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Recipes as Pedagogical Resistance: Teaching Food Writing in an AI-Era

By Bonnie Shishko and Shawn Bowers 

As college professors with three combined decades of First-Year Writing experience, we’re observing two unsettling trends: first, that traditional undergraduate students are increasingly unlikely to tackle academic writing without relying on AI-tools, and second, that they are increasingly likely to hold rigid beliefs about writing—what it is, what it can do, and what it should sound and look like. As a result, we’re noting a third phenomenon: in the face of machine-generated content, students don’t trust their own voices.  

And why should they? As products of an educational system that standardizes and quantifies learning, it makes sense that many students view writing as an output—one to be assessed through binary lenses of good/bad, right/wrong.  

Enter generative-AI, which capitalizes on learned beliefs that “good” academic writing conforms to a prescribed formula and that the goal of writing is not to learn, but to efficiently produce the “right” answer in service of a grade. But writing is much like cooking; the process is vital to the product. Both writing and cooking are iterative and messy; words, like ingredients, often refuse to come together. They demand patience, humility, and the willingness to make mistakes. And, as any experienced cook knows, the courage to deviate from the recipe’s formula, and to defy its discursive authority in favor of our own instincts.  

But let us not forget, the recipe is a technology, and one not unlike gen-AI. Derived from the Latin imperative “recipere,” meaning “to take or receive,” the word “recipe” dates back at least to the fourteenth century and was used by alchemists and domestic cooks to denote not a finished text but a “method of preparation,” or steps that, if followed, promised reliable outcomes (Notaker 144, 146-7). However, despite its steady move towards discursive efficiency and culinary standardization in the hands of nineteenth-century British writers Eliza Acton and Isabella Beeton, recipes, unlike gen-AI, have always recorded the personal, the human, and even the body itself. As Kyla Tompkins puts it, beneath a recipe lies “a field of embodied knowledges, movements, flavors, smells, gestures, and habits that is only hinted at by [the recipe’s] own textual remains” (442). From kitchens in early modern British households to college classrooms, recipes, as technology, have the power to do what gen-AI cannot: “register the creative, intellectual, and social exchanges . . . of people trying to make sense of their worlds” (Wendy Wall xii). 

And so, to our students’ surprise, we tasked them with writing a mini-cookbook for their first college writing assignment. As we explain in the prompt, “Like cookbooks themselves, ‘we contain multitudes’ (Ferguson 33). We are human beings; our identities are many, and our food traditions and tastes are shaped by these identities.” To complete the project, students sourced three recipes reflective of different intersections of their identities. Collected recipes became personal narrative once surrounded by carefully-curated paratexts: treasured family photos, marginal notes, recipe annotations, personal anecdotes. (For Jolie Braun’s experience teaching with community cookbooks, see her post here.)

Recipe Entry, Student Mini-Cookbook, 2024. Queen’s University of Charlotte student (image included with permission.)

To prepare, we studied the historical evolution of the cookbook. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1859) taught us that standardizing the recipe form played a key role in the historical construction of white, middle-class femininity. Toni Tipton-Martin’s Jubilee (2019), on the other hand, uses the recipe as record, reclaiming African foodways erased by the slave trade.  

Inspired by these examples and others such as Vertamae Smart-Grosvener’s Vibration Cooking (1970), students did so much more than collect recipes; they wrote to understand themselves. Their collections centered beloved family traditions such as tailgating, commemorated lost loved ones, confronted traumatic memories of disordered eating, and recorded holiday traditions that bridged linguistic and geographic homeplaces. 

Cover, Student Mini-Cookbook, 2024. Queens University of Charlotte (image included with permission).

Writing about food invited students to discover and negotiate the complicated, sometimes painful, and sometimes joyful intersections between food, one’s past, and who one wishes to become; to legitimize and honor memories, emotions, cultural heritages, languages of origin, and embodied knowledges at risk of being lost.  

This is writing gen-AI cannot manufacture. Indeed, as one student put it: 

My favorite part of this assignment was being able to express myself in a way I had never experienced. Linking food to myself, and the various aspects of my identity or memories opened my mind to different ways people can express themselves. The only genuine struggle I had within this was overcoming the heavy emotions that I was trying to convey. At first, I experienced an emotional block, in which all my emotions related to the assignment seemed non-existent. This obviously limited the vulnerable aspect of my cookbook I have grown much pride in. The project has truly been a joy to complete, and I would gladly do it again. 

AI- writing erases linguistic differences and generates composite knowledge in service of expedience and transaction. Cookbook-writing, in contrast, opens space for abundance by resisting dominant literacies. In joining this tradition, students learned to recognize writing as a vital act—of remembering, of re-claiming, of resistance. 


Bonnie Shishko is Assistant Professor of English at Queens University of Charlotte, where she teaches courses on nineteenth-century literature and First-Year Writing. Her teaching and research focus on the intersection of gender, sexuality, dis/ability, and food in Victorian and contemporary women’s writing. Her work on recipes and their history has appeared or is forthcoming in Studies in the Novel, Victorians Institute Journal, the edited collections Elizabeth Robins Pennell: Critical Essays (Edinburgh University Press) and Teaching Food in Literature (MLA Press), as well as Journal of Victorian Culture Online and The Recipes Project. She enjoys all things pickled and discovering new ways to make the tastiest tomato sandwich.   

Shawn Bowers is Associate Professor at Queens University of Charlotte where she teaches courses on creative writing, Latinx literature, and First-Year Writing and currently serves as the director of General Education for the university. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens. Under the pen name Anita Cantillo, Shawn has published poetry in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Juke Joint, Blue Mesa Review, and Azahares, among other journals. Her favorite food is tamales from her beloved homeland of Costa Rica.  


Works Cited

Beeton, Isabella. Book of Household Management. London: S.O. Beeton, 1861. 

Kelly, Rhea. “Survey: 86% of Students Already Use AI in Their Studies.” Campus Technology. 28, (2024): https://campustechnology.com/articles/2024/08/28/survey-86-of-students-already-use-ai-in-their-studies.aspx.  

Notaker, Henry. A History of Cookbooks: from Kitchen to Page Over Seven Centuries. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017. 

Smart-Grosvenor, Vertamae. Vibration Cooking: Or, the Travel Notes of a Geeche Girl. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1970.  

Tipton-Martin, Toni. Jubilee: Recipes From Two Centuries of African American Cooking. New York: Clarkson Potter, 2019. 

Tompkins, Kyla. “Consider the Recipe.” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. 1,2 (2013): 439-445. 

Wall, Wendy. Recipes for Thought: Knowledge and Taste in the Early Modern Kitchen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.