Cooking therapy in the creative arts therapy theoretical context: Conceptual validation and practical guidelines

Therapists across disciplines incorporate cooking as a central tool within their clinical practice. However, the concept of “cooking therapy” lacks a standardized operational definition, hindering the advancement of this field within psychotherapy. The main objective of this article is to examine cooking within the context of psychotherapy from the perspective of creative arts therapy (CAT). Through this lens, the authors aim to delineate the therapeutic factors inherent in the CATs and illustrate how these factors manifest in cooking activities within therapeutic settings. Therapists can use the proposed framework to establish consistency in cooking therapy protocols. This standardization will facilitate the development of comparable research exploring the effects and effectiveness of cooking therapy across populations. Moreover, therapists can gain insight into the therapeutic mechanisms, deepening their understanding of cooking’s potential contributions to the therapeutic process and its applications, analogous to various artistic modalities used in CATs.