But is a continuation of the original post of affordances, but this post takes a slightly different slant on affordances. The following post will no longer look at communication, connections and moral asepcts, but aesthetics, spirituality and health. To break these down, the English oxford dictionary (2011) defines aesthetics as “The branch of philosophy which deals with questions of beauty and artistic taste”, so aesthetics is the feeling of something through your senses, whether it be the smells, tastes, how it feels, sounds, or looks. Looking at spirituality many people think of religion and beliefs, in this sense, it refers to how you connect more deeply with this activity. And health is pretty self explanatory, especially when related to food, as there are clear foods and way foods are eaten that are good, and not so good for your health.
Here is another quick story about my cooking which relates quite well to ergonomics, Saturday night and I had decided to go home for the weekend to the farm, Mum had asked me to get her some groceries and it was decided we would have burgers for dinner, and there would be about 6-9 people at home for dinner. After spending far too long deciding how many burger buns to buy it was time to cook. Burgers are one of my favourite things to cook at home, because both Mum and Dad help, and they are easy and everyone likes them. So really with Mum and Dad both in the kitchen, I didn’t really end up doing mum cooking at all. However the biggest part of cooking burgers is putting them together.
In many ways, burgers are aesthetically pleasing; the smell of bacon on onion cooking is mouth-watering, as these burgers were so full with fillings the look of them alone was mouth watering, however visually some of the burgers failed a bit as they didn't stay together too well. That sounds somewhat contradictive, but I guess what I am trying to say is although visually some were a bit of a mess, they still looked as though they would taste good. And of course they did taste good. The feel and sound of burgers is not so obvious, sound wise, there is the sound of the bacon cooking in the pan, and the sound of people eating (not so nice), but also the conversation and laughter that comes with having a gathering of people round for dinner. Feel is very much up to the person, whether or not they like the feel of the burgers when they eat them. While cooking there is the feel of the raw bacon and the onion on your eyes which is not so pleasing.
Spirituality, this here was harder for me to relate to my cooking, however when Mum invites my brothers and staff around for dinner, she often does cook burgers, as you can add in and leave out food to peoples likings. There was no vegertians and we had grown all the meat used on the farm. Having a family dinner shows a sense of caring and connection between the family.
Health – cooking for my family is easy as nobody has any health issues which are effected by diet or on any weight loss programmes, however food quite directly relates to energy levels, my brothers have very hard manual jobs and eat very big meals, where as mum and I don’t eat as much, and don’t need to. There are health factors when cooking e.g. 5+ a day, and I think burgers aren’t too bad in this respect with a decent serving of onions, mushrooms, beetroot, pineapple, lettuce. Then there is all the vitamins and minerals, which all effect health in different ways, I currently don’t know much about this at all, but so far I have been mostly healthy, simply by following my mothers instructions “everything in moderation”.
It’s amazing what you can get from a family feed of homemade burgers when you pull it apart.
Posted 10/10/11
English oxford dictionary. (2011). Retrieved September 29, 2011 from http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/aesthetics
