Cooking as Inquiry: A Method to Stir Up Prevailing Ways of Knowing Food, Body, and Identity

The paper develops a method of research called 'cooking as inquiry.' This method seeks to add layers to the typically disembodied practices of social research that have long overlooked the body and the mundane rituals of foodmaking as sites of knowledge. Informed by autoethnography and collective biography, cooking as inquiry recognizes bodies and food as sites of knowledge and engages researchers as researcher-participants in reflexive, collaborative study that explores the ways in which the embodied self is performed relationally through foodmaking. In addition to a discussion of the epistemological and methodological frames of this method, this paper offers a case study that describes a project conducted by a colleague and the author.