Cooking Cooperatively at “Shun”
Robert C Marshall, Anthropology Department, Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA 98225
A. 14 middle-aged, middle-income
housewives, all
B. Members of Seikatsu Club Consumer
Co-operative, who have started
C. A worker owned and managed lunch
delivery restaurant (shidashi bentoya)
D. Dedicated to high quality, wholesome,
cooking, and who work as
E. A self-managed, egalitarian, part-time
force.
V. Analysis
III. What are some results of cooking this way?
I. Who is Shun?
A. No bosses
B. No stars
C. High mutual confidence
D. Consistent characteristic taste
home
labor
One of twelve festive tables
A. If culture is symbolic, so is how people cook
B. Symbols pattern public action based on
local, interested knowledge rather than
communication encoded,
disinterested meanings
C. Technical knowledge, tropical associations and strategic
action all fuse in symbols
D. Multi-vocality of symbols allows concerted action
without
1. An explicit consensual interpretation or
gloss of the “meaning” of the action, or
2. Belying strategic “plausible deniability”
E. Shun’s cooks cook with
1. a high degree of energy, enthusiasm, skill and
mutual confidence in a setting in which
2. acts of aggressive egoism are forestalled and
3. accusations of aggressive egoism are avoided
Food for a feast
IV. How does cooking this way
reproduce Shun’s practice?
A. Cooks monitor each other’s cooking
B. Cooks monitor each other’s egalitarianism
C. Simultaneously with
D. Plausible deniably that they monitor.
Shun’s cramped kitchen
These photographs are all from a catering job Shun won by bid, the result of their
decision to extend their capacity.
Cooking at Shun: preparing a feast
II. How does Shun cook?
A. Cooks often offer a taste while cooking,
take a taste when asked, make a
comment or a suggestion, act on
that suggestion or ask a second cook.
B. When asked, they deny this practice
importance; it has become routine.
C. They make up the next day’s menu
collectively after eating lunch.
D. As each cook arrives in the morning,
she chooses the dish she will cook.
E. Every combination of cooks, from 4 to 12,
1. Cooks any of 200 dishes
2. Without written recipes
3. In batches of 50 to 300 servings
4. From menus they did not make and
5. Ingredients they did not buy.
VI. Conclusions
any
A. How subtle, to demonstrate one another’s
commitment to egalitarian cooking by offering
to each other’s judgment.
one’s dishes
B. How effective, to build into Shun’s cooking
practice a sort of inverted Fordism, to mutually
simultaneously monitor both
and
1. individual commitment to collective
practice and ethos, and
Dessert dumplings
force
Setting out the feast food
Acknowledgements
Social Science Research Council
Fulbright Program
Bureau for Faculty Research, WWU
Department of Anthropology, WWU
2. Quality control in a highly variable labor
3. Tacitly
C. These data were gathered in 1994, Shun’s fourth
year in business. Shun continues in 2004,
prospering thru more than a decade of
stagnation in the wider economy.