Understanding and measuring cooking skills and knowledge as factors influencing convenience food purchases and consumption

Abstract

As the convenience food industry becomes more prominent in society, it is essential to understand the influence of cooking competence on home food production. Cooking competence allows a consumer to be self reliant and have a healthy diet, creates a less stressful home food production process and influences the consumer’s orientation attitude towards pre-prepared convenience foods. Through a literature review, it was found that mothers and cooking classes are the most important sources to acquire cooking skills, while factors such as gender, age, income, social/educational class, attitude and social environment determine how one acquires their cooking competence. A non-traditional definition of cooking competence was analyzed which strays from the traditional ‘task centered’ approach and instead encompasses a comprehensive set of skills used in domestic cooking. A cooking competence questionnaire was created to include this new definition.