Summary of Peer Reviewed Article
Hartel, J. (2006). Information activities and resources in an episode of gourmet cooking. Information Research, 12(1). http://informationr.net/ir/12-1/paper282.html
This is a 2006 peer-reviewed article and research project by Jenna Hartel, who, at the time this study was published, was a PhD candidate at UCLA. This study was her thesis. She is currently an associate professor at the University of Toronto, and specializes in the study of information and how it relates to hobbies and other pleasurable life activities. I have chosen this article because it was the first case study of cooking published in the LIS sphere.
After a brief introduction of the serious leisure group, gourmet cooks, Hartel analyzes the contemporaneous LIS literature that could be applied to this information community. Savolainen and Hektor’s models of ELIS are cited as being relevant to the study of gourmet cooks due to their focus on hobbyists, but the author cautions that they are limited in their usefulness due to a lack of specificity. Ross’s research into pleasure readers is mentioned as applicable because it presents the idea that information seeking does not necessarily need to be initiated by a gap or problem. Sometimes individuals seek information for pleasure; for example, a gourmet cook often reads a cookbook cover-to-cover, not searching for a particular recipe but rather as “food porn”(O’Neill, 2003). Likewise, LIS studies of amateur genealogists, bird watchers, and paranormal phenomena enthusiasts are noted by the author for the way that they have diversified the research into why and how people seek information, providing “counterpoints to information seeking studies of academic or professional contexts” (Hartel, p. 2). Hartel suggests that it is unlikely that a generic model of information seeking and use could be helpful in the diverse realm of leisure activities; the heterogeneity of different types of hobbies necessitates narrower studies of defined information communities. She then states her case for conducting this study, asserting that it is the “first case study of a craft or making and tinkering hobby” (p.2) in the LIS field.
Between 2002 and 2005, Hartel interviewed 20 gourmet cooks from Los Angeles, California and Boston, Massachusetts. These people were initially “encountered at cookbook signings and public culinary lectures” (p.2). Subsequently they were screened in order to ascertain if they were currently active as hobbyist gourmet cooks. If they met Hartel’s criteria, they proceeded to the next phase of the study, 60-minute interviews about the cook’s routines, information activities, and “life-context of the hobby” (p.2). These interviews were taped, and transcribed. Then the subject gave the interviewer a tour of their kitchen, and culinary-information resources areas (e.g., cookbook library, cooking magazine rack); photographs were then taken of both areas.
After this phase, all of the data was compiled, compared, and studied for common themes. Secondary research of popular culinary resources, and fundamental sources of cooking information was also conducted in order to fact check the information given by the subjects and to provide contextual information.
The analysis of the case study lead to Hartel’s nine-step cycle of a gourmet cooking episode.
Examples of some of the possible information activities and information sources used in Hartel’s steps:
- Exploring– browsing, looking for inspiration rather than information; flipping through cooking magazines, cookbooks read for pleasure, walking through a farmer’s market seeing what’s in season, eating at a new restaurant
- Planning– looking for a specific recipe, looking for multiple versions of recipes for the same dish in order to berry pick parts from each to produce the cook’s own version, talking to another cook about how they make a particular dish
- Provisioning– online or in person searching for a particular ingredient or cooking utensil necessary to attempt a recipe (e.g., a coconut grater and dosa pan for masala dosas with coconut chutney)
- Prepping– writing cooking timelines, reading the recipe and getting ingredients ready to cook, looking at past successes/failures of similar recipes in personal culinary journals
- Assembling– reading the recipe and timelines
- Cooking– consulting the recipe and timelines while cooking, using the cook’s embodied knowledge of smell, taste, and touch
- Serving– looking at pictures of the finished dish to decide how to plate and serve it, being influenced by the season to add festive garnishes
- Eating—using the 5 senses
- Evaluating—recording the results in a personal culinary journal, discussing results in conversations with other cooks or by publishing in a cooking blog, altering the recipe to improve upon it
Hartel’s analysis helped me to understand how diverse the information needs and sources can be within the seemingly narrow activity of a cooking episode; gourmet cooks often cast a surprisingly wide information net when undertaking a new project. The fact that the steps are presented as circular, as opposed to linear, is very significant, with one cooking episode flowing-into and informing the next. This demonstrates that the gourmet cook’s experience builds over time and with practice via the repetition of individual cooking episodes. This is echoed in Stebbins’s idea of a serious leisure career (p. 625) which builds in experience and mastery usually over the arc of many years. Gourmet cooking could likewise be examined according to Stebbins’s 6 distinctive qualities of serious leisure (p.625-626):
- perseverance is necessary to move past failed cooking disasters
- a serious leisure career is demonstrated by the long arc of a cook’s self-education
- significant personal effort is undertaken to learn about new types of cuisine and to undertake elaborate cooking episodes
- the durable benefits of enhanced self-esteem and self-expression are reaped as a gourmet cook advances through the levels of personal culinary achievement
- gourmet cooks are bonded through the ethos of the online and in person social world of gourmet cooking
- Eventually, individuals that are involved in the leisure activity identify themselves as gourmet cooks, it becomes a significant part of how they see themselves.
Hartel’s study is vital to my research into passionate home cooks and I expect will be using it extensively throughout the semester.
References
Hartel, J. (2006). Information activities and resources in an episode of gourmet cooking. Information Research, 12(1). http://informationr.net/ir/12-1/paper282.html
O’Neill, M. (2003). Food porn. Columbia Journalism Review, 42(3), 38. https://www.cjr.org/from_the_archives/food-writing-cookbook.php
Stebbins, R. A. (2009). Leisure and its relationship to library and information science: Bridging the gap. Library Trends, 57(4), 618–631. https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.0.0064