Cooking at home around the world: which countries cook most often at home and why?
How often people cook at home, who cooks, what resources they have and use to do it, how and with whom a meal is shared … these are all windows into people’s lives and into our society. While cooking is an individual activity, connected to the basic human need of eating, it’s an activity that is intertwined with the state of a country’s health, economy and environment.
But there has never been a global analysis of cooking around the world. There is national or local research but often even how to define home cooking is a stumbling block.
So in 2018 Cookpad partnered with Gallup to include questions about frequency of cooking in the Gallup World Poll. So far, we have two years’ of data (2018 and 2019) and are in the process of analysing our third year of data — which, of course, happened to coincide with the onset of the global Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting lockdowns in many countries around the world.
Why measure home cooking?
Because of our mission, we’re interested in home cooking. We have it written into our Articles of Association that when everyone on the planet enjoys everyday cooking, our company will dissolve. But we have no way of measuring that. While we have a snapshot of what’s happening in kitchens through our product in over 70 countries around the world, it’s not a measure of whether cooking is increasing or decreasing. And there’s no way of knowing how home cooking correlates with other life factors.
Primarily though, we conceived this project as a starting point for future research. We see it as a foundation piece that will spark discussion and further research. For this reason, we’re sharing the raw data with researchers who are interested. (If that’s you, please get in touch.)
What does the data tell us?
It’s early days. But after two years’ worth of data, there’s a clear indication that where there is economic or social unrest, there seems to be an increase in people staying home to cook and eat. The biggest increase in home cooking between the 2018 and 2019 data occurred in countries that experienced economic challenges such as Lebanon and India.
Another story within the data is gender inequality. There is a clear gender disparity in who cooks for whom; women take on most of the cooking worldwide. This is more pronounced in those countries with low gender equality in other areas as measured by the UNDP Gender Inequality Index.
What about 2020?
The Gallup World Poll team was undertaking the first interviews of the 2020 data collection as the COVID-19 pandemic started to spread. Face-to-face interviewing was stopped for the safety of the respondents and interviewers. Instead, Gallup undertook the first-ever entirely phone-assisted global survey.
The data is being analysed now and we will share the results in the coming months.
Anecdotally, more people have been cooking at home throughout the pandemic: from banana bread to Basque cheesecake and of course, sourdough. It seems that many people have discovered or rediscovered home cooking - maybe out of boredom, or an emotional need, and often out of necessity.
With many people spending more time at home, the economic impact of the pandemic, and the restaurant sector in a number of countries going through long periods of closure, we expect to see significant changes in home-cooking trends. Whether these are a blip or a long-term shift, we will have to wait and see.
You can find the reports based on the research here.
