Attention in the Kitchen – What We Notice & How it Affects Our Cooking
working together in a kitchen takes coordination
If my wife is using the vacuum while I am cooking, I often end up burning things. I will have something under the broiler and I will be working on prepping something while my back is turned to the oven and before I know it, I’ve burnt my food. This happens because I rely a lot on sounds in the kitchen, I use my hearing to “watch” things as they cook – and when the vacuum is running it has the right frequency to cancel out my convection oven. This always pisses me off. I realized that this is disorienting to me because for me hearing is a stabilizing force in how I manage and juggle the tasks of cooking, and if I can’t hear then I can’t pay attention to what I am listening to as it cooks. You could say that I offload my need to visually attend to something I am doing by paying attention to it with my ears – when I do this it frees up my eyes to work on another task. Some people think of this as multitasking, but it is not, I am merely using separate channels of attention to keep track of the updating progress of separate tasks, and like a couch potato I keep switching channels back and forth to “watch” both shows.
It is no surprise that kitchens are busy places – the number of people interacting in the kitchen, the number of tasks being performed, the timing considerations that drive the flow of the kitchen as a system, all of these factors converge to make an extremely busy place. Successful kitchens often have extremely rigorous organization, ample and appropriate storage with equipment put away in the same place every day, different work surfaces and staging areas that are task specific, people dedicated to doing specific tasks, organized communication paths, an organized set of books, checklists, ways of keeping track of how old things are, et cetera. The reason kitchens are so organized is because they have to be; there is so much going on in a kitchen that it is easy to overlook important details when things aren’t organized.
In some respects, the kitchen is a place where we have to block everything out in order to simply pay attention to what we are doing, because it is easy to let the busyness and urgency of events in the kitchen disorient us. But at the same time we have to be aware of what is going on around us – we have to maintain situational awareness of the kitchen without compromising precise focus on the task at hand.
I want to start exploring the role of attention in the kitchen from a cognitive perspective.
Oakley (2009) describes how our perception helps us notice and pay attention to information in our environment, and how this shift connects our memory and thinking to these information signals in the environment. He does this using a cognitive model he calls the Greater Attention System. I’m going to talk about how this system applies to you in two ways: 1) how signals in the kitchen shape our thinking as cooks, and 2) how signals at the table shape the guest’s thinking and experience of a dish.
Before diving into this project it is important to understand the structure of this model of the greater attention system. I am not going to describe it all here, but briefly, attention in this model occurs in three distinct systems:
Signal System (how we understand information)
Selection System (how we control our own attention)
Interpersonal System (how we coordinate and shape other people’s attention)
By using these three systems as I am going to show you in this series, you will be able improve your kitchen experience – enabling you to: 1a) look at any given signal in a kitchen and describe how it is affecting your ability to do your work, 1b) identify how it is impeding other people in doing their work, and 1c) use these models of attention to drive your kitchen workflow (i.e., overcome obstacles in kitchen performance). But this is only the kitchen side of things – it applies just as much to the table side, we will be talking about how to improve different stages of guest experience 2a)where your guests encounter dishes and have their own experiences that are shaped by their own attention patterns, 2b) how they dwell on the impact a dish is having on their sensory apparatus, and 2c) how they take the experience of your dish with them as a memorable experience that they share with other people. If you can learn how to leverage the attention patterns of your guests, then you can shape a new experience for your guests: the memorable texture that I like to encourage people to produce.
This isn’t a philosophy of attention, it is a model that comes out of empirical and experimental research – it is driven by evidence in the data. My goal is to translate this framework into a useful framework for understanding the kitchen. My hope is that this series of posts will become a tool that you can use to grow your own attention skills in the kitchen.
Ok, enough for now. Do you want to get updates on this post series? Sign up for this series mailing list and I will deliver them to you as emails.
Works Cited:
Oakley, Todd (2009). From attention to meaning: Explorations in semiotics, linguistics, and rhetoric. Bern: Peter Lang.
Ryan Dewey - Kitchen Cognition 
Leave a comment