Making Dinner: How American Home Cooks Produce and Make Meaning Out of the Evening Meal

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With a vast selection of foods and thousands of recipes to choose from, how do home cooks in America decide what to cook and what does their cooking mean to them Answering this question, Making Dinner is an empirical study of home cooking in the United States. Drawing on a combination of research methods, which includes in-depth interviews with over 50 cooks and cooking journals documenting over 300 home-cooked dinners, Roblyn Rawlins and David Livert explore how American home cooks think and feel about themselves, food, and cooking. Their findings reveal distinct types of cookthe family-first cook, the traditional cook, and the keen cook and demonstrate how personal identities, family relationships, ideologies of gender and parenthood, and structural constraints all influence what ends up on the plate. Rawlins and Livert reveal research that fills the data gap on practices of home cooking in everyday life. This is an important contribution to fields such as food studies, health and nutrition, sociology, social psychology, anthropology, gender studies, and American studies.

Reviews

The aim of the study is to identify the multiple factors that home cooks consider with regard to food preparation, including emotional, social, and resource perspectives. The authors argue that in addition to the shortage of time available to most home cooks, much of meal selection is tied to the identity of the cook and the intended goal of preparing the meal, beyond providing dinner. The authors also point out that home cooking isnt as uncommon as popularly portrayed in contemporary media, because such media tend to focus exclusively on the cooking act, ignoring the choices that cooks make surrounding meals. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. Students in two-year technical programs. * CHOICE *
This topic is relevant and understudied, and the authors address it here with an accessible writing style. * Shelley Koch, Emory and Henry College, USA *
Very little has been written about what people actually do with food rather than the discourses and myths that surround cooking or the family meal. This book overcomes this with empirical research on home cooking combined with academic analysis and with reference to the relevant literature. A very well written and convincing book. * Wendy Wills, University of Hertfordshire, UK *
Adding to the unduly sparse literature on meals, this book valuably presents further evidence that eating out is not eclipsing eating at home and that cooking skills are not being lost, simply changing. * Anne Murcott, SOAS, University of London, UK *

Author Bio

Roblyn Rawlins is Professor of Sociology at The College of New Rochelle, USA. David Livert is Associate Professor of Psychology at Pennsylvania State University, Lehigh Valley, USA.