Engagements in situationally appropriate home cooking

Abstract

The article analyses engagements in home cooking from a practice theoretical perspective. The focus on engagements reveals what people regard as worthy of doing and as appropriate cooking performances in specific everyday situations. For producing a more nuanced account of situationally appropriate cooking, the theoretical perspective is complemented by Thévenot’s regimes–familiarity, planning and justification. The data consist of videos and video-stimulated recall (SR) interviews: five Finnish families with children video-recorded their dinner-cooking for one week using wearable cameras and described their performances in the SR interviews. We applied an abductive theory-based and data-driven analysis. The results show that the regime of familiarity sustains cooking performances and that the regime of justification addresses negotiations of common good. However, the regime of planning appeared to be the most crucial: through flexible planning, the participants strived for a balance between maintaining familiarity and negotiating justification to achieve satisfaction. Planning was enacted in different time spans: in action, tentatively and anticipatorily. The variations of planning may offer new insights into promoting changes in families’ food practices. Overall, we suggest that an analysis of engagements by this method combination enables understanding of how families navigate through everyday life to perform situationally appropriate cooking.