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Paper short abstract

Based on food workshops with migrants in Trondheim, this talk explores how “healthy eating” is negotiated through collective cooking. Health emerges as a practical accomplishment shaped by work rhythms, resources, and everyday constraints instead of a fixed norm.

Paper long abstract

This talk draws on a series of food workshops conducted with migrants in Trondheim, Norway, where participants cooked together and discussed their ideas around "healthy eating". Participants wrote their own associations with healthy eating on 3d printed tokens and they resurfaced during cooking, while chopping vegetables, adjusting oil, discussing portion sizes, and negotiating taste, cost, and time. Through collective cooking, dietary categories were enacted in practice. “Healthy” didn't fell into a single standard and it's meaning shifted depending on work schedules, religious commitments, family obligations, bodily fatigue, and the availability of ingredients. Decisions emerged through gestures, substitutions, and small compromises made while preparing the meal.

I suggest that these workshops functioned as small experimental spaces of distributed food care. Cooking together redistributed authority and made visible how dietary advice is shaped by socio-material conditions. Ingredients, tools, economic constraints, and migration histories all participated in shaping what counted as appropriate or workable food. Approaching these situations through perspectives on enactment and care, the talk reflects on how collective cooking can reveal eating as a relational and practical activity embedded in everyday coordination.