Affordances of cooking a meal

Christiansen et el (2010) states affordances to be, namely features if the environment that are relevant to enabling or obstructing actions that the perceiver can perform that might be relevant to achieving goals. In class when looking at affordances we broke it down into three categories of communication, action properties and moral properties. For this aspect of looking at cooking I will do the same.

Firstly the connection and action properties:
Yesterday morning before I went to class I thought to myself hmmm ... what am I going to cook for dinner tonight. I looked in the freezer to see what kind of meat to get out so that it would thaw by the time I needed it. The freezer did not have much meat in it but I found some mince and I thought I would be able to make those into meat balls.

It was that time of the day again when I had to cook the mince I had gotten out earlier had now defrosted so I got it out and a large bowl broke it up into small pieces added some chopped onion, soy sauce, herbs and of course an egg to hold it all together. As I was cooking the meat balls I needed to put some spaghetti pasta on so that it would be ready at the same time. I brought the water to a boil at this point my flatmate had joined me in the kitchen. The meat balls were cooked and the pasta was in the pot, now all I had to do was make the sauce for the meat balls. This consisted of a can of tomatoes, tomato puree, some chilli powder and some water. I added this to the meat balls and left to simmer. The pasta and the meat balls were now ready so I served them as my flatmate and I were very hungry. I had to leave some in the fridge because my other flatmate was not going to be home for dinner at the same time.

Secondly Communication:
Because the activity of cooking a meal is carried out in the kitchen in my household this means that there are many communication properties to it. For instance in my flat the kitchen is considered a communal area, therefore whilst I was cooking my flatmates would get home from wherever they had been. They would then engage in a conversation about how my day was and were curious as to what they were going to be eating that evening. The environment also gave me a sense of belonging; I choose to cook for people as when I was a young child I learnt these behaviours from my parents. Louw (1998) states that observational learning or modelling refers to the viewpoint that people can learn behaviours by observing the behaviours of others. I learnt my cooking skills from my mother and my grandmother from a young age, these learnt skills I am now able to share with others socially.

Thirdly Moral Properties:
Good: The good moral properties from this task are that I was completing an activity, the degree of precision, thrift, and the gift I was giving to my flatmates
Bad The bad moral properties from this task are that my flatmates don’t really understand the meaning of food, they were wasteful of some of the food put on their plate and judgemental of my cooking.

References

Christiansen, H., Kruijff, G. J. & Wyatt, J. (2010). Cognitive Systems. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

Louw, D. A. (1998). Human development. (2^nd Ed). South Africa: ABC Press