Favourite Cookbooks: Social and Individual Identity Work

摘要: Many consumers can look at their kitchen shelves and see it groaning under the weight of an array of different cookbooks, some remain unopened and unused while others become well worn and well loved. What distinguishes these books how do we arrive at favourites when so many others languish untouched? This article argues that the influences which guide choices of favourite cookbook and cookery writer stem from the individual’s narrative of self and by extension their narrative as cook. In the sociology of consumption the role of self and identity is a recurring one, particularly among those who view consumption as an act of integration between external objects and self, often through a process of personalisation (Belk, 1988). Whether food consumption can take on such significance is well debated: Warde (1997), for example, argues that because we can travel the world nightly in our food choices: Chinese takeout one night, Pizza the next and a home cooked meal the third, individual meals are not significant enough consumption experiences to tell us much about the self-identity of the consumer; Somers (1994) argues contrary, that every consumption decision no matter how low cost or habitual forms part of an individual’s identity work, Belk et al (2003) discuss how food, among many other subjects of consumption, can be important enough for consumers to become passionate about it and Mennell (1985) discusses how food can illuminate, not just individual identity, but can provide broad cultural information. That debate will continue beyond this article so for this purpose it considers that, whatever the view on individual foodstuffs or …