chopping boards in enticing people to join in and create a place for each class member.

There are two main set-up formats which are significant in terms of how the cooking is organised and the sociomaterial interactions that take once the session is underway.

Independent-collective cooking

In this format each member makes their own version of the same dish alongside each other to eat together at the end and/or take home. Teachers demonstrate and/or instruct every step of the process to the whole class focusing the activity in these sessions around the step-by-step cooking process.

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As shown in Figure 13 a ‘station’ of ingredients is prepared (perhaps weighed-out, portioned, peeled or chopped and so on). However, the degree of set-up is tailored to each class, to make the cooking experience smooth and to focus the class time on the more enjoyable parts of the cooking, allowing the recipes to be interesting and varied and for class members to cook as many different things as possible28_.

Setting up in order to attend to specificity of the class can also involve ‘not doing’. For programmes working towards a BTEC29_{cookery skills qualification such as Cultivating Chefs,} one of the learning aims is to know the wider practices involved in “cooking and maintaining a kitchen”30_{. Throughout the course, the amount of preparation is gradually reduced, so that} the students learn where things are kept and “which tools to use”31_.

Communal Cooking

Cooking in these sessions is much less formulaic and loosely organised around the communal preparation for a meal eaten together at the end. The class begins with one, shared set of ingredients, often placed in the centre of the table, as shown in Figure 14 and equipment such as knives and chopping boards usually spread out across place settings. Preliminary tasks such as chopping are carried out communally. For groups where it is common for members to turn up after the class has officially started, this format provides flexibility so that people can arrive and join in at any point in the cooking.

28_{Three volunteers all separately expressed that they were continually surprised by how much is achieved in}

each class- sometimes two or three different dishes in the space of two and a half hours – and were very impressed by the organisation that goes into making this possible.

29_{Business and Technology Education Council qualification}

30_{This also applies to the BTEC sessions for young teenagers from a specialist dyslexic school and a group from}

a pupil referral unit (for those outside of mainstream school and often in the care system). Teachers explained that gradually ‘not doing’ the set up contributes towards teaching “life skills” which they can use to care for themselves or others later on.

31_{Learning the way around the kitchen is part of the learning in each session. The importance will become}

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Setting up for ‘outreach classes’ various locations around the city32_{additionally requires the} transportation of equipment, usually in crates in the teacher’s car (and on one occasion when a car broke down, a last-minute plan B was devised around what could fit into two bike paniers). Resourcefulness and imagination are key in negotiating different local spaces, with a mixture of items in-situ, items brought33_{and unavailable items. Furthermore, these} spaces are much less user-friendly and present different, and often unexpected, set of practical concerns34_.

The set-up of the room works to create a place for each class member and entice

participation. In what follow I will trace how the invitation to cook is brought into motion by the teachers, volunteers and food together.

32_{Sometimes these settings are other kitchens and sometimes other-use spaces that are transformed into a}

kitchen, using tables and portable electric induction hobs, and when without power sockets - gas camping stoves.

33_{Some heavy equipment is semi-permanently left at these different sites to avoid having lugging it back and}

forth every week. On a few occasions I overheard teachers trying to track down various utensils/ equipment that has been spread over the city. Considerable coordination is required to ensure teachers have everything required for a class off-site and to avoid taking an item needed back at the cookery school kitchen.

34_{Examples of these include: spaces being used by other projects and having people walking in and out}

throughout classes, work surfaces being low, or not best suited for cooking.

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1. Teaching people to cook from scratch

During my fieldwork I quickly realised how much I would need to learn in order to step into the shoes of a cookery teacher:

[I]t’s such a big mix, you need to be able to take into account you know, it is safe for them to use a knife, through to is everybody able to join in, through to how is the group working together, through to people's support workers and people’s circumstances at home, their ability to take in information and follow instructions. So, I think there’s a big cross-section of things which include social factors, actual cooking factors, educational factors, and, planning to ensure that the session works to time so that they've all got something edible to take home at the end of it, on that button!35

Teaching people to cook in this setting involves caring about specific circumstances in people’s lives. In this chapter I will delineate the practice of teaching, tracing the role of language and the ways in which bodies are invited to participate in, and attended to during, the cooking processes. It uses a material semiotic lens to open up how class members come to know food through cooking (as well as other food practices outlined above, growing, composting, eating) and how they are encouraged to care about food and care about how it is done. Words associated with care are often used in explaining cooking practices, such as looking after something cooking in a pan so it does not burn or overcook or carefully separating an egg, being extra delicate so the yolk does not break. In teaching people to cook, words are entwined with the other non-verbal elements of the practice. This chapter will explore various, interwoven elements of the practice of cooking (Reckwitz 2002:249) and how these are drawn upon and accentuated in this setting.

