The Current State of Cooking in Ireland: The Relationship between Cooking Skills and Food Choice

This research investigated the attitudes of Irish people to food to ascertain whether the acquisition of cooking skills influences food choice. Caraher et al. (1999) report on the state of cooking in England noted that changing lifestyles has had a significant impact upon the demand of food offerings and on the variance of domestic cooking skills. Caraher et al. (1999) found that cooking skills play an important part in healthy eating as a vehicle for lower-paid people to achieve a healthy diet and is an essential life-skill. While these discourses advance, the deficiency of inherently Irish empirical data contributed to inspire the development of this research. The analysis of the relationship of cooking skills to food choice may point to the growing importance of the social role and indeed the contributory role of good cooking skills in the maintenance of health in the Irish context