The need for cooking

17-10-2011

A discussion in class this week was based around what need is met through cooking for me in particular. Well, again I have touched on this in some of my past blogs but in this tutorial we pulled apart my needs much more specifically. It was interesting that I could not easily determine these without some serious thought which shows that my needs for cooking are muchly subconscious and not something I have needed to address in the past. With help from Mary and some of my peers we identified the following as some of my needs:

• Survival and health: "Food is 'everyday'-it has to be, or we would not survive for long" (Visser, 1986, p. 12) and this is a big part of my need to cook for both myself and my flatmates as the dinner meal is a staple meal of the day. It is also important for our health that we incorporate fruit and vegetables into our diet and therefore this is another need for me to cook and think about what ways I might include these in my meal.
• To meet my responsibilities as a flatmate: this appeared to be an underlying theme throughout a lot of my thoughts around my cooking. Within this I feel the need to make a satisfying meal that also tastes fairly good is important so that I feel as competent as my flatmates in terms of providing for each other.

I got thinking about these needs when I was cooking this week and I realised that it usuaslly comes naturally to include vegetables in the dinner meal, I know that it is a nutritional need however I also let this slip occasionally if I need to make a fast meal or feel like I don't have the right ingredients to include vegetables. I also try my best to be attentive to the meal as it is cooking to ensure that no mistakes are made and I can feel competent providing for my flatmates. This week unfortunately things didn't go quite to plan, I managed to under cook my roast and held up my flatmates from their studies. This made me feel as though I wasn't fully pulling my weight as a flatmate and that I wasn't as competent as I should have been, I realised how important the need is for me to present my flatmates with a nice meal and to take my fair share of responsibility within the flat.


References:


Visser, M. (1992). The rituals of dinner. London: Viking, The Penguin Group.