Cooking as Inquiry: A Method to Stir Up Prevailing Ways of Knowing Food, Body, and Identity

Abstract

The paper develops a method of research called 'cooking as inquiry.' This method seeks to add layers to the typically disembodied practices of social research that have long overlooked the body and the mundane rituals of foodmaking as sites of knowledge. Informed by autoethnography and collective biography, cooking as inquiry recognizes bodies and food as sites of knowledge and engages researchers as researcher-participants in reflexive, collaborative study that explores the ways in which the embodied self is performed relationally through foodmaking. In addition to a discussion of the epistemological and methodological frames of this method, this paper offers a case study that describes a project conducted by a colleague and the author.

You Are What You Eat: Exploring a Chinese-Jamaican Foodway

“…I have documented my experience using Google documents and photographs as data to reflect on my own cross-cultural identity. Similar to Brady's (2011) study using cooking as inquiry, I placed the following guiding principles into the Google document to support my reflexive process:…”

“…I recognized that this was a different cooking adventure than my grandmother's, enabling me to outline where our perspectives differ in cooking and eating Jamaican food. This research used cooking as a method of inquiry (Brady, 2011) to learn about my intersectional identity living in Ontario, Canada as a second-generation Chinese-Jamaican and Ashkenazi Jewish woman. Reflecting on my own lived experience through cooking, I strived to self-define my individual Chinese-Jamaican diaspora in Canada.…”

Food in contemporary migration experiences between Britain and Australia: A duoethnographic exploration

“…However, the contributions of Antoniou (2004), Brady (2011), Karanth (2014, and Andreatta (2015) offer a helpful starting point in considering the potential of autoethnographic methods in food studies. Antoniou (2004) explores the relationship between her Cypriot identity, gender, sexuality, and foodusing an autoethnographic method that combines recipes, transcripts of her oral commentary in the kitchen as she cooks, and reflections linking her cooking and commentary to the (feminist) research literature on ethnic identity and marginalization in contemporary Britain.…”

“…Her focus on issues of national/ethnic identity, ideas of home and belonging, and memories and embodied experiences of food parallel our own concerns in this paper. Brady (2011) builds on Antoniou's work (among others) and presents cooking as a collaborative, autoethnographic method of inquiry. As a dietitian interested in exploring the connections between food, power, and discourse in her field, Brady presents a tangible "recipe" for how to "generate collaborative, introspective narratives that bring to light the process by which our embodied selves are relationally performed, or 'made social,' through foodmaking" (325).…”

Elements of practice in the analysis of auto-ethnographical cooking videos

“…Auto-ethnographical studies have been interested in forms of embodied routines and tacit knowledge (e.g. Brady, 2011; Groth, 2017; Larsen, 2014). By watching and making field notes about one’s own performance, the researcher may be able to identify his or her embodied and normative routines and recall the motives, emotions and tacit knowledge related to the recorded cooking sessions.…”