Let’s cook up a batch of spaghetti sauce. Is there only one recipe, with one set of ingredients? Do cultural preferences and available raw material affect the ingredients that go into the recipe? Should we expect the cooks to have tried making spaghetti sauce before? Will a cook make it the same way every time or does it vary from one batch to another?  How is the sauce preparation affected by an individual cook’s cultural or social perspective within the community?

It is apparent that the something as straight-forward as making spaghetti sauce can be greatly influenced by the learning experiences of humans throughout their lives, coupled with the social contexts in which they find themselves in. Can the parameters be generalized and theories developed around why cooks can influence the taste, texture and presentation of their recipes to patrons?

We start this paper with a description of how people make spaghetti sauce as an analogy of how it represented the adult educational experience, and reasons for learning new skills and knowledge in order to affect change in family life. It helps to demonstrate the essential ingredients in adult education is variability of human beings and how the society that live in and the people that they interact with affects how they learn.