Pressure Cooker: Why Home Cooking Won't Solve Our Problems and What We Can Do About It

This isn't a book about cooking. It's a book about how what we say, think, do, preach, and spend public money around food, health, and family puts more and more pressure on families, especially on mothers.The book is a result of a research project, following multiple families of various socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, in the Raleigh, North Carolina area. It looks at how they eat, why they make their choices, and how they try to balance time, money, health, conflict in the family over food choices.Everyone parent wants their children to be healthy, and wants to feed them in a healthy way. It's not that simple even for well-off families, though, and for the economically struggling, it gets even more complicated. Food isn't just nutrition. It's also culture, family tradition, personal memories and feelings, and a way that people assert identity. None of this is easy on the families deciding what are the best choices.And making these choices is further complicated by the fact that fruits and vegetables are expensive. If you're on a limited income, especially if your food budget is SNAP benefits, it can be difficult or impossible to afford the recommended number of fruits and vegetables for the family. At the bottom end of the economic ladder, there is food insecurity--families who can't provide every member enough food to keep them healthy and active. In these families, adults have to decide who eats, and get enough calories into their children to keep them healthy and growing.With money so limited, there is also the painful reality of deciding what bills to pay. If you have a medical emergency and need care, that's a large bill you probably can't pay, at least not and pay the rent and the electric and the phone, as well. Yet food is not a need that can be deferred. I'm an aging woman with no kids, but I've been through some of this myself, thank God with no one but me depending on my ability to balance things. When you have to feed others, especially children young enough that they can't even understand the issues, it's much worse. It's all well and good to say that this is what we need, this is what we can afford, so this is what you have to eat--but in real life, you can't make kids eat what they've decided they're not going to eat. I recall one memorable incident from my early teens. My younger sister was three. She liked peas. Really, she did. We all knew that, and had observed her liking of peas on a regular basis.But that night, she had decided she was not going to eat peas.My parents had a rule, I think an easy and flexible rule compared to many families around the subject of family dinner and food. Anything that was put on your plate, you had to eat three bites. Not finish it, just eat three bites. That night, my sister decided she was not eating any peas. At all. My dad, who backed down on nothing, backed down to the extent of insisting on, not three bites, but three peas. And my sister still refused. My mom and I watched in amazement, and distress, and inability to come up with anything that would make either of them budge, as this confrontation went on for nearly four hours. In the end, my sister did not eat the peas.On other nights, later, she did eat peas.That's one personal example. The simple fact is that there is no way to force a child to consume food they have decided they will not eat, and if you are already struggling to put enough food on the table, you can't waste money on what you know won't be eaten. The kids get no benefit from what they refuse to eat anyway.Moreover, nearly all of the advice about what to eat, how to cook it, the central importance of the nightly family dinner, and how to afford good food is coming from white, male, upper income foodies and chefs who will never themselves have to figure out how to feed everyone with $1.45 per person per meal, in an urban center that may have no close supermarkets, and where costs are relatively high.There is so much more in here, and I can't talk about even everything that moved or disturbed me greatly. Please, read the book, and think about it.Highly recommended.I bought this book.

A good compilation of stories evidencing the failure of our society as it relates to the poor and marginalized

With many references to existing research, this book is organized around the stories of a diverse group of women and their families, and the role of food and cooking in their homes and lives. In so doing, the authors present a richly textured view of the role of food in the lives of American women and families of different races, ethnicities, and incomes levels. From what I have seen, it's the first compelling critique of the common impulses underlying well-intentioned exhortations to cook healthy food at home.If you are at all curious about how food insecurity works and what it looks like for 11.8% of American households, I highly recommend this book. I learned about the history of SNAP and WIC, food banks, and I read about the connections between food insecurity and other types of insecurity, such as employment, homelessness, transportation or the lack thereof, and health. This book vividly conveys that food issues are embedded in a kind of net of other structural issues; with memorable stories and concrete facts to illustrate these relationships.

I already feel bad at the supermarket when the person ahead of me is juggling WIC and EBT and some other cards and pocketfuls of change trying to buy food. A whole book about people on the edge just isn't the kind of depressing stuff I need to weigh me down any further! It is a well written book, and seems to make a lot of very good points. I haven't gotten all the way through it yet. The title promises something on what we can do about our problems. I'm hoping it gets a little more cheerful then!

I was hoping for a book about alternatives to sit down family meals. This book is not that great, not that bad. It focuses on the author's research.

This book tells the stories of 9 families from different backgrounds and income levels as they relate to food. These stories are interwoven with thoroughly researched current information connecting the stories to broader societal issues. The authors are sociologists and they focus on the systemic issues that make the ideal of daily home-cooked meals hard to actualize. The basic message is that it's not helpful to blame individuals for being too lazy or ignorant to cook - solutions need to address the societal root causes. Not light reading but very readable, and worth the time.

A good book to begin to understand some of the issues surrounding poverty and access to food.After finishing the book, I found the Conclusions chapter to be the most helpful for taking back to my students when we discuss food. The stories following the families were really interesting as well.If you are looking to move beyond some of the white washed and sanitized versions of eating in the US, this book could be a good place to start.

This book confirms and validates a lot of thoughts I've had about providing my family a home cooked meal, and the continued gender inequities in having a family. I appreciate that these smart women are talking about it, and spent an enormous amount of time interviewing women across socio-economic classes to shed light on this tricky subject.The book was really well written, which is a real challenge when writing about research. The description of the home environments really transported you to those kitchens in North Carolina.

Very enlightening read! I am 'savouring' every page🤗

Hunger, inequality and social pressures about parenting are important issues to look at. While this book is interesting in points, it's not a great book.For instance, it follows the trend of many of these books, in that it shows the participants' lives, then has an incredibly awkward segue into the writers' policy proposals, which are incredibly vague and in no way supported by what came before.They keep whining that the meeeeeeaaaan white Protestant men are making the immigrants assimilate. But there's no acknowledgment that the availability of cheap, pliable immigrant labour is and has always been a huge reason why the lower rungs of the economic ladder are so poorly paid and so precarious.And I seriously doubt they'd be as critical of, say, Mexico's incredibly harsh methods to ensure that people who emigrate there assimilate.It's getting 3 stars because the case studies were interesting. But it's a wasted opportunity. You get the distinct impression the studies were an excuse to pontificate. "Evicted" had some serious issues, but it sold so well because it treated the people it depicted as the main attraction (which the were) and scattered the writer's personal recommendations throughout, rather than in a block at the first opportunity. He was often wrong, but he knew what kept the reader and it was far less jarring.