35_{Part of answer to interview question: If I had to take over your role tomorrow what advice would you give}

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Cooking as a practice: How to finely dice an onion

The teacher holds an onion on a chopping board, forming a ‘bridge’ between his thumb and fingers to steady the onion and create space for the knife to cut. He points the knife, tip first, into the onion and cuts down the middle lengthways. He then, flat-side down, slices off the top of one half, then peels the orangey-brown, papery outer layer off backwards, explaining that you peel the outer layers to ensure only “the soft layers are left and remove all the fibrous parts”. He then places the onion back on the board and cuts horizontally, half way up the onion, “towards the rooty bit” and then holding the rooty bit starts slicing groves into the onion, “stopping at the rooty bit” about 5mm apart and then slicing thin strips the opposite way “so you get small rectangles”. Everybody watches closely before having a go themselves. The class is quiet with concentration. The

teachers go around the room giving further advice or adjusting someone’s way of holding their onion or their knife or to demonstrate again on the person’s

chopping board up close. One woman has tears streaming down her face from the onions’ aroma.

This fieldnote extract illustrates that both the teacher’s explanation and the demonstration of the technique are crucial to teaching people how to finely dice an onion. The teacher’s use of language is intertwined with the actions (here actions extends to class members trying out the technique as well as the teachers making adjustments) together, drawing attention to the material qualities of the onion, including texture, aesthetics and geometry. While being cut, the onion brings attention to its chemical composition through the stinging and watering of the eyes of one class member36_.

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Returning to the onions, now finely diced:

“You always cook the onions first because they take the longest to cook and you want them to be really soft.” The teacher drops a handful of the diced onions into each saucepan, each making a sizzling sound when they land in the oil, “You need to cook them slowly so they don’t burn and keep them moving”. The class

members proceed to push the onions around the pans with wooden spoons. The room is filled with the sweet smell37_{of the onions as they cook. A few moments}

later the teacher adds, “Once the onions have sweated down, then you add more or less the less equal volume of carrot, celery.”[…] “No one does this bit long enough when they are cooking”…. “You need to sweat down the veg so you get that sweetness and the harmony of textures”.

Here, further elements of the cooking process must be attended to, the speed of cooking, how the onion might react to the heat of the pan: sweating but not burning and the volume of ingredients being added. Together, finely dicing as a specific way to cut and this technique of cooking the onions, are linked to the desired result: the sweetness and the harmony of textures. The moment when the food is eaten matters to the cooking process.

37_{Here I try to engage in sensuous scholarship (Stoller 1997) but myself find it difficult to divide up the senses}

of smell and taste and even the sounds in my descriptions pointing again to the artificiality of divisions between these sensations (Mann et al 2011).

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Preparing food care-fully is important: cooking from scratch can be tasty, healthy and cheap.

The teaching approach highlights the involvement of material things, notably foods, in the various cooking processes, not simply as objects but as actors in a web of relations

(Abrahamsson et al 2015); foods are articulated as materialities-in-practice38_{. For example,} “the [egg] yolk will make the pastry waterproof on the inside and the [egg] white will make it shiny on the outside” or “the salt acts like sand paper, and mashes garlic”. These

explanations echo the call from Science and Technologies Studies’ scholars to attend to materialities as part of the doing, the mashing or the making shiny or making waterproof, that is distributed, between both human and non-human actors in practices (Abrahamsson et al 2015). Cooking from scratch both requires and entails getting to know different ingredients and different elements of those ingredients, for example gluten in bread dough: “keep going until the texture becomes more elastic, you are working the gluten in the bread”. While the science may be relevant, or not39_{what is significant here, is that the} teacher guides the class member to simultaneously understand and feel the process of kneading the bread. The taken-for-granted-ness of “bread” is replaced by knowing the process of transformation from ingredients to dough to bread. Teachers also explain what other material things do to the food. For example, the following guidance given to a class member stirring a bechamel sauce40_{: “it has to be constant so it doesn’t catch”, followed} by: “it’s good to use a wooden spoon, metal on metal would rub and then wear away,

