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How the Other Half Eats: The Untold Story of Food and Inequality in America
A fascinating look at dietary differences along class lines, revealing that lack of access to healthy food is far from the primary driver of nutritional inequality in America.
Inequality in America manifests in many ways, but perhaps nowhere more than in how we eat. From her years of field research, sociologist and ethnographer Priya Fielding-Singh brings us into the kitchens of dozens of families from varied educational, economic, and ethnoracial backgrounds to explore how—and why—we eat the way we do. We get to know four families intimately: the Bakers, a Black family living below the federal poverty line; the Williamses, a working-class white family just above it; the Ortegas, a middle-class Latinx family; and the Cains, an affluent white family.
Whether it's worrying about how far pantry provisions can stretch or whether there's enough time to get dinner on the table before soccer practice, all families have unique experiences that reveal their particular dietary constraints and challenges. By diving into the nuances of these families’ lives, Fielding-Singh lays bare the limits of efforts narrowly focused on improving families’ food access. Instead, she reveals how being rich or poor in America impacts something even more fundamental than the food families can afford: these experiences impact the very meaning of food itself.
Packed with lyrical storytelling and groundbreaking research, as well as Fielding-Singh’s personal experiences with food as a biracial, South Asian American woman, How the Other Half Eats illuminates exactly how inequality starts on the dinner plate. Once you’ve taken a seat at tables across America, you’ll never think about class, food, and public health the same way again.
Inequality in America manifests in many ways, but perhaps nowhere more than in how we eat. From her years of field research, sociologist and ethnographer Priya Fielding-Singh brings us into the kitchens of dozens of families from varied educational, economic, and ethnoracial backgrounds to explore how—and why—we eat the way we do. We get to know four families intimately: the Bakers, a Black family living below the federal poverty line; the Williamses, a working-class white family just above it; the Ortegas, a middle-class Latinx family; and the Cains, an affluent white family.
Whether it's worrying about how far pantry provisions can stretch or whether there's enough time to get dinner on the table before soccer practice, all families have unique experiences that reveal their particular dietary constraints and challenges. By diving into the nuances of these families’ lives, Fielding-Singh lays bare the limits of efforts narrowly focused on improving families’ food access. Instead, she reveals how being rich or poor in America impacts something even more fundamental than the food families can afford: these experiences impact the very meaning of food itself.
Packed with lyrical storytelling and groundbreaking research, as well as Fielding-Singh’s personal experiences with food as a biracial, South Asian American woman, How the Other Half Eats illuminates exactly how inequality starts on the dinner plate. Once you’ve taken a seat at tables across America, you’ll never think about class, food, and public health the same way again.
352 pages, Hardcover
First published November 16, 2021
263 people are currently reading
8289 people want to read
About the author
Priya Fielding-Singh
1 book48 followersPriya Fielding-Singh is an American sociologist and ethnographer. She is an Assistant Professor of Family and Consumer Studies at the University of Utah. Her research and writing examine issues of social and economic justice, with a focus on families, food and health. Her forthcoming book, How The Other Half Eats, unpacks nutritional inequality in the U.S. through a captivating examination of class and health, following four families intimately across the income spectrum in an exploration of the meaning of food itself.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 356 reviews
August 27, 2022
4.5 stars
I heard about How the Other Half Eats through NPR’s Code Switch podcast and feel so glad that I checked it out. In this narrative and highly readable book, sociologist and ethnographer Priya Fielding-Singh details how and why a variety of American families eat the way that they do. While Fielding-Singh conducted over 100 interviews, we follow four families in-depth: the Bakers, a Black family living below the federal poverty line; the Williamses, a working-class White family; the Ortegas, a middle-class Latinx family; and the Cains, an affluent white family. Through her rigorous and thoughtful observation, Fielding-Singh lays bare the nuanced factors affecting these families’ food choices and what we as a society must do to provide families, especially mothers, with more support for their health and wellbeing.
I learned fascinating information reading this book. One of my first takeaways: while the idea of food deserts and lack of public access to healthful foods is prominent, lack of access is not actually the key determinant in shaping families’ food choices. Fielding-Singh documents how families living in poverty and lower socioeconomic statuses use food as a way to provide comfort for their kids (e.g., if I cannot afford to buy my kid a new videogame or an expensive fun trip, I can at least provide them with this bag of Doritos or a soda). I appreciated the nuance in which she wrote about the intersection of food and emotional comfort. Secondly, Fielding-Singh writes about the extreme pressure placed on mothers specifically to obsess and monitor their children’s food intake. She details how low-income mothers specifically are often strapped for resources and time, and thus they sometimes are forced to fall back on takeout or processed foods after working long hours and supporting their kids in other ways.
