Good cooking practices can make all the difference between a healthy Thanksgiving dinner and a disaster. Nestle, the world’s largest food and beverage company, is committed to a healthier future. In an effort to encourage better eating habits, the company organizes an advanced cooking course in Bangladesh each year. These courses are open to employees’ spouses, too. In addition to fostering good nutrition, good cooking practices can also improve workplace morale.

One WorldVeg training focused on teaching local youth to make healthier meals from scratch. Training included applied food literacy and cooking skills education, as well as field trips to community farms to help the participants appreciate food from farm to plate. The training resulted in a film and posters that illustrated good cooking practices and promoted best practices for the local population. It also increased community engagement and helped to increase awareness of the importance of good cooking practices. In addition, participants were inspired to scale up the training and spread the message.

The authors argue that food agency is the result of the complex interplay of individual desires and social environments. In particular, food agency emerges from the interplay between technical skills, cognitive capacities, social supports, and cultural barriers. Using a close reading of anthropological research into cooking, they argue that good cooking practices are a product of people’s capacity to integrate complexity in provisioning. They supplement this argument with interviews with home cooks in the United States.