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Food, consumption, and why cooking matters

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Cargill, K. (2011). Food, consumption, and the psychology of cooking. I n S. Stewart & S. Korol
(Eds.), Food for Thought. Cape Breton: University of Cape Breton Press

Food, Consumption, and the Psychology of Cooking

Kima Cargill, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, Psychology
University of Washington, Tacoma
Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences
Box 358436
1900 Commerce Street
Tacoma, WA 98402
(253) 692-4544
kcargill@u.washington.edu

Introduction regulation. A person is overweight or obese

The obesity problem that began around
1980 in the United States has grown into a
worldwide epidemic which some researchers
are calling "Globesity" (Delpeuch, 2009). In
2000, the World Health Organization
estimated that there were over 300 million
obese individuals worldw ide and over a
billion people overweight. (Delpeuch, 2009, p.
6). The most recent research shows that
obesity is no longer a problem of the United
States or even the developed world. There are
now high rates of obesity across the planet,
with the exception of sub-Saharan Africa.
Sadly, hunger co-exists in many of the same
places in which obesity thrives. While this
chapter does not focus on the problem of
hunger, it is nevertheless noteworthy to point
out that the same forces of global wealth and
public policy that allow for excessive
consumption by some, are the same forces at
work in hunger for others.
There have been two dominant
paradigms used to understand the obesity
phenomenon: The first, which is the
prevailing paradigm of psychology, examines
individual behavior, personal dietary choices,
and biochemistry in eating and weight
either because they haven't made good choices
and/ or because of biochemical regulation.
This paradigm views the individual as the unit
of study and the responsible party in
overeating. The second paradigm is the
sociological/economic which examines the
broader forces responsible for global obesity.
This approach examines advertising, fast food,
and globalization as forces of dietary change.
So, essentially there are macro and
micro level approaches that are quite present
in mainstream news media and the academic
literature. Somewhere between these two
poles of the individual-personal and the
social-economic is an interface of the human
condition and community. Situating obesity
and consumption at this nexus, as a means for
understanding the forces at work in these
problems, involves an interdisciplinary gaze
that must also include philosophy and
evolution in the analysis.
What I aim to do is to speak from this
nexus and synthesize many of the ideas out
there about food and obesity, but with a
specific focus on cooking, its decline, and that
decline's insidious effect on both our psyches
and the social fabric.