As a researcher and reader I enjoyed How the Other Half Eats for many reasons. Fielding-Singh’s writing is keen, intelligent, and easy to follow, such that she captures both the nuances of these families’ lives while still describing their experiences in a story-like format. She’s nonjudgmental and empathetic while remaining astute and precise in her observations. I felt her deep care for these families and these issues of food, gender, and health, and I liked that she maintained both her humanness and her role as a researcher. She makes tangible recommendations for action at the end of the book and describes her research methods with clarity and depth.
Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in inequality, family life, and/or food and nutrition. While I don’t have any intention or desire to write a book myself, after reading this I was like, oh wow, how cool if someone could somehow write like, the therapy equivalent of this book. Anyway, props to Priya Fielding-Singh for a great read and I hope her research continues to thrive.
I heard about How the Other Half Eats through NPR’s Code Switch podcast and feel so glad that I checked it out. In this narrative and highly readable book, sociologist and ethnographer Priya Fielding-Singh details how and why a variety of American families eat the way that they do. While Fielding-Singh conducted over 100 interviews, we follow four families in-depth: the Bakers, a Black family living below the federal poverty line; the Williamses, a working-class White family; the Ortegas, a middle-class Latinx family; and the Cains, an affluent white family. Through her rigorous and thoughtful observation, Fielding-Singh lays bare the nuanced factors affecting these families’ food choices and what we as a society must do to provide families, especially mothers, with more support for their health and wellbeing.
I learned fascinating information reading this book. One of my first takeaways: while the idea of food deserts and lack of public access to healthful foods is prominent, lack of access is not actually the key determinant in shaping families’ food choices. Fielding-Singh documents how families living in poverty and lower socioeconomic statuses use food as a way to provide comfort for their kids (e.g., if I cannot afford to buy my kid a new videogame or an expensive fun trip, I can at least provide them with this bag of Doritos or a soda). I appreciated the nuance in which she wrote about the intersection of food and emotional comfort. Secondly, Fielding-Singh writes about the extreme pressure placed on mothers specifically to obsess and monitor their children’s food intake. She details how low-income mothers specifically are often strapped for resources and time, and thus they sometimes are forced to fall back on takeout or processed foods after working long hours and supporting their kids in other ways.
As a researcher and reader I enjoyed How the Other Half Eats for many reasons. Fielding-Singh’s writing is keen, intelligent, and easy to follow, such that she captures both the nuances of these families’ lives while still describing their experiences in a story-like format. She’s nonjudgmental and empathetic while remaining astute and precise in her observations. I felt her deep care for these families and these issues of food, gender, and health, and I liked that she maintained both her humanness and her role as a researcher. She makes tangible recommendations for action at the end of the book and describes her research methods with clarity and depth.
Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in inequality, family life, and/or food and nutrition. While I don’t have any intention or desire to write a book myself, after reading this I was like, oh wow, how cool if someone could somehow write like, the therapy equivalent of this book. Anyway, props to Priya Fielding-Singh for a great read and I hope her research continues to thrive.
November 7, 2021
The entire world knows Americans eat badly, are hugely overweight and unfit, and don’t know good food when they see it. But Priya Fielding-Singh, a Stanford sociology student, wanted to know what exactly families were eating, and why. She personally conducted a study, interviewing 160 parents and their mostly teenage children, and spending three months observing four families, all in the Bay area of northern California. The result was a Phd and this book, How The Other Half Eats.
Not being a nutritionist, she avoided judgment on what people ate. Being a sociologist, she wanted to know why parents bought what they did, why everyone ate what they did, and the role food played in their families. She networked her way to a balanced effort, with rich and poor, Black, white, Hispanics and Asians. (It was all but impossible to find a father responsible for the groceries and the feeding. She managed to profile one.) She was open to getting close to the families, and ended up helping make dinner, going to birthday parties, watching old movies and of course, shopping. She recorded their stories, listened to their histories and avoided getting personally involved in their crises. Like any ethnographer, her focus was observation, making endless notes on artifacts, décor, clothing, hair, activities, neighborhoods and foods, in order to write it all up as if no one had ever heard of these kinds of people before.
