Priya Fielding-Singh > Quotes

“Radical empathy involves putting in the work “to educate oneself and to listen with a humble heart to understand another’s experience from their perspective, not as we imagine we would feel.”
― Priya Fielding-Singh, How the Other Half Eats: The Untold Story of Food and Inequality in America

“The sociologist Sharon Hays coined the term intensive mothering in 1996 when she detailed the unreasonable, gendered demands society had increasingly placed on mothers since the 1980s. In the 1980s and 1990s, as more women in North America became educated and began entering the labor force, the intensive-mothering ideology arose as a means to redomesticate women through motherhood.”
― Priya Fielding-Singh, How the Other Half Eats: The Untold Story of Food and Inequality in America

“Rather than trying to make sense of other people from your own perspective and lived experience, you must work to understand their experiences deeply, from their perspectives and lived experiences. Radical empathy is a tall order, and I would never claim to have wholly succeeded at it. Like all human beings, I am prone to biases born of my own experiences that color how I make sense of everything I observe. But an awareness of these biases — and a continual commitment to questioning them — also positioned me to see what others might have missed when it came to families’ diets.”
― Priya Fielding-Singh, How the Other Half Eats: The Untold Story of Food and Inequality in America

“Books about food are often filled with insights or advice that makes us feel bad about how we are eating. They tell us that we should follow a plant-based diet or that our TV dinners are irreparably harming the planet. Because these books, informative as they may be, tend to be highly prescriptive, they can inadvertently make us more judgmental. They can encourage us to be increasingly critical of ourselves and others. This is a different kind of book. I hope you will find it short on judgment and long on empathy and evidence about the feeding challenges that unite and divide families across American society.”
― Priya Fielding-Singh, How the Other Half Eats: The Untold Story of Food and Inequality in America

“Over the past fifty years, the racial income gap has not budged. In 1968, shortly after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the median Black family income was 57 percent that of whites. In 2016, it was 56 percent. But the starkest racial divides are in household wealth, reflecting centuries of white privilege that have made it particularly difficult for people of color to achieve economic security. Today, the average Black family with children holds just one cent of wealth for every dollar that the average white family with children holds.15”
― Priya Fielding-Singh, How the Other Half Eats: The Untold Story of Food and Inequality in America

“we are each other’s harvest: we are each other’s business: we are each other’s magnitude and bond.  — GWENDOLYN BROOKS, “PAUL ROBESON” What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed.  — BARBARA KINGSOLVER, ANIMAL DREAMS”
― Priya Fielding-Singh, How the Other Half Eats: The Untold Story of Food and Inequality in America

“Saying yes to junk-food requests was how low-income moms worked to prove to themselves they were good mothers; saying no was how affluent moms tried to derive that exact same sense of worth.”
― Priya Fielding-Singh, How the Other Half Eats: The Untold Story of Food and Inequality in America