AFFORDANCES

My  time came around again last night for cooking dinner, so we decided to have home-made hamburgers and wedges since it was such lovely sunny weather outside. We had mince in the freezer, so earlier that day I had got this out and it was all ready and defrosted by the time I got home. I took out the recipe book and made the meat-patty recipe that mum had sent me down to Dunedin with. After getting all messy and having sticky hands from the patty-making, these went in the oven to cook. After peeling many potatoes, these got cut into wedges and tossed around with some oil, flour, chicken salt and several other seasonings. In the oven they go. Next came the easy part, slicing the cheese, cutting the tomatoes, washing the lettuce, grating the carrot, cutting up the capsicum and getting the buns ready. These are all put into their separate bowls ready for everyone to make their own burgers. After half an hour or so, everything is cooked, put on plates and ready to go. “Dinners ready” – and the flat mates come running into the kitchen, make their burgers and head back outside to enjoy the last minutes of the warm night.

“Cooking has many functions, and only one of them is about feeding people.  When we go into a kitchen, indeed when we even just think about going into a kitchen, we are both creating and responding to an idea we hold about ourselves, about what kind of person we are or wish to be. How we eat and what we eat lies at the heart of who we are – as

individuals, families, communities.”

- Nigella Lawson, (2004). P.vi

Communication properties: there are many different aspects of communication surrounding the activity of cooking. There is the communication when learning to cook, such as a friend or family member telling you how to do something; as well as written communication such as writing out and reading recipes. With many meals in our flat, we also have to communicate to figure out what people want and what people don’t like, in order to try and suit everyone. Cooking also encourages communication when sitting around to eat, and like at our flat, we sit down to eat dinner and talk about what we have done that day.

Moral properties: the good and the bad aspects of cooking. Firstly, a positive moral aspect is that cooking brings people together and generally encourages teamwork and socialising. Cooking is great as it provides energy to do many other things within the day and also just makes me very happy to have something yummy in my stomach. A bad aspect of cooking is that it can sometimes lead to fights in our flat as to what people want for dinner and what they like. It can also take a lot of time and if you cook and eat too much, it can end very badly!

Action properties: Cooking provides a connection with many other activities. Before the cooking begins, there is the supermarket shopping – which we do as a flat, and quite often this provides us some entertainment around the supermarket. Then there is the consumption of the food which has just been cooked which sometimes includes the odd beverage and some social times. However, there is also the washing up to do once all the fun parts are finished.

Lawson, N. (2004). Feast:Food that celebrates life. London: Chatto & Windus.(this quote was also presented in BT127001 lecture notes)