38_{Latour (2004), in his case, explains how the articulation of odours “does something to the odours}

themselves” therefore letting go of the idea of “primary qualities” and secondary perception of the latter. He

terms what is articulated as propositions. Through the process of articulation the world is made, not just labelled. I take from this that foods, in my context, become known through the processes by which they are cooked, or interacted with.

39_{One teacher explained that the level of detail in any explanation of a cooking process should depend what}

people can, and want to, connect with and what is relevant to the experience of the class member. This is something that teachers gauge and tailor with each class and sometimes with each individual.

40_{A ‘white’ sauce made with butter, milk and flour which has to be continually stirred so it mixes without}

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causing the taste of the sauce to be metallic.” The tools, spoon and the pan, and how they are used, can also affect the cooking process. Other practices such as washing up, also become relevant, for example, “glass [bowls] are better” for whisking egg whites “the plastic bowls are never completely clean when you wash them up, and we don’t want any protein contaminating41_{our egg whites”. Similarly, “the heat” and “the humidity of the} room” which “may dry [the dough] out faster” or “make it stick to the table”. In these explanations the doing within the cooking process is distributed across several things, (actors) as well as, and sometimes less so42_{, the human actor. I have lifted these parts of} speech from the context of the class where they would be entangled with demonstrations, observations and various bodily engagements. They indicate how language is part of drawing attention to food as materialities-in-practice. I will now turn to look more closely at what language does in this setting.

“Splammy” and other technical terms

Teachers sometimes use culinary terms, such as slicing, dicing, sweating, kneading or they explain what is happening and/or demonstrate the technique. Dicing stands in for and evokes a culinary technique. It can only be understood as part of, and participates in (Mol 2014), the practice of the teacher or the class member dicing onions.

In the following example the class members are asked to carry out rubbing-in, the mixing together of flour and butter by rubbing together between the finger tips and thumb. The teacher then describes the next step and realises there is no word for the technique she is demonstrating:

41_{Protein prevents the egg whites from whisking and forming foam that will be cooked for meringues.} 42_{Sometimes non-human actors can be more unruly and not behave as intended. A teacher explained to a}

student whose pastry was both breaking off and sticking to the table: “yes this [pastry] is hard to work with, as it is getting very soft very quickly as it’s warm. I didn’t know that the pastry would behave so badly”.

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The teacher advises them to “use a knife instead of your hands for the rubbing-in technique, as it’s such a warm day the butter is gorubbing-ing to melt faster and it will be harder to rub it in before it gets sticky”. Next, they all add milk to their bowls and some become too sticky (to work with) so the teacher goes around adding flour to each of their mixtures. The teacher then takes over one class member’s bowl to demonstrate how to pull the dough mixture together to form a ball before she tips it out onto a baking tray. She then pats down the ball of dough into a circular shape but with vertical sides, “you want it be splammy, which is a technical term obviously” to which everyone laughs.

The made-up word “splammy” participates in teaching the class members what to do, in articulating both the action flattening the dough and its malleable texture. This emphasises the evocative role of words within cooking practices, yet “splammy” only makes sense in relation to the bodily doing it is entwined with; “flesh and talk, jointly participate in practice” (Mol 2014:100).

Although words play a part in teaching people to cook, what is being articulated cannot be reduced to words, or even ‘things’ (named in words) (Latour 2004:212). So instead of

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answering the question of what, my analysis will focus on the effects of articulation as a process and what happens when class members participate in cooking activities. In an interview with Steve from Cooking in Company, he explained that he enjoys the cooking but:

If [the teacher] gives me two things to do on a stove, you know you got a frying pan and a sauce pan, I done it, I must admit I done it but blimey oh riley oh riley… It’s like pooohhh watching me egg go while it’s like rererere… It’s a bit challenging.

