Tacit Knowledge in Cooking: A Key to Teaching and Integrating Cooking as a Practice

Cooking is a dietary behavior linked to the optimization of dietary intake in both nonintervention and intervention settings. Incorporation of cooking into daily life to benefit diet requires the acquisition and transfer of knowledge and skills, which can then influence cooking self-efficacy and agency. Utilization of and awareness of tacit (embodied or unspoken) knowledge with transfer to explicit knowledge (spoken, written) may facilitate cooking as a practice. This perspective article will explore the use of tacit knowledge in cooking in the building and transfer of skills, provide a framework for understanding knowledge development and transfer, and provide implications for practice and research.