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2 oeuvres 86 utilisateurs 4 critiques

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Sinikka Elliott is Assistant Professor of Sociology at North Carolina State University.

Œuvres de Sinikka Elliott

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2.5 stars. The authors followed nine families closely to write about the act of cooking and feeding ourselves. The bulk of the book is stories of individual snippets of daily life from these families. Yes, you get an idea of some of the challenges they face, but the book provides very little analysis, and it doesn't deliver on the promise to reveal "What We Can Do about It."

The authors discuss their research process. I would be interested to see actual papers published from this research, because the book itself doesn't appear to include data from that research, simply stories from a handful of the families studied.… (plus d'informations)
 
Signalé
CarolHicksCase | 3 autres critiques | Mar 12, 2023 |
Those of us who feed other people on a regular basis are familiar with the regular hectoring to get back to the kitchen and cook, and the promises of psychological, social, and nutritional benefits of doing so. If we all just pulled up our bootstraps and got to the frying pans, we would be better, healthier people. And 90% of the women I know look at these articles--often written by men--and say, "Good luck with that. Come into my life and make your perfect family dinners." Pressure Cooker is a study by three sociologists into what really goes into getting that dinner on the table, and why it doesn't look like Michael Pollan's lovingly simmered sugo. (I loved that they highlighted examples of the most noxious writing on the topic; they included a column of Mark Bittman's that I've repeatedly shared with swear words attached.)

The book is structured around the real stories of 9 women and their families. The women represent a cross section of ethnicities and class (ranging from homeless to middle class). The fieldwork and interviews are the heart of the book, but the stories serve as an entry point into the different factors surrounding mealtime in American families. The women all largely share a belief in feeding their families well, but their vision of what that looks like, and their ability to put it into practice, varies. Physical and financial obstacles to obtaining fresh food, time constraints, government programs, culture, family preferences, and equipment all play a role. The constraints have secondary effects; for example, on a tight food budget, parents can't afford to buy things that might go to waste. Familiar foods that will get eaten are a better use of money.

At its root, food crusaders get it wrong because they assume people don't cook because they don't want to. These women do want to eat well--they aren't serving Ho-Hos for dinner because they don't care. They are not meeting the ideals of foodie life because of circumstances that they cannot fully control.

The researchers were clearly sympathetic to their subjects and are generally nonjudgmental. (I did wind up disliking one of them--the middle class white woman whose daughter had never seen M&Ms.) The stories do an excellent job of showing how the constraints on their lives work out in practice for families and the field work is backed by research. The work was all home focused, so the influence of food consumed elsewhere is not looked at--another interesting line of questioning would be whether and how school food programs impact eating habits at home.

One slightly nitpicky point: I felt like a lot of the information in the notes was not just sources, but was valuable information that could have been put in the body text. It seems like they didn't want to disrupt narrative flow, but a lot of important details could be lost. As well, the setup was slightly confusing; the introduction says that the extended observations were done only with the lower class families, but the profiled families do include what I would consider middle class ones.

The solutions section is a little weak; fixing our food problem requires fixing a lot of things about our culture, from the way we begrudge poor people a decent diet, to ad hoc work schedules that make planning difficult, to city planning that leaves shopping inaccessible. There's simply too much to tackle, but I can't fault the authors for it, and they have some good ideas.

I did not find this book to be groundbreaking, but I enjoyed it and feel that the researchers had the correct approach to the topic.
… (plus d'informations)
 
Signalé
arosoff | 3 autres critiques | Jul 11, 2021 |
This is a decent piece of social research, and to the research team's credit, they do acknowledge that the presence of researchers would tend to have a big impact on what women buy, cook, and eat.

The feminist aspects of the book are right on target. Why is the burden of this almost 100% on women's shoulders? Having been one of these mothers myself (food insecure with multiple children and on public assistance), I felt validated by the accurate portraits of humiliation, fatigue, scrutiny, misplaced blame, lack of adequate transportation, and difficulty of obtaining child care. I could add to the list the complete joke that is called "child support enforcement." The entire culture is deeply ignorant of what poor women are up against in trying to feed their families. In my own children I have observed the disastrous effects of the gig economy and on-call labor.

The book discusses how underprivileged mothers are unfairly attacked: many in our harsh society insist that they should never give themselves or their children treats, they should never have gotten pregnant to begin with, they must live in fear of loss of custody if they make mistakes--and always the fathers get a free pass.

While I believe in quite a bit of what the food gurus teach, I also understand that cheap food with a long shelf life is an absolute necessity for many Americans to keep them from going hungry, whether it is the healthiest or not. I had never considered the cultural ramifications of demanding that black people give up "soul food" in order to be worthy and receive respect. This was a real eye-opener.

I felt that the book strayed fairly far afield of its subject matter in many places and that the authors had no solutions to offer that I haven't seen in every other sociology book for years--the government supplies everyone with money, food, paid leave, and child care, and then when massive inequalities persist and even become worse, rinse and repeat. Is there more that we should consider?

While government assistance has dwindled, I would actually have an easier time if I were in the same position now that I was in 15 years ago. There are more and larger food pantries and community gardens. Churches feed more people. There are summer programs to feed children. Food stamps can be used at farmer's markets and WIC checks can be used for fruits and vegetables now. Would it be ideal if all these reforms had occurred while government assistance stayed the same, or increased, or at least been handled more sensibly and with less malice? Absolutely.

How do we stop wasting food by millions of tons and get it to the people who need it? The authors at least begin to ask this question. To me, addressing food distribution is a better job for the government than simply handing out cash--which would simply cause inflation. As the authors point out, most communities have gigantic industrial kitchens that sit empty most of the time, that could be used to feed people. What about a government program that makes use of these--pays the cooks, the farmers, and transport/public transit/delivery providers? The whole Department of Agriculture is ridiculous and in need of a drastic overhaul. The Community Kitchen could be as much a part of public life as the public park or public library. There would be waste and theft and corruption ($100 of food was stolen from my church once) but we wouldn't be letting a third of our food rot in landfills.
… (plus d'informations)
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jillrhudy | 3 autres critiques | May 11, 2019 |
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.
… (plus d'informations)
1 voter
Signalé
LisCarey | 3 autres critiques | Apr 30, 2019 |

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