Cooking with NO POWER!

September 19th-25th

My cooking this week was a little different to what I am used to, I’d put it as old school. My friends and I braved a couple of nights at my bach in the whop-whops at Lake Alexandrina, no cell phone reception, no internet and NO POWER. I had better paint you a quick picture of the testing environment I was cooking in all weekend. We have a fridge that runs on gas which is started with a jump from the car battery; also running on gas is our tiny blue and cream oven which strongly resembles a child’s play oven fit with two gas hobs on top. The huge old coal range is always lit to heat the two rooms that make up the bach, but the only cooking duty it performs is melting our marshmallows and burning our toast in the mornings. All drinking water is gathered from a natural spring at the lakeside, and large tanks collect the rain water for washing hands and dishes. When the weather is fine we would usually stand round the bbq cooking dinner then sit around the picnic table all night until the sun was completely down. Unfortunately mother earth wasn’t on our side Saturday night so the sausages and kebabs had to be cooked in the toy oven. A trip to the lakeside for fresh mint added the final touch to the bubbling spuds and all left to do was prepare a quick salad for our daily dose of greens. Desert involved opening up the element on the coal range and melting marshmallows on green sticks (green sticks don’t burn), once they were melted to satisfaction we smooshed them between chocolate thins and indulged.

Affordances: Outcomes from cooking

Aesthetics

Cooking brings about a huge range of feelings of pleasure, cooking and eating a meal satisfies all of the human senses. Cooking in the bach you cannot escape the aromas and the sounds. The smell of the meat in the oven and the gas from the hob, the pleasing sounds of the spuds bubbling and the coal range cracking; all of these are part of the bliss of cooking. Care is always taken when presenting a cooked meal. Margret Mahy’s short story Work of Art, illustrates the point that the food is in fact an art form. However no matter how pleasing a dish is on the eyes it never looks “too good to eat” which at the end of the day is its built purpose. Cooking is forever provoking emotion weather through the frustration of messing up, the longing for a taste and finally the joy of the yummy first bite. There is also a beauty in the strong connection between cooking and memories, the drawing on previous experiences and creating new memories too.

Spirituality

Spiritually up lifting is how I would describe my cooking experiences, I get a fabulous feeling from creating something out of nothing, it is the place I can be my erratic self and do my own thing. Looking specifically at my cooking with no power I was able to make a historical connection with the old days of cooking without the luxury of an electric oven and running water. At the bach I get to share my childhood camping persona with my friends however at the flat I have a completely different approach to cooking. Living in a flat we all bring new foods, different techniques, values and rituals from our own homes and cultures. Margret Visser believes that with these rituals and expectations around food it’s turned “the consumption of food, a biological necessity, into a carefully cultured phenomenon (Visser, 1992).” The flat has created our very own culture around our cooking and eating, at least once a week each flatmate cooks a meal, it is then eaten around the table and we each share two positives and one negative from our day. Even if we are all busy throughout the day at dinner time we spend time catching up. At home our passion for food is evident through the family grace. Starting with my grandma slapping her hands on the table, the kids are banging the cutlery too and we sing the family grace at the top of our lungs showing our gratitude for our food and everyone who helped cook it. 

Health:

Cooking can have an effect on an individual’s physical and mental health. The types if food and ingredients used have the most dramatic influence on physical health, cooking healthy nutritious meals can be hard on a small student budget. All individuals have different food preferences for health reasons; this ranges from high carbohydrate meals to ensure energy and endurance during the day to healthy eating diets for weight loss. Food allergies or intolerance can be a high health risk when cooking for others. There are of course positive aspects on health from cooking, the food produced is necessary for survival and gives humans energy to get through their daily occupations. Many conditions or symptoms can be minimised and treated with a change of diet or additions to it.

References:

Mahy, M. (1988). Work of art. The door in the air and other stories. London: JM Dent & Sons Ltd.

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