I. The Empty Self
How we experience ourselves in this
day and time is essential to understanding
what makes us vulnerable to obesity and
overeating. As Westerners we have what is a
historically unprecedented notion of
ourselves. "During the beginnings of the
modern era in the 16'" Century, the Western
world began to shift from a religious to a
scientific frame of production, from a rural to
an urban setting, and from a communal to an
individual subject" (Cushman, 1990, p. 600).
In other words, we' ve come to view ourselves
as self-contained and highly individualized
beings, characterized by free will and mastery
over the environment, rather than a small
part of a collective entity with perhaps a
predetermined destiny. It's difficult for us to
see that our notion of ourselves of what it
means to be human is very culturally and
historically specific. It feelsas though people
must have always thought of themselves as
having free will, as being highly
individualized and unique, but this is a
relatively new development in the course of
human history.
Even more recently, "During the
course of the 20"" Century....Americans have
slowly changed from a Victorian people who
had a deeply felt need to save money and
restrict their sexual and aggressive
impulses....to a people who have a deeply felt
need to spend money and indulge their
impulses. (Cushman, 1990, p. 600). Spending
money and indulging impulses are two
essential ingredients in the recipe for obesity.
In other words, prosperity and the culture of
consumption arenecessary correlates for
widespread obesity.
Another ingredient in the recipe is a
sense of lack. Consumption of any sort must
fill a deficit, or a perceived deficit. In Why The
Self Is Empty, psychologist Philip Cushman
argues that the in the post-World War II era of
t he United States the self is empty. H e
believes, "Our terrain has shaped a self that
experiences a significant absence of
community, tradition, and shared meaning. It
experiences social absences and their
consequences "interiorly" as a lack of personal
conviction and worth, and it embodies the
absences as a chronic, undifferentiated
emotional hunger. The post-World War II self
thus yearns to acquire and consume as an
unconscious way of compensating for what
has been lost: It is empty." (Cushman, 1990, p.
600). Note that this cultural ill a loss of
community or shared meaning is something
that we experience as an individual deficiency.
Food, of course is only one of many
commodities that can be used to fill the empty
self. While Cushman presumably refers to
"hunger" in it's metaphorical sense, here I
examine hunger in its most literal sense. For
surely examining hunger quite literally will
bring us back around to the symbolic meaning
of hunger and its attendant psychological
emptiness. In fact, I would argue that the
notion of hunger is by nature a circular one, in
that cultural hunger shapes and influences
individual or bodily hunger, and in turn,
individuals' attempts to sate bodily hunger are
representative of the attempts to sate deeper,
existential hungers.
Much like the pharmaceutical industry
locates psychological illness within the
individual, the diet and food industries locate
obesity within the individual. Both
approaches serve to increaseaggregate
consumption (of pills, diet books and products,
and of food). Locating psychological illness,
such as depression and anxiety within the
culture, as an expression of collective distress;
as well as locating obesity within the culture,
would serve to decreaseaggregate consumption
as a solution. The empty self is thus embedded
in a capitalist, consumer-driven society in
which industriousness and its bedfellow,
consumption, are both highly valued.
Industriousness and consumption specifically
make us vulnerable to two important
phenomena which are salient determinants of
obesity: 1) the desire to stretch our spending
capital in order to buy luxury goods and 2)
the notion that we have little time.
We should also note that the post-
World War II Empty Self coincides with an
important benchmark in food technology. It
was just after World War II that the food
industry began developing and heavily
marketing convenience foods. In 1954,
Swanson TV Dinners fulfilled two post-war
trends: the lure of time-saving modern
appliances and the fascination with a growing
innovation, the television. More than 10
million TV dinners were sold during the first
year of Swanson's national distribution.
Looking at TV dinners and then later fast
food, it is clear that food habits reflected a
changing sense of self that prioritized
mobility, efficiency, and increased
individualism. As these culinary changes
reflected cultural and economic changes, they
also became antecedents for further distance
from food sources, depersonalization of food
preparation, and ultimately increased
consumption and obesity. That, combined
with the aforementioned drive toward
increased productivity and industriousness
brings us to the present.
II. Industriousness and Consumption
The current economic recession not
withstanding, we are in the grip of what
economist Robert Frank refers to as "luxury
fever", that is, an uninterrupted rise in the
past three decades in luxury consumption,
independent of inflation and economic
recession (Frank, 1999). In previous economic
booms, such excesses were associated with
only the superrich. Today, however; luxury,
by global standards, is more accessible than
ever to a large proportion of those in
developed nations. M o r e and more, even
working and lower-middle class families are
able to afford the ownership of a private car,
cable television, and designer clothing items
that are now thought of as basic by many.
While consumption patterns in middle and
lower income earners have, to a certain extent,
mirrored consumption increases by the
