It was late March, 2020; I was staring at a very bare cupboard with a sweet tooth, and a family in need of a morale boost. Luckily, a quick google search produced a recipe for Atlantic Beach Pie; unfamiliar to me, and surprisingly delicious considering the unusual list of ingredients. I was not alone in my online search for recipes. As the COVID-19 pandemic shut most of the world in their homes, it also produced a wave of home cooks searching for information. Americans were struggling with long waits for grocery delivery services, a fear of exposure during in-person shopping, food shortages, and restaurant closures. We were, by and large, hunkered down at home and we needed to feed ourselves somehow. According to an online survey of home cooks during the pandemic (Hunter, 2020), 54% of Americans attested to cooking more and 60% said that they were searching for recipes that utilized what they had on hand. In an effort to avoid unnecessary trips to the grocery store, many home cooks were taking on new tasks, such as baking bread, for the first time. King Arthur Flour, one of the nation’s top sources of baking recipes and advice, experienced a 260% increase in website traffic, and a 200% jump in online sales during the pandemic (Berthiaume, 2020). According to Google Trends, the number of people google-searching the terms “bake bread” and “make rice” hit an all-time high mid-April, 2020, followed by “online cooking classes” peaking during mid-May, 2020. While the popularity of online content for home cooks has demonstrably swelled in 2020, it is not a recent phenomenon. Online recipe and cooking websites have thrived since the mid-1990’s.
If we follow Christen and Levinson’s definition of the four angles of community (2003), I propose that the community of home cooks can be seen intersecting between all four. Many home cooks share an affinity for food, food preparation, and the culture of cooking and eating. This community also shares the instrumental desire to feed and comfort themselves, their families, and communities with food. Home cooking can provide the most elemental of pleasures, in addition to a basic human necessity. Some members in the community of home cooks are making food as a means to connect to primordial ties of ethnicity and ancestral heritage by keeping historical or family recipes alive. Finally, this community is also sometimes connected proximately. Local cooks share seasonal recipes, sourdough starters, and sometimes the spoils of their kitchen gardens, as a way to harness and share the bounty of the season within a particular geographic area.
At first glance, one might view home cooks as individuals simply looking for recipes, and nothing more; I don’t believe that this is the case. I suggest that home cooks are a long-established group that has united to create an extensive network that fulfills many of Fisher and Bishop’s characteristics of an information community (2015), most recently, in the desire to foster social-connectedness during the pandemic. I have started to collect evidence of home cooks sharing information, and collaborating in the world-wide sphere, while utilizing many diverse methods (e.g. amateur YouTube cooking tutorials). In light of the sudden increase in inexperienced home cooks looking for information (due to COVID-19), many established cooking resources pivoted in order to provide simpler recipes, reshaping around nascent home cooks’ needs for more rudimentary information. I am discovering confirmation of the use of emerging technologies; for example, the bigoven recipe app has a “use my leftovers” search function to help people cook with what they already have on hand. And finally, the New York Times Cooking website allowed non-subscribers to access its recipes for free during the pandemic, an example of an information source removing obstacles in order to increase access to content.
References
Hunter Public Relations. (2020, April 15). America gets cooking: Food trends during Covid-19.https://www.hunterpr.com/foodstudy_coronavirus/
Berthiaume, Dan. (2020, June 6). King Arthur Flour crowns new digital customer experience as onine sales grow. Chain Store Age. https://chainstoreage.com/king-arthur-flour-crowns-new-digital-customer-experience-online-sales-grow
Christensen, K., & Levinson, D. (2003). Introduction. In K. Christensen, & D. Levinson (Eds.), Encyclopedia of community: from the village to the virtual world. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. https://dx.doi.org.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/10.4135/9781412952583
Fisher, K. & Durrance, J. (2003). Information communities. In K. Christensen & D. Levinson (Eds.), Encyclopedia of community: From the village to the virtual world (Vol. 1, pp. 658-660). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412952583.n248
Fisher, K.E. & Bishop, A.P. (2015). Information communities: defining the focus of information service. In S. Hirsh (Ed.), Information services today: an introduction (pp. 20-26). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sjsu/detail.action?docID=2032756