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Cooking Resources for a Disability-Friendly Kitchen

| By | Food,News,Staff Picks

October is Disability Awareness Month! A great way to celebrate diversity and inclusion, highlight acceptance and build awareness around the fact that disabilities are both apparent and non-apparent. 

In addition to being the Business Librarian in Rutgers-New Brunswick, I am also a food historian and author. In this work, I am always communicating the connection between food and history, and what we can learn from this. But honestly, food as a topic and conveyer of information trickles through so many aspects of human experience (not just history). After all, everyone has to eat! This gave me the idea of investigating cookbooks and other resources related to food and cooking that are disability friendly through the lens of Rutgers Libraries.  

Searching through the Rutgers Libraries collections yielded a variety of supportive resources in this area; and turns out it is not a new concept! Most of the early focus on cooking for the disabled in the U.S. revolved around those who were ill or injured, with hospitals and other caregiving facilities providing cookbooks and menu ideas, such as the book Collection of Recipes for the use of Special Diet Kitchens in U.S. Military Hospitals (1898), published by the U.S. Soldiers Christian Aid Association, Cleveland, Ohio. Designed to supplement the foods already in hospitals and aid volunteer nurses during the Spanish-American War, it capitalized on the idea of “food as medicine.” In fact, the book’s introduction states, “Leading medical men express the opinion that, in a majority of cases; the diet of patients is of more importance than medicine.”

Aiding the visually impaired was another common theme. Cooking and baking rely heavily on sight, but this doesn’t mean those with impairments cannot be creative and successful in the kitchen. Articles from the early and mid-twentieth century discussed new advancements in the area. A 1932 article “Cooking for the Blind” in London’s Answers magazine suggested using the other senses to assist in the process (touch for ingredients, hearing to listen for liquid boiling and smell to make sure things don’t overcook). It also recommends using an electric stove (still rather new at the time) for increased safety. But apparently gas companies realized they needed to make sure their products were safe too. A 1952 New York Times article “Cooking Class for Blind: Safety Devices Protect First Group of 13 in Jersey” discusses a cooking class for blind residents of Union County, NJ. Organized by the Elizabethtown Consolidated Gas Company, it incorporated special pots, pans and other equipment fitted with safety gadgets. 

This focus on assisting the vision impaired continued throughout consecutive decades, particularly as new technological advancements came into play. The 2000s and beyond have seen many new innovations. This includes appliance design improvements, such as tactile markings placed under cooktop controls, as mentioned in the 2007 Appliance Design article “Cooking for the Blind.” Apps were also covered as beneficial devices, such as in “Tasteful: A Cooking App Designed for Visually Impaired Users,” a book chapter featured in the 2021 book Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction. Design Methods and User Experience. The idea behind this app is to help visually impaired users locate ingredients quickly and find more ways to cook flexibly, providing more independence with cooking. There are even cooking schools for the visually impaired, as discussed in the article “The cooking school for the blind that has already trained 80 gastronomic entrepreneurs: `Prejudice ends when they taste their food’” featured in a 2023 issue of CE Noticias Financieras. Located in Beccar, Argentina, the Román Rosell Institute for the Blind trains cooks through courses that last from three to six years; teaching them to be independent cooks for themselves and their families and giving them the chance to develop catering and home delivery businesses. 

Cognitive impairment is another area of disability focus within the culinary world. Before the recent explosion of Artificial Intelligence, a 2014 AAAI (Applications of Artificial Intelligence) Conference paper entitled “A Smart Range Helping Cognitively-Impaired Persons Cooking” presented a new smart range prototype to help monitor and guide a cognitively impaired user through the process of preparing a meal via load cells, heat sensors and electromagnetic contacts embedded in the range. Six years later, the researchers presented another paper, “A smart cooking device for assisting cognitively impaired users” in the Journal of Reliable Intelligent Environments, discussing further developments to the prototype, such as the ability to detect risky situations and a state-transition recognition algorithm incorporating a model of cognitive errors. In addition, several prototype experiments and a study conducted with targeted users, with companies, public organisms and professionals, were discussed.  

What about cookbooks? There are many – here is just a sample of what is available. Published on behalf of the Disabled Living Foundation in 1986 as a reference book, Kitchen Sense for Disabled People covers the problems faced by disabled people working in the kitchen and how they can be resolved. It is divided into the following sections; kitchen design, equipment, coping with problems, healthy eating, eating with others, shopping, and cooking short cuts. While this book might seem a little dated, the practical solutions, adjustments, and independent living strategies for individuals with disabilities working in the kitchen offered within its pages still resonate today. For teens and adults with autism, journalist Lydia Wilkins authored The Autism-Friendly Cookbook (2022) designed to provide guidance when cooking for friends, lacking inspiration, or on low-energy days. Written in clear, jargon-free language, recipes are categorized by meal type with additional guidance on the level of energy needed to make them. Wilkins thoughtfully includes additional modifications for those with sensory issues or who want to expand their experience in the kitchen, as well as contributions from individuals within the autistic community.  Crip up the Kitchen: Tools, Tips and Recipes for the Disabled Cook (2023) by Jules Sherred is designed to make cooking accessible and enjoyable for individuals with disabilities. A commercial food photographer, author, recipe developer, and advocate for disability and trans rights, Sherred provides 50 recipes using popular kitchen tools like the electric pressure cooker, air fryer, and bread machine. Kitchen organization, meal planning, and safe cooking techniques tailored to varying physical abilities and energy levels are discussed practically and inclusively. 

Please check out your local library and/or bookstore for more options! 

Here’s some lists to get you started: