I’m Cooked! From Burnt out to Cooked out: A Theoretical Model of Home Cooking Burnout (HCBO)

Crucial health and psychological benefits, and advantages for child development may be associated with regular, healthy home cooking practices and social exchange around the table. However, establishing and maintaining home cooking practices involve challenges and may be progressively taxing on caregivers, akin to burnout. This article proposes an innovative theoretical conceptualisation of Home Cooking Burnout (HCBO), a phenomenon of psychological exhaustion specifically linked to the repeated preparation of meals and their clean-up in a domestic setting. Here we introduce the term cooked-out, defined as a state of psychological exhaustion relating to the repeat preparation of meals, characterised by a loss of motivation, pleasure, and energy, as well as impaired cognitive and emotional functions associated with food preparation. Based on the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model, HCBO describes how the accumulation of structural, cognitive, emotional, and time demands, combined with a lack of material, social, or psychological resources, can lead to a dynamic of deterioration similar to that observed in professional burnout.The model distinguishes between two key dimensions: exhaustion, defined as the emotional and cognitive fatigue associated with cooking tasks, and engagement, corresponding to the pleasure, creativity, and meaning attributed to cooking. These two dimensions coexist on partially independent axes, enabling differentiation between various profiles of cooking behaviour (exhausted, disengaged, over-engaged). HCBO also constitutes a proposal to formalise household mental load, making it measurable and falsifiable through the development of two psychometric instruments: a household cooking load and engagement scale (HCBO-EE) and an inventory of household demands and resources (HCBO-DRI).We propose a three-phase methodology to validate the HCBO model: (1) construction and psychometric validation of instruments via exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses; (2) modelling of cooking exhaustion or “cooked-out” trajectories through SEM analyses, machine learning methods, and clustering; (3) studying the implications of being cooked-out on marital relationships, dysfunctional eating behaviours, and metabolic risks. HCBO thus makes it possible to link cooking fatigue to family changes, gender inequalities, and risky eating behaviours.By offering a new perspective on household cooking, the HCBO model opens up theoretical, clinical, and societal perspectives that are essential for understanding and preventing domestic exhaustion in modern households.