From Kitchen Practice to the Public Sphere: The Social and Aesthetic Translation of Culinary Home Economics Capital

This paper develops a theoretical account of how domestic cooking, historically understood as private and relational labor, can come to be translated into publicly visible and socially consequential forms of value. Building on the concept of Culinary Home Economics Capital (CHE Capital), domestic cooking is understood as a relationally embedded, value-generating practice. Through processes of visualization, narrativization, and platformization, CHE Capital becomes legible within contemporary regimes of visibility and evaluation, generating recognition, identity, and hierarchical effects. This paper situates CHE Capital in dialogue with Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital, care ethics, and affect theory, highlighting both its continuities with and distinctions from these frameworks. The analysis contributes to cultural sociology, everyday aesthetics, and feminist political economy by offering a framework for understanding how intimate, relational practices enter public circuits of evaluation and recognition.