Cooking
as a Literacy
When we talk about “literacy”, we typically refer to a
student’s ability to read and write. However, a literacy simply refers to competence
or knowledge in a specific area. Over the last few years, partially through
necessity, I’ve picked up a cooking “literacy”. Because my mother is so sick
with Lyme disease, and has had it for so long, I have had to take on some of
her responsibility. One of the ways I’ve had to do so is in cooking. I cook on
a regular basis for my family, and I like to believe that I’m getting pretty
good at it. I have been doing so for at least the past 5 years, and I am increasingly
more satisfied and proud of my results. My influence is, of course, my mother’s
cooking: she was essentially my teacher, through her cooking and through her
instruction.
The impact that this literacy has had on my life is huge.
On the most basic level, it’s a skill that will help me when I am on my own. It
is a skill that will help me to survive, and also one that helps me to enjoy
and understand food. I also like to think of it as a skill that saves money:
not having to buy processed or prepared foods and making them yourself is always
cheaper. However, I think that cooking has a much larger impact on my life and
future than just simply the ability to cook. Cooking is a bridge between
cultures and people; whether we realize it or not, the things that we choose to
eat say something about who we are and what we value. Cooking leads our present
to a long traditional past. Italian food is not just food, it is a community of
shared values.
Of
course, in our current world, we can sample any kind of food we wish, separate
from the context that it came from. I could head to Providence and try Vietnamese,
Ethiopian, and Lebanese food all in the same day without any knowledge about
Ethiopia, or Vietnam, or Lebanon. I think as we look at what we cook and eat,
we can start to understand our pasts as well as our present. I think cooking in
particular lends itself to a greater understanding of food. Eating is certainly
an aspect of understanding food, but actually preparing it gives you a greater
understanding and appreciation of all of the aspects of a dish. Cooking itself
is just a useful task, too. I’ve never been very good at multitasking, and
cooking is one of the things that I’ve gotten good enough at that I can
multitask without much trouble. Cooking is at times inexact, at other times
precise and scientific. It forces you to pay attention to too many things at
the same time. At times, you must make sure everything happens perfectly, and
at times you just have to sit back and let things happen. It’s a skill that
forces you to be patient, yet forces you to pay close attention.
I really think having any non-educational literacy is
very important and can be very useful as a teacher. On the most basic level, it
allows you to form a human bond with students who may have the same interests
or literacies as you. A shared literacy creates an instant community around an
understanding of how to do a task. I’m not trying to say that I expect many (or
any) of my students to be able to cook, but food is an extremely important part
of all of our lives. We spend so much time enjoying food, or perhaps just
simply going through the motions, but food is what allows us to do what we do. I
don’t think cooking necessarily has any kind of direct effect on my teaching,
but I think that the experience as a whole has helped to make me who I am, and
so it has had an effect on everything. When we begin to look at the literacies that our students may have, too, we can better understand and help them learn in an educational setting. All students can and do learn: when we can tap into the power of their literacies, we can use their knowledge to help them build new knowledge.
