No, really -- who cooks? Yes, everyone eats, some even put food on the table, but cooking...
Hobbyists. People with spare time. People who make enough money within a household to allow a member of that household to "do cooking" and who don't make enough money to hire a cook or to eat in restaurants. Cooking-as-hobby has as a pre-requisite the investment of food with a more-than-fuel significance. This is shared-family-meal significance for some, the my-body-is-a-temple significance for others, the individuation-through-proclaimed-expertise significance for still others. (I cook for shared-family-meal reasons and to save money. Not that I could immediately turn hours spent in food shopping and preparation into cash; but I certainly can immediately make cash disappear by buying cooked food.)
Other people, non-hobby cooks, just eat.
The upper-class person eats in restaurants and goes to Waitrose / Marks & Spencer for any readymeals, the lower-class person goes to Aldi / Tesco / Iceland for readymeals and when in a can't-be-arsed-to-work-the-microwave mood pops into a chippie, a Tennessee Fried Chicken.
Neither the upper-class person nor the lower-class person has "family recipes". For them, other people do the cooking.
To have opinions on food, to know and to trade recipes, strikes me as a very middle-class characteristic.
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momijizukamori
no subject
Date: 2012-05-18 04:37 am (UTC)No, really -- who cooks? Yes, everyone eats, some even put food on the table, but cooking...
Hobbyists. People with spare time. People who make enough money within a household to allow a member of that household to "do cooking" and who don't make enough money to hire a cook or to eat in restaurants. Cooking-as-hobby has as a pre-requisite the investment of food with a more-than-fuel significance. This is shared-family-meal significance for some, the my-body-is-a-temple significance for others, the individuation-through-proclaimed-expertise significance for still others. (I cook for shared-family-meal reasons and to save money. Not that I could immediately turn hours spent in food shopping and preparation into cash; but I certainly can immediately make cash disappear by buying cooked food.)
Other people, non-hobby cooks, just eat.
The upper-class person eats in restaurants and goes to Waitrose / Marks & Spencer for any readymeals, the lower-class person goes to Aldi / Tesco / Iceland for readymeals and when in a can't-be-arsed-to-work-the-microwave mood pops into a chippie, a Tennessee Fried Chicken.
Neither the upper-class person nor the lower-class person has "family recipes". For them, other people do the cooking.
To have opinions on food, to know and to trade recipes, strikes me as a very middle-class characteristic.