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34 reviews for:
Pressure Cooker: Why Home Cooking Won't Solve Our Problems and What We Can Do about It
Joslyn Brenton, Sinikka Elliott, Sarah Bowen
3.96 AVERAGE
34 reviews for:
Pressure Cooker: Why Home Cooking Won't Solve Our Problems and What We Can Do about It
Joslyn Brenton, Sinikka Elliott, Sarah Bowen
3.96 AVERAGE
Amazing look at food issues
This book is a very well-cited study of food, its acquisition, preparation, and consumption. It follows several families, mostly low income families, as they navigate feeding themselves. Women's roles and the perceptions around them are central, as are our country's policies about welfare. I was hoping to keep reading forever, but I've got a list of many other works to find out more thanks to the references section in this book. Definitely a must read for anyone concerned about our food supply, hunger, poverty, welfare, and policy and its outcomes.
This book is a very well-cited study of food, its acquisition, preparation, and consumption. It follows several families, mostly low income families, as they navigate feeding themselves. Women's roles and the perceptions around them are central, as are our country's policies about welfare. I was hoping to keep reading forever, but I've got a list of many other works to find out more thanks to the references section in this book. Definitely a must read for anyone concerned about our food supply, hunger, poverty, welfare, and policy and its outcomes.
I really loved this look at how families really eat, especially with the focus on women of color in a smaller city. There is a lot of pressure for each of us to feed our families and ourselves properly in order to make ourselves healthier and change the world. But it's often too much pressure, and it's hard for everyone, and harder the less money and time you have.
They followed 9 different families in this book and while I appreciated the diverse perspectives, it was sometimes hard to keep track of all the people. But seeing them grocery shopping and cooking and interacting with family provides important insights. There are research notes at the end of this book which I appreciate but didn't read as a lay person reading this book.
There's also no answers in here, which is okay. It's not billed as a book of answers. And it does critique the white men out there who are all so surprised and shocked to learn that we can't all make all of our food from scratch with local ingredients. Thank you for calling them out as you share the circumstances of some real folks.
They followed 9 different families in this book and while I appreciated the diverse perspectives, it was sometimes hard to keep track of all the people. But seeing them grocery shopping and cooking and interacting with family provides important insights. There are research notes at the end of this book which I appreciate but didn't read as a lay person reading this book.
There's also no answers in here, which is okay. It's not billed as a book of answers. And it does critique the white men out there who are all so surprised and shocked to learn that we can't all make all of our food from scratch with local ingredients. Thank you for calling them out as you share the circumstances of some real folks.
Pressure Cooker is the book version of an anthropological study examining how families (primarily low-income) in Raleigh, North Carolina shop, prepare food, and eat. It attempts to rebut the idea that our eating habits can substantially reform the food system, arguing that people we might judge for making seemingly less-than-perfect choices are hampered by overwhelming systematic factors and are doing the best they can.
To do this, the book chooses the following structure:
• List a commonly heard food commandment – “Make time for food,” “Shop Smarter, Eat Better,” – next to a few quotes from well-known food writers (Michael Pollan, Jamie Oliver) who preach said gospel.
• Provide three quick vignettes narrating, blow-by-blow, a scene from the daily life of one of the nine featured families, typically focusing around some element of food (cooking, grocery shopping, trying to eat as a family).
• Throw in a bit of research that, in combination with the everyday-life narration, supposedly demonstrates why said food commandment is ridiculous and out-of-touch with the realities of most everyday Americans.
In the vein of Mathew Desmond’s Evicted, Pressure Cooker attempts to use an anthropological study to argue home cooking is not the solution to our country’s food access problems. The authors present, without comment, illustrations of people’s everyday lives, using storytelling to let the reader draw their own conclusions and thus ostensibly have greater buy-in to the perspective. But it doesn’t quite work. Evicted managed to pull this off because house hunting and evictions are clear, defined time points: the reader connects the dots between Event A and Outcome B. Food and health outcomes, however, are the sum of a thousand daily choices, making it difficult to infer what precisely about a family’s day is supposed to be rebutting one of the food commandments the authors want us to think is misguided.
I’m not critiquing complex connections– it’s good to have nuanced data, and “A unconditionally causes B” is extremely rare. The larger problem is the author’s claims can lack evidence. For example, in the segment “Bring Good Food to Others,” the authors assert that food non-profits, such as attempts to bring gardens to low-income urban areas, are often unwelcome by the people they’re meant to help. Then they describe efforts at urban farms in Detroit – no commentary, just mentioning they exist. Then they present the daily lives of three families…none of whom mention anything about gardens. There is no research cited about anyone disliking gardens, or that one would be unwelcome. But I as the reader am supposed to finish the section have concluded such non-profits and programs are ineffective, even though no real evidence suggesting such as been presented.
