14 DAY TRIAL // A team of investigators has recently demonstrated that people love to cook their own meals at home just as much as they did in the old days. Over the past few years, many sociologists and psychologists have been wondering as to whether we are experiencing a shift in eating habits or not. The answer to this question is very important, because it has repercussions on the strength and unity of families. It would now appear that concerns were misplaced. People love to make their own food now as they did before, it's just that they do it differently, researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC) say.
The research team conducted a series of investigations on local families from British Columbia. The leader of the investigation, UBC Integrated Studies in Land and Food Systems program graduate student Dean Simmons, says he and colleagues were surprised at the findings. The researchers thought they would stumble upon families that order take-out very often, but they instead found that most of the respondents still preferred cooking their own meals at home. “I expected them to be more about take-out and eating out,” Simmons says. He presented details of the research at the 2010 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, which currently takes place at the Concordia University, in Montreal.
The scientist was also able to identify three main reasons why people preferred to cook at home. Parents said, for example, that this allowed them more control over what they and their children were eating. “It allowed them to exclude certain foods they didn't want – people talked about not having preservatives and junk foods,” Simmons says, adding that this approach also saved a lot on the family food budget. The second reason was because people felt more connected to each other by eating together at home. Some said that this reminded them of how their mothers used to cook, while others said that, on the contrary, they were cooking themselves in order to escape their mothers' “horrible recipes.”
The third primary reason, Simmons mentions, is intimately related to life skills. The researcher explains, “Nearly every teen I spoke to said learning to cook was important for when they moved out of the house. And this included teens who didn't like cooking.” The team leader adds that people who were a part of the study referred to dinner when speaking about eating together. Most individuals eat out while at work or at school. Simmons also argues that we are not collectively loosing our abilities to cook, as others have suggested in previous works.
He believes that these skills are simply being reshaped, given the availability of complex, food-related technologies, such as microwaves and bread-making machines. “Cooking has meaning beyond feeding ourselves. It's more than just a laboratory process. It has to do with control over food, with independence, and with connecting with each other,” the expert concludes.