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Attention to culinary care can enrich the framing of health within medical anthropology. We focus on care practices in six Latin American kitchens to illuminate forms of health not located within a singular human subject. In these kitchens, women cared not for individuals but for meals, targeting the health of families and landscapes. Many medical anthropologists have critiqued health for its associations with biomedicine/biocapitalism, some even taking a stance 'against health.' Although sympathetic to this critique, our focus on women's practices of caring for health through food highlights dissonances between clinical and nonclinical forms of health. We call for the development of an expanded vocabulary of health that recognizes health care treatment strategies that do not target solely the human body but also social, political, and environmental afflictions.

Indoor environments pose a significant health risk due to exposure to particulate matter (PM), leading to various diseases and premature deaths, and raising public concerns about indoor air quality. Household kitchens are a major contributor to indoor air pollution, emitting particulate matter of varying sizes during cooking, which disperses throughout the house. Understanding the extent of PM exposure and identifying its sources is crucial. This study assesses PM presence in Kuwaiti household kitchens, measuring concentrations of different‐sized particles (PM 0.3, 0.5, 1.0, 2.5, 5.0, and 10 μm) under various conditions. Measurements were taken for 24 h using a particle/mass monitor device, considering different ventilation scenarios, cooking oils, and methods. Spearman's rank correlation and indoor/outdoor (I/O) ratios investigate the correlation between indoor and outdoor PM exposure. Principal component analysis (PCA) models identify specific sources contributing to PM exposure. A questionnaire survey in Kuwaiti households determines primary kitchen sources during cooking. Results show that kitchens with ventilation systems consistently reduce PM concentrations. PM emissions during cooking vary based on factors like cooking method, energy type, cooking oil, food, additives, temperature, and ventilation. The cooking stove is the primary emission source, but other household activities contribute. This study enhances our understanding of influential factors affecting cooking emissions and their concentrations, contributing valuable insights into mitigating indoor air pollution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Domestic cooking is changing the world over. Kitchen technologies and the smartphone transform the way we cook and whom we cook with. Coupled with urbanisation and the shrinking of households, cooking seems to be an increasingly solitary practice. At the same time, these processes did not change who cooks; across the globe it is mostly women who prepare the daily meal for their families. Yet, rather than treating domestic cooking solely as a gender relations issue, this article presents ethnographic research with low-income domestic cooks in Marrakech, Morocco, to argue that unequal generational relations are also important drivers of change in family life. Paradoxically, rather than cook alone or simplify meals, kitchen appliances and social media were employed to continue preparing elaborate family meals. Through a thick description of the preparation of a spread called amlou and of pizza, this article explores why domestic cooking remains centralto idealised notions of womanhood and family life in Marrakech and beyond. It introduces the concept of culinary connectivity to understand how new technologies were employed ininter-generational negotiations of cooking knowledge and power. Moreover, while the crafting of culinary connectivity enables young generations of low-income womento emancipate themselves from age-based power in the home, these practices also enmesh them in new relations of dependence on money and the market. By making cooking central to understanding the (re)production of everyday family life in the context of poverty, this article contributes to cross-cultural studies of food and to regional debates about the family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Equipment utilization is one facet of commercial kitchen management. Technology era Industry 4.0 significantly impacted food production, and technology era Society 5.0 has improved the process’s effectiveness and efficiency. This study examines how human agents, such as chefs and kitchen crew, collaborate with artificial agents, represented by smart machines, to attain precision and consistency in the culinary arts. The study underlines the value of chefs’ essential skills, creativity, and leadership in delivering one-of-a-kind culinary experiences. While technology and clever tools have become integral parts of commercial kitchens, chefs’ human touch and personal interaction remain critical. The research also looks at the difficulties and limitations of artificial agents in perfectly recreating human experience and cultural characteristics. It emphasizes the importance of human–machine collaboration to optimize production processes, increase efficiency, and solve the issue of abstraction in the culinary arts. However, it highlights that technology can only replace human intelligence and experience to a limited extent. The study indicates that reciprocal care and collaboration between human and artificial agents are critical for commercial kitchen management’s long-term performance and sustainability in the Society 5.0 era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recommender systems are commonly-used tools to assist people in making decisions. However, most research has focused on the domain of recommendations for audio-visual content and e-commerce, whereas the specific characteristics of recommendations for recipes and cooking did not receive enough attention. Since meals are often consumed in group (with friends or family), there is a need for group recommendations, taking into account the preferences of all group members. Also cuisine, allergies, disliked ingredients, diets, dish type, and required time to prepare are important factors for recipe selection. For 13 algorithms, we evaluated the recommendations for individuals and for groups using a dataset of recipe ratings. The best algorithm and a baseline algorithm based on popularity were selected for our mobile kitchen experience and recipe application, which assists users in the cooking process and provides recipe recommendations. Although significant differences between both algorithms