Recipe-as-inquiry: Critical Feminist Food Pedagogies

Recipe as inquiry explores how critical history research, recipe adaptation and food-centered storytelling can be a tool for social change and a form of feminist pedagogy. Employing socially-engaged arts, cooking as inquiry, and critical pedagogy methods in a food education context, this two-pronged inquiry responds to the following questions: What kind of counternarratives emerge when I use recipes as a starting point of inquiry, both as a route for historical reflection and a way to engage with embodied knowledge transmission through the process of baking and adapting recipes? and What happens when hands-on food education is combined with critical discussion around place and home? This research draws from anti-racist and anti-colonial theory, including Black feminism and Indigenous perspectives on relational knowledge, an expansion of critical geography discourse analyzing contemporary food systems, colonial food history and my own settler family history. This research situates critical food pedagogies within environmental education discourse and practice in the form of two educational outcomes. The first is a memoir and cookbook manuscript that builds both whole grain food literacy and counternarratives around Atlantic canadian food history. The second outcome reviewed in this paper also focuses on expanding whole grain food literacy through the creation of a virtual whole grain baking workshop. This digital pedagogy event involves both practical skill development and offers critical background information and storytelling about the workshop recipe and its ingredients. Recipe- as-inquiry shows how food education can be a tool for social change by increasing the accessibility of food education spaces through digital delivery and through sharing whole grain food knowledge. As expressions of radical pedagogy praxis, this research shows how food is a site of relational knowledge building and how historic relations of food and people shape our contemporary food system and the stories we know and tell about home.