Cooks Cooking Up Recipes: The Cash Value of Nouns,Verbs and Grammar

In the process of eating, everyone cooks, personally combining ingredients at hand to enhance appetite; but few are called cooks. From this mundane example we can take a new approach to the study of material status. A sociological formula that credits capital as opposed to labor with the source of advantage will obscure the dynamics shaping material status. Drawing on a study of the Hollywood area of Los Angeles, I indicate how, at the lowest and highest levels, people make their material status by innovatively combining what they have, as passively available resources, and what they do in the nature of hourly or task paid labor. The shift of theory from nouns, like labor and capital, to the active and passive verbs, “doing” and “having,” leads to a shift in the search for explanations of status differences. As in cooking, the transformative tricks critical for producing savory results are not simply in the recipes handed down from generation to generation but in those cooked up, in the innovative interactions in relating working for pay and the exploitation of ongoing relations.