1. Cooking Solo Off-Campus Culinary Independence and Identity
By: Liam Harley
Recipes for Personhood
Cooking Solo
Building off of work by David Sutton that identified the ways that cultural traditions are created and maintained through intergenerational cooking experiences, I sought out to explore how cooking knowledge is gained without the advice of others, especially one’s parents. I started studying my friend Sarunas’ cooking habits after he moved off-campus and began cooking for himself. My research evolved to answer the deeper question: How does Sarunas form and perform his identity while he cooks by and for himself?
Although Sarunas is cooking by and for himself, he does not cook independently. Sarunas draws from a variety of resources that influence what and how he cooks. Below is a “recipe” that resembles the thought process that Sarunas follows during the cooking process.
Ingredients (Resources Useful for Sarunas)
Memory
Web Recipes
Advice from Friends
Green Discourses
Health/Nutrition Information
Cooking Skills/Available Kitchen Tools
Food Cost
Choose a recipe: When choosing a recipe, Sarunas might make stewed chili because it’s a specialty of his father’s and reminds him of home. Sarunas might make a quiche with assorted vegetables because it is healthy. Sarunas also scours the internet looking for recipes that intrigue him but he first has to check if the recipe is easy enough for him to do (after all, Sarunas considers himself to be a novice.)
Go Shopping: Sarunas usually shops at Uncle Dean’s Groceries, a nearby grocery stores that specializes in organic, locally sourced produce and prepared foods. Sarunas checks labels to make sure that his ingredients are both “healthy” and “sustainable” by his standards. Although these ingredients can be twice as expensive, Sarunas considers the extra money he spends to be worth it. He says that we aren’t really cutting costs by cheaping out at the grocery store. “We pay for it in other ways.”
Cook the meal: Although Sarunas always pulls up a recipe to use from the internet, he deviates heavily from the recipe’s directions and ingredients. This deviation is active: Sarunas likes to add or subtract ingredients that he likes and believes won’t alter the recipe very much. These deviations are often based off of his memories (adding more spice because that’s how his dad made chili), advice from friends (replace butter with coconut oil in pie dough for a vegan dough), or user comments from online (substitute kale for spinach in his veggie quiche). Although the recipe is there as a reference for Sarunas, he relies more heavily on his preferences, memories, and advice.
Cooking and Identity
When Sarunas deviates from the recipe, he is not only experimenting with the food but formulating his identity as an independent adult. By cooking beef chili, Sarunas connects himself to his family in Lithuania, putting his preference for vegetarian food aside for the maintenance of his father’s recipe. Sarunas cooks with local, sustainable ingredients because he considers himself to be an eco-conscious individual who prioritizes environmental costs over financial ones. As Sarunas deviates further and further from the recipes, he claims ownership of the dish as an expression of himself and his learned cooking skills.
This type of identity formation is significant for anthropology as a discipline because it demonstrates how identity is formed and performed during an everyday process like cooking. The study not only demonstrates how Sarunas configures a meal from a variety of available resources without the guidance of an expert, but also demonstrates how Sarunas can gain a better understanding of himself during the process of cooking. Like all of us, Sarunas is a social person who lives on his own but not isolated from discourses about food, nutrition, and the environment. These discourses shape the food Sarunas cooks as well as the type of person Sarunas makes and remakes himself to be.
Research Methods
I worked with Sarunas first because our friendship gives me access and immediate trust in the ethnographer/interlocutor relationship, and second because Sarunas only recently moved off-campus and has begun to cook meals for himself. To conduct my research, I primarily used participant observation: I accompanied Sarunas as he went shopping, chose recipes for a meal, cooked for himself, and ate his food. Throughout the process, I asked questions about why he chose certain ingredients or recipes, what he thought about while he cooked, or how he thinks the cooking is going. I took notes in his kitchen while he cooked, analyzed my notes to find patterns, and finally applied my findings to see how Sarunas is formulating and performing his identity while he cooks.
Bibliography
Sutton, David.  2014.  Secrets from the Greek Kitchen: Cooking, Skill, and Everyday Life on an Aegean Island.  Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.  
Liam Harley –
Anthropology of Food (AY464)