Pressure Cooker has many valid points. When you don’t have reliable access to a car, even getting to a grocery store can be impossible; you can’t exactly cook when your family is living in a hotel room; kids are bombarded with temptations for unhealthy food that even the most dedicated parents are powerless to combat. But these points (in addition to being pretty sufficiently covered in previous literature such as $2 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America) don’t actually negate the argument that cooking healthy food from scratch when you can is a good idea. It would be most successful if used to argue that cooking health food from scratch isn’t sufficient to solve all the challenges of our food system – but it fails to show that home cooking shouldn’t be a proposed solution.
There were a few other problems. The narration is highly repetitive, stating the same facts about the same people over and over and across multiple chapters (ironically, despite the repetition, it was hard to keep the families straight). Ideas would contradict themselves: the authors mentioned repeatedly than people across socioeconomic statuses all want organic food, but then discussed how organic offerings at an interviewee’s restaurant were ignored because the surrounding neighborhood was low socioeconomic status. And if you aren’t a reader already sympathetic to the argument of systematic factors, this book can at times leave you MORE convinced the problem is people making poor personal choices.
I recognize that this was a comprehensive study that took thousands of hours of work and will likely help continue to shed light on how difficult it is to get all people access to healthy, delicious, affordable food. It excels at pointing out that there are so many more challenges in today’s world than food: our society has crazy expectations about succeeding in every area of life, we’re awash in marketing, many people lack strong social support systems. It makes a contribution to the literature on food access, and it’s not bad to push back on the narrative of “personal choice will solve everything.” It just doesn’t accomplish these tasks in any astonishingly successful way.
To do this, the book chooses the following structure:
• List a commonly heard food commandment – “Make time for food,” “Shop Smarter, Eat Better,” – next to a few quotes from well-known food writers (Michael Pollan, Jamie Oliver) who preach said gospel.
• Provide three quick vignettes narrating, blow-by-blow, a scene from the daily life of one of the nine featured families, typically focusing around some element of food (cooking, grocery shopping, trying to eat as a family).
• Throw in a bit of research that, in combination with the everyday-life narration, supposedly demonstrates why said food commandment is ridiculous and out-of-touch with the realities of most everyday Americans.
In the vein of Mathew Desmond’s Evicted, Pressure Cooker attempts to use an anthropological study to argue home cooking is not the solution to our country’s food access problems. The authors present, without comment, illustrations of people’s everyday lives, using storytelling to let the reader draw their own conclusions and thus ostensibly have greater buy-in to the perspective. But it doesn’t quite work. Evicted managed to pull this off because house hunting and evictions are clear, defined time points: the reader connects the dots between Event A and Outcome B. Food and health outcomes, however, are the sum of a thousand daily choices, making it difficult to infer what precisely about a family’s day is supposed to be rebutting one of the food commandments the authors want us to think is misguided.
I’m not critiquing complex connections– it’s good to have nuanced data, and “A unconditionally causes B” is extremely rare. The larger problem is the author’s claims can lack evidence. For example, in the segment “Bring Good Food to Others,” the authors assert that food non-profits, such as attempts to bring gardens to low-income urban areas, are often unwelcome by the people they’re meant to help. Then they describe efforts at urban farms in Detroit – no commentary, just mentioning they exist. Then they present the daily lives of three families…none of whom mention anything about gardens. There is no research cited about anyone disliking gardens, or that one would be unwelcome. But I as the reader am supposed to finish the section have concluded such non-profits and programs are ineffective, even though no real evidence suggesting such as been presented.
Pressure Cooker has many valid points. When you don’t have reliable access to a car, even getting to a grocery store can be impossible; you can’t exactly cook when your family is living in a hotel room; kids are bombarded with temptations for unhealthy food that even the most dedicated parents are powerless to combat. But these points (in addition to being pretty sufficiently covered in previous literature such as $2 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America) don’t actually negate the argument that cooking healthy food from scratch when you can is a good idea. It would be most successful if used to argue that cooking health food from scratch isn’t sufficient to solve all the challenges of our food system – but it fails to show that home cooking shouldn’t be a proposed solution.
There were a few other problems. The narration is highly repetitive, stating the same facts about the same people over and over and across multiple chapters (ironically, despite the repetition, it was hard to keep the families straight). Ideas would contradict themselves: the authors mentioned repeatedly than people across socioeconomic statuses all want organic food, but then discussed how organic offerings at an interviewee’s restaurant were ignored because the surrounding neighborhood was low socioeconomic status. And if you aren’t a reader already sympathetic to the argument of systematic factors, this book can at times leave you MORE convinced the problem is people making poor personal choices.
I recognize that this was a comprehensive study that took thousands of hours of work and will likely help continue to shed light on how difficult it is to get all people access to healthy, delicious, affordable food. It excels at pointing out that there are so many more challenges in today’s world than food: our society has crazy expectations about succeeding in every area of life, we’re awash in marketing, many people lack strong social support systems. It makes a contribution to the literature on food access, and it’s not bad to push back on the narrative of “personal choice will solve everything.” It just doesn’t accomplish these tasks in any astonishingly successful way.
challenging
emotional
informative
sad
slow-paced