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alexisrt 's review for:
Pressure Cooker: Why Home Cooking Won't Solve Our Problems and What We Can Do about It
by Joslyn Brenton, Sinikka Elliott, Sarah Bowen
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.
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.