The extra-capitalist potential of intimate cooking: Tracing practices of eating and cooking

In this paper, I present intimate cooking as an extra-capitalist and relational practice. Intimate cooking is the nourishing act of cooking and sharing meals between close relationships (familial, platonic or otherwise), often involving recipes that hold deep personal or familiar resonance. I argue that this practice offers a differing perspective of daily practice that is not beholden to the logic of capitalism: including our understandings of standardised time, reproducibility, commodification, and labour. My analysis places observations of the rhythms, atmospheres, and experience of intimate cooking in conversation with theory on cooking and everyday practice from scholars including Ben Highmore, Elizabeth Freeman, Sara Ahmed, and Nancy Fraser. I will explore the ways time and labour—often associated with capitalist logics—work differently through the practice of intimate cooking, and the political implications of these differences. I discuss how the temporalities of intimate cooking orient toward slower and unmeasured time, unlike the highly efficient and timed rhythms of the cooking industry. I also delve into care labour, which both diverges from capitalist logics of labour by fitting within economies of relation and gift-giving, while also being vulnerable to exploitation as undervalued domestic labour propping up traditional labour economies. Throughout my analysis, I position intimate cooking and eating as an aesthetic experience and practice that builds relational bonds with the resulting meals becoming a material representation of collectivity outside of capitalist logic.