wealthy, the difference is that median earners'
incomes have decreased, in real dollars, since
1979, thus luxury spending is largely
maintained in working and middle class
families through decreased savings, increased
credit card debt, and most importantly,
increased hours at work.
In spite of this increased spending by
working and middle class families, spending
on quality food is not commensurate with the
spending rises in other areas. In fact, the
proportion of disposable income spent on food
has steadily been decreasing from
approximately 25% of total income in the
1930's to less than 9% currently (Meade &
Rosen, 1996). USDA data show that of 51
countries worldwide, the US spends the
smallest share on food prepared and eaten in
the home. It is generally true that the richer a
country, the smaller the proportion of personal
income its citizens spend on food; however,
citizens of other high income countries, such as
Switzerland, Japan, Norway, and Spain, spend
nearly twice the percentage of personal income
than Americans on food.
Not only are we spending less on food
and more on luxury goods, but the
composition of food purchased has changed
dramatically over the past two decades. Data
from the same USDA study show that per
capita availability of caloric sweeteners and
fats increased in the U.S. by 20% between 1977
and 1997 (Meade & Rosen, 1996). Thus, it's fair
to say that, with the exception of poorer
families who spend a higher proportion of
total income on food, working, middle, and
upper class Americans spend less of their
overall money on food than before, and nearly
all Americans have a diet that is characterized
by more unhealthy foods, such as potato chips,
sodas, and sweets.
Rises in income capital have been
associated with more frequent dining out -
America's favorite pastime. In fact, the
proportion of total food expenditures spent on
food-away-from-home increased from 34% in
1972 to 49% in 2006(Linn, 1999; Stewart,
Blisard, & Jolliffe, 2006). Eating at restaurants
has become one of the most frequent luxury
behaviors and for many takes places in
restaurants with food that is served in large
portion sizes, has been trucked long distances,
and is therefore loaded with preservatives,
fat, and salt to retain flavor and preserve food.
Many studies to date have conclusively
shown that healthier foods, such as fruits,
vegetables, fish, and whole grains cost more
(Drewnowski & Specter, 2004). Yet most
people, irrespective of income, aren't buying
these foods. While it's true that middle and
upper class Americans do buy more "healthy"
foods than do lower income groups, the fact
remains that even those with more spending
capital use a great deal of their money for less
expensive junk foods and convenience foods.
III. Time
The effects of modernization and
industrialization have resulted in powerful
social, economic, and political forces which
push people toward repeated harmful food
choices. Prevalent American attitudes
surrounding both time and money are
powerful components of the equation that
results in unhealthful, inauthentic
convenience foods. In his essay on American
cuisine, anthropologist Sidney Mintz argues
that Americans do not, and likely will not,
have a cuisine of our own, in the traditional
sense of the term, largely because of our
notion of time (Mintz, 1996). Mintz argues
that Americans are repeatedly told (and
strongly believe) that they are so busy that
they have little or no time to spare. In turn,
this serves to increase aggregate consumption
with the astonishing variety of time-saving
products and foods. "Most convenience food
is successful because of prior conceptions
about time. But most such food would not
succeed if Americans cared more about how
and what they ate." Many people believe that
they are "too busy" to grocery shop or
prepare meals at home. Buffets, "express"
restaurants, and of course fast food
restaurants, all respond to and sustain the
myth that there is no time.
Researchers in 2008 surveyed people
who ate at fast food restaurants and found that
92% said it's because the restaurants are quick,
53% said they were too busy to cook, and 44%
said that they did not like to prepare foods for
themselves. By contrast, 67% of respondents
strongly disagreed that eating at fast food
restaurants was a way to socialize with friends
and family and 79% disagreed that the
restaurants had nutritious foods to offer.
(Rydell, Harnack, Oakes, et al, 2008). Such
responses reveal the common thinking that
there is no time, and moreover, that the lack of
time is consciously "paid for" by less
socializing with friends and family and eating
less nutritious food.
Yet there is time. If people were too
busy to go to the movies we would not have
multi-million dollar blockbusters. If people
were too busy to watch television, advertisers
wouldn't invest in expensive commercials. If
people were too busy to go to sports events,
players wouldn't make millions of dollars per
season. Somehow in all the busyness,
Americans find the time to watch four hours of
television per day and spend millions of
dollars on luxury goods per year. But
somehow, somewhere along the way, we came
to believe that we were too busy to invest time
in what we eat.
So, increased consumption as well
notions about our lack of time have conspired
to keep us out of the kitchen. Today the
average American spends only 27 minutes a
day on food preparation (Pollan, 2009, p.3),
which is one of the major culprits in the obesity
epidemic. Harvard economist and Obama
Health Adviser David Cutler and his
colleagues found "that when we don't have to
cook meals, we eat more of them: as the
amount of time Americans spend cooking has
dropped by about half, the number of meals
Americans eat in a day has climbed; since 1977,
we' ve added approximately half a meal to our