were witnessed in the offline evaluation with the dataset, the differences were less noticeable in the online evaluation with real users. Because of the cold-start problem, the advanced algorithm failed to reach its full accuracy potential, but excelled in other quality features such as diversity, perceived usefulness, and confidence. We also witnessed a better evaluation (about half a star) of the recommendations by the more advanced cooks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The built environment is a factor widely known to have significant impacts on dietary behaviours and the promotion of healthy food practices. Yet, there is limited understanding of the influential design features of domestic cooking and eating spaces on food practices. This systematic scoping review aimed to provide an overview of the body of knowledge (by identifying and classifying different design features of domestic kitchen and dining area and their impact on the cooking/eating experiences generally and in different age cohorts), as well as explore knowledge gaps to aid the planning of future research. In total, 27 articles met the selection criteria for the analysis, most of which were qualitative, from the USA, the UK, and Australia, and published from 2014 onwards. Influential design features associated with cooking/eating experiences included size and layout, connection to other spaces, fixture and fittings (including spatial ergonomics, materiality, and texture), and indoor environmental qualities (lighting, ventilation, visual access, and window views). Many of these features such as the provision of sufficient dining space were common requirements for a diversity of residents. However, kitchen layout and the significance of certain safety features to food practices differed according to age group. To conclude, it was noted that despite the range of studies reviewed, currently there is insufficient practical knowledge and evidence to inform design decisions. Further research using a multidisciplinary approach is required to explore the detail of kitchen design features and individuals' food practices to provide recommendations for future design policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cooking at home is a critical survival skill. We propose a new cooking assistance system in which a user only needs to wear an all-in-one augmented reality (AR) headset without having to install any external sensors or devices in the kitchen. Utilizing the built-in camera and cutting-edge computer vision (CV) technology, the user can direct the AR headset to recognize available food ingredients by simply looking at them. Based on the types of the recognized food ingredients, suitable recipes are suggested accordingly. A step-by-step video tutorial providing details of the selected recipe is then displayed with the AR glasses. The user can conveniently interact with the proposed system using eight kinds of natural hand gestures without needing to touch any devices throughout the entire cooking process. Compared with the deep learning models ResNet and ResNeXt, experimental results show that the YOLOv5 achieves lower accuracy for ingredient recognition, but it can locate and classify multiple ingredients in one shot and make the scanning process easier for users. Twenty participants test the prototype system and provide feedback via two questionnaires. Based on the analysis results, 19 of the 20 participants would recommend others to use the proposed system, and all participants are overall satisfied with the prototype system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the intersections between gender, domestic slavery, maritime empires and food in the early modern world, focusing on the Dutch East India Company's empire in the Indian Ocean during the eighteenth century. It traces the stories of three very different women in the Dutch Indian Ocean Empire and shows how food provisioning, preparation and consumption intersected with their gendered, racialised and classed roles in European colonial kitchens. In different ways, these women exerted sovereignty over food in colonial households which highlights their role as active participants in both shaping and contesting the social hierarchies of empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food preparation is one of the essential tasks in daily life and involves a large number of physical interactions between hands, utensils, ingredients, etc. The fundamental unit in the food preparation activity is the concept of a recipe. The recipe describes the cooking process—the way to make a dish in a sequential order of cooking steps. Frequently, following these steps can be an extremely complicated process, which requires coordination, monitoring and execution of multiple tasks simultaneously. This work introduces a cooking assistance system powered by Computer Vision techniques that provide the user with guidance in the accomplishment of a cooking activity in terms of a recipe and its correct execution. The system can provide the user with guidance for carrying out a recipe through the appropriate messages, which appear in a panel specifically designed for the user. Throughout the process, the system can validate the correctness of each step by (a) detection and motion estimation of the ingredients and utensils in the scene and (b) spatial arrangement of them in terms of where each one is located to another. The system was first evaluated on individual algorithmic steps and on the end-to-end execution of two recipes with promising results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, gas-fired kitchens of 54 bungalows and 25 apartments were studied using stationary indoor carbon monoxide (CO) monitoring. The levels of CO were measured in each kitchen for a period of 24 h with a 1 min resolution using data logger EL-USB-CO300. Hourly, 8 h and 24 h, CO means for all the kitchens were calculated. Hourly and 24 h CO means of kitchens for bungalows were 3.72±6.26 ppm and 3.72±3.16 ppm, respectively, while those apartments have 3.74±6.96 ppm and 3.74±2.17 ppm, respectively. 8 h CO means of night, day and evening in the kitchens of bungalows were 2.62±3.22 ppm, 4.85±4.66 ppm and 3.53±3.30 ppm, respectively, while in apartments 2.13±2.02 ppm, 3.79±3.86 ppm and 5.29±4.17 ppm. The mean difference between the 8 h CO concentrations during the evening in bungalows and apartments was 1.76±0.87 ppm (P<0.01). 20% of kitchens apartment and 16.67% of bungalows which exceeded the WHO guidelines for daily exposure limit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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