Here Steve uses spoken language, or in this case sounds, in order to capture the goings on. Some things are difficult to fully put into words. What Steve wants to explain is situated and embodied, which Hirschauer would include as part of the pre-lingual, one kind of “resistance to verbalisation” (2006:431). Almost as onomatopoeia, pooohhh and rererere participate together with Steve’s gestures, moving both his hands, and facial expression as he conveys what it feels like to look after two separate pans on a stove simultaneously. He articulated this well; I knew exactly what he meant and related it to my own experience of a similar situation.

Articulation is about being understood, but it is also about knowing and relating to, and through, food: what people “say, feel and act” (Latour 2004:210).

One of the greatest challenges, or put it this way, one of the wonderful things that can happen, is when people begin to learn how to articulate what they think about what they are doing when they are cooking or eating. Beyond I like it or I don’t like it. Because it’s about something else that’s going on for them as well, a sort of language.

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When people learn how to cook, they are learning to be affected by (ever) more, layered elements, or differences in texture, smell, taste, appearance and so on, that make up cooking (and eating). I argue that this “sort of”, but more-than language, is what shapes alternative ways of relating to food (and also people).

Bodily engagements matter

How then to talk about the bodies that are being evoked in language, choreographed in demonstrations and for example, fingers melting butter while rubbing in. The bodies that are involved in learning to cook, drawing on another intervention from the social studies of science, are not natural or singular, but multiple and both produced by and part of practices (Mol 2002). As the examples above demonstrate, sensory engagements are part of cooking practices and also how bodies are invited to participate in cooking. These kinds of bodily interactions with food can be unfamiliar for some of the class members. Polly and her sister Molly, both suffer from severe social anxiety and at ages 26 and 29 had never had the opportunity to cook or use the kitchen in their home due to a complex domestic abuse scenario. Polly described their experience of cooking in this setting, particularly:

the tactile-ness of it, my counsellor had said something about how I haven’t had many like sensory experiences, so like touch and smell, taste and stuff, so like actually doing this stuff, I can experience more towards that, so like touching all these ingredients and can smell these things and taste all these things, you know, which I've never done before.

Polly’s reflection points to the powerful effects of learning to attend to, and to be affected by, the material dimensions of food in practice, such as texture, smell and taste, and this reflection is relevant both inside and outside the cookery school.

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Teachers attend to the “fleshy, situatedness” (Mol & Law 2004:47) of class members’ bodies in various ways. They select dishes that will engage

people “on a sensory level”43_{and explain how ingredients} might feel on hands: oily, sticky or hot. As the class members touch and experience these things, again the materiality of words comes into play. Smelling bodies are also articulated as teachers pass round ingredients such as spices or herbs, asking class members to smell them and guess what they are or to decide if they would like to add the ingredient in the dish that

they are cooking. The practice of smelling can do some of the work for the teacher. Mel asks the teacher what she should do. The teacher hands her a vegetable and asks her to chop it finely. “Is that cabbage”? Mel asks, “No”, he replied, “smell It”, and holds it towards her, “oh it’s fennel!”.

Mel knowing fennel in this moment partly takes place through smelling.

Teachers also use tasting as a tool to teach people to cook. When cooking onions, taste: the sweetness, is attended to in moments before food is being eaten and through explaining how doing different things to the onions will affect the taste44_{. Language, actions,} interactions with materialities and bodily sensations are all entwined in the process of cultivating a “tasting body” (Mol 2011:277). Teachers also ask class members to taste the dishes as they cook. They are also tasting the dishes when they eat at the end of the class. The practices of cooking and eating are joined up through taste. Production and

43_{Part of different teacher’s response to “If I had to take over your role tomorrow what advice would you give}

me?”

44_{As Mann et al argue, tasting is not just happening in the moment food touches the tongue but is “fluidly}

spread out in time” (2011:238-9). At the cookery school tasting is happening through trying the food as people cook, but also through talking about taste and through other practices, in the cooking, smelling, watching, even the mixing.

Caring for and about cooking from scratch : ethnographic explorations of a community cookery school