Katharina Graf - University of Frankfurt

Cyborg Cooks: Digitalizing Domestic Cooking in Germany Future kitchens are increasingly imagined as smart. Wired food processors offer a choice of recipes and prepare food for busy cooks while smartphones or intelligent fridges promise to shop online autonomously. Whatever the futuristic image, so-called “smart technology” is depicted as rescuing domestic cooks too busy or inexperienced to cook. Social anthropology is suspicious of such one-directional and hegemonic visions of technological impact on everyday life and ideally positioned to explore the entanglements of social, cultural, economic and political dimensions in increasingly digitally mediated human-machine interactions in the home. In this talk I will challenge this futurist vision from an anthropological perspective on domestic food practices in urban and rural Germany through the feminist notion of the cyborg cook. I draw on multisensory participant perception of domestic cooks’ interactions with the digital kitchen robot Thermomix to demonstrate that smart kitchens are already a reality and that cyborg cooks are firmly established among us. I argue that mothers should be considered as early adopters of digital technologies in diverse domestic kitchens and contest the assumptions in futurist visions and in the literature that women, including those from cultural or class minorities, are tech-averse marginal users.

Bio - Katharina Graf is a social anthropologist. She currently researches the interaction between humans and machines in domestic kitchens and the transformation of bodily knowledges therein. She obtained her PhD from SOAS University of London. Since 2021 she’s based at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology at Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany. She is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Exeter and a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the SOAS Food Studies Centre. Her research interests range from food, gender and knowledge reproduction to materiality, space, global markets and food insecurity.