daily intake.
Cutler and his colleagues also surveyed
cooking patterns across several cultures and
found that obesity rates are inversely
correlated with the amount of time spent on
food preparation. The more time a nation
devotes to food preparation at home, the
lower its rate of obesity." (Pollan, 2009, p. 7)
This is somewhat counterintuitive, as it would
seem that more time in the kitchen might
equal a higher caloric intake. Certainly,
spending more time in the kitchen is no
talisman against overweight or obesity;
however, home-cooked food seems to
somehow mediate caloric intake, not just on
the part of the cook, but on those eating as
well. Overweight and obesity, then, are not
simply a pure function of food intake, but of
who makes the food, and where.
IV. The Cooking Hypothesis
Indeed, there is mounting evidence
that what separates humans from other
animals is not language, not culture, but
cooking. In his recent book Catching Fire: Hour
Cooking Made Us Human (2009) primatologist
Richard Wrangham argues that cooking food,
which began probably about 500,000 years
ago is what originally separated humans from
apes and from our non-human ancestors. Our
ancestors discovered that the control of fire
could be used to cook food which offered
crucial biological advantages, such as
maximizing energy, impeding food spoilage,
and improving overall food safety. "Cooked
food does many familiar things," he observes.
"It makes our food safer, creates rich and
delicious tastes and reduces spoilage. Heating
can allow us to open, cut or mash tough
foods. But none of these advantages is as
important as a little-appreciated aspect:
cooking increases the amount of energy our
bodies obtain from food" (p.13). Quite
simply, the energy the body must expend to
consume and digest raw food is significantly
more than what it expends when the same
5
food is cooked. The energy of the heat used for
cooking effectively pre-digests food, allowing
the body to preserve more of its energy,
allowing for a net gain in calories a crucial
biological advantage when food was scarce.
He continues: "The extra energy gave
the first cooks biological advantages. They
survived and reproduced better than before.
Their genes spread. Their bodies responded by
biologically adapting to cooked food, shaped
by natural selection to take maximum
advantage of the new diet" (p.14) In other
words, Wrangham argues that cooking food
made digestion easier and so the human gut
could grow smaller compared to other non-
human primates. The enormous energy
previously spent on digestion then allowed the
human brain to grow larger.
Incidentally, Wrangham does not
advocate a raw food diet as a means of weight
loss, although the reduced net caloric intake of
raw food might suggest this as viable diet
strategy. Research has shown, however; that
not only do raw foodists experience chronic
hunger, but suffer from as much as 50% lower
fertility rates (Wrangham, 2009, p. 20), which is
further support for the idea that the switch to
cooked food was an evolutionary turning point
that led to reproductive fitness.
The advantages to cooking food were
not just biological. The social changes to
human life were revolutionary. Gathering
around a fire required socializing, calmed the
human temperament, and fostered cooperative
living. As Fernandez-Armesto (2001) puts it in
Food: A History, " Culture began when the raw
got cooked" (p.5). The campfire becomes a
place of communion when people eat around
it. Cooking is not just a way of preparing food
but of organizing society around communal
meals and predictable mealtimes. Levi-Strauss,
in his influential book The Ram and the Cooked,
wrote, "Not only does cooking mark the
transition from nature to culture, but through
This seems to require that the provenance of
our things be brought closer to home. Many
people are trying to recover a field of vision
that is basically human in scale, and extricate
themselves from the obscure forces of a global
economy." (Crawford, p. 8) When we
relegate the assembly and production of
consumer goods and foods to unseen others,
we no longer know where things comes from,
whose hands they' ve passed through, what
exploitation has been done to others, or what
damage might be done to ourselves.
The use of fire to cook food and the use
of tools for a variety of activities were both
turning points in human evolution. Wh at
does it mean for the species that we are
becoming increasingly disconnected from
both activities because of the intellectual
economy and the ability to entrust others with
preparing and cooking our food? Now, there
are clearly many advantages to having others
prepare our food. By not having to go out
and hunt for tonight's dinner and spend
hours cooking and preparing it, we can
develop our minds or exchange goods and
services (translation: shopping), but it seems
that this disconnect is partly responsible for
the growing obesity epidemic, as well as other
less measurable phenomena, such as a sense
of alienation or lack of community felt by
many in the West.
VII. Food, Ritual, and Civility
In our evolutionary history, cooking
and the use of tools for cooking became
deeply intertwined with rituals and rites of
passage early on. Every known cultural has
rituals for which food is often a central focus.
For the developing child in particular, cultural
identity and community are shaped by the
familial narrative and by the cultural and
familial rituals established for that group.
Food and food rituals are one of the more
important facets of an individual's subjective
terrain and mediator of experience. Healthy,
joyous, and celebratory food rituals can be
understood as an essential component of
development and good social relations. In
childhood and adolescence, family time
historically occurred over the dinner table.
Relationships with more distant family
members usually took place over holidays,
reunions, and family gatherings, all of which
center around the table. Weddings, funerals,
initiations, cleansings, and many other rituals
are how children learn what it means to be part
of their group virtually all of such rituals
involve food.
Many food rituals attempt to invoke the
past, a group's history, or even the deceased.
In the Mexican celebration Dia de losMuertos,
for example, altars are made for the dead and
women spend all day preparing the favorite
food of the deceased to place at the altar.
Other food rituals invoke a temporal
regression as a means of connecting with one' s
ancestors. In the highly ritualized Passover
Seder, for example, the Seder plate contains
important symbols of the holiday. Maror, the
bitter herbs, are used as a symbol of the
bitterness of slavery. Zeroa, a roasted shank
bone, is a symbol of the Passover sacrifice. Salt
water is also used to symbolize the tears of
slavery. The Seder is a ritual meant to bridge
the cultural space and emotional experience
between generations, faraway places, and the
rituals of one's ancestors. It is not only the
telling of a story, but a reenactment. It is an
important component of both religious identity
and history in that it also tells the story of a
people so that it is never forgotten. The Seder
then is a mechanism by which psychological
"genes" are handed down through generations
and transmit political information through oral
history (Volkan, 1996). The poignant role of
food and food ritual in the intergenerational
transmission of sociopolitical history can be
seen in the humorous Jewish saying regarding
religious holidays: "They tried to kill us, we
won, let's eat."
Ross and Ross have a similar
understanding of the Christian mass:
 The bottom line is that the more time
we spend in the kitchen the less likely we are
to be overweight or obese and the more likely
we are to engage in cooperation, sharing, and
civility. W hat we know is that food prepared
in the home, partly because it does not need
the fat, salt, and sugar, that convenience food
needs to be palatable, is no where near the
caloric value of packaged food, fast food, or
much restaurant food. We also know that
there are social and psychological benefits to
cooking and eating at home. Collaboration,
cooperation, nourishing others, and being
nourished by others have a synergistic effect
with the nutritional benefits of cooking, which
together mediate personal health probably
more than almost anything else.
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