ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the challenge to ordinary food consumption that comes from medialised discourses and representations that normatively identify good cooking with cooking from scratch and home-made food. The deskilling issue deals with concerns about whether people's abilities to prepare food and cook meals have decreased and food work in everyday life has become less skilled. Some scholars claim that although traditional routine skills are probably reduced due to the increase in availability of already processed foods, a re-skilling of new abilities is also taking place due to the rise in the variety of available food items, the broad exposure to multiple cultural cuisines, and the technological development in kitchen tools. Public policy makers in Denmark have found support from the private sector in their efforts to promote cooking from scratch. The groups of food practitioners who are being targeted or who subscribe to the discourses of the everyday life celebratory media texts are women with allegedly busy lives.