Her book is very personal as well as thorough. She weaves in her own story and the food she was raised on, and how she approaches bringing up her own child now, nearly ten years later. She is class conscious and very aware of privilege.
It takes about a hundred pages, but Priya Fielding-Singh (hereinafter PFS) finally discovers where conventional wisdom and common knowledge are plainly wrong. Everyone “knows” that being poor means being unable to afford quality food. That poverty makes people fat and sloppy, that it leads the higher quality supermarkets to pack up and leave, changing neighborhoods into food deserts. But PFS looked at the data and found that was not true.
Mothers will buy junk food for their kids when it is the only luxury they can afford. A couple of Starbucks Frappacinos, a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal or peanut butter cinnamon Oreos is not their idea of nutrition, but it is about the only thing they can do that makes their kids feel great. In wealthier families, the mothers have far less compunction about saying no to junk food. It actually makes them feel like good mothers, she says. Poorer moms spend all day saying no, so a treat they can actually afford is a no-brainer.
In the summer, richer kids go to camps, have laptop computers, take lessons or tutors as needed. They go on trips, they eat in restaurants on a regular basis. For the marginal, there is none of that. Their kids sit and watch videos all through the summer break. Ice cream from the passing truck is as good as it gets.
She found another myth regarding food deserts. The moms in the study had all the choice in the world, because Americans go far for their groceries. The “average American travels 5.2 miles to grocery shop, and 90 percent of shopping trips in the country are made by car. It turns out that people are willing to travel long distances to buy food and are less geographically constrained,” she says.
She found from her participants that quality foods were not more expensive or beyond their means. Processed foods cost more, not less, but were more filling. To that extent, they provided more value than raw ingredients. It was never a preference for junk; it was all thought through.
This brings up waste. Americans trash nearly 40% of the food they buy. In poorer households, that just cannot happen. Mothers quickly learn that brussel sprouts stay on the plate, but KFC is eaten completely, right to the bone, every time. When it is critical to get calories into growing (and growling) stomachs, they have no option but to cater to picky teenage preferences. It’s not their choice, but it satisfies their families and keeps them going. Mothers are clear that fast food and processed foods are not the legacy they want future generations to wax nostalgic over, like these moms do about their own mothers’ cooking.
She says “Food insecurity in the United States affects more than thirty-five million people and about two-thirds of households below the poverty line. In 2019, one in nine Americans lacked enough food.” Programs like SNAP and WIC did not solve the problem (nor were they meant to), but they alter behavior dramatically. When their cards are recharged on the first of the month, cardholders grocery shop like there’s no tomorrow. Rather than budget weekly, they spend it all gloriously at once (it also saves on gas), and eat really well that first week. As the month wears on, the cupboards empty out, sometimes leaving nothing at all before the cards recharge. It’s an artificial, unnatural and most unfortunate cycle for those who must pay half their income in rent. They are simply never out of the hole, and this is how they cope.
Food shopping is an ordeal, rich or poor. Junk foods, processed foods and candies line the aisles and end caps. Children ask, then beg, then cry for them. The tie-ins from all the commercials they see on TV and their own phones make them drool for the products when they see them within reach. Never mind the bad effects, their own cultural heritage, their economic position or the food’s bad effects: moms (must) cave on a regular basis. The processed food makers win, again and again. “They promise moms ease, comfort, and convenience. They promise moms quiet, happy children. They promise moms the chance to be ‘good’ by making their lives easier and getting their kids fed. They promise less sodium and fat and more whole grains and protein. They promise health. But apart from, perhaps, convenience, the industry does not deliver on any of these promises. In fact, it brings parents the exact opposite. It fosters nagging and begging. It prompts meltdowns and tantrums in the supermarket. It forces moms to sacrifice their preferences to keep kids quiet and content. It promotes lies about food’s qualities and benefits.” PFS is hardly the first to call for regulation banning food advertising to children.
She was initially shocked that poorer mothers had no problem blowing twenty bucks on fast food treats, even though the rent was short again and the cellphones were cut off for lack of payment. But sober reflection made PFS come to the same conclusion the mothers did: twenty bucks was not going to pay off a bill, appease the landlord or mollify the phone company. It was never going to make up for anything. A treat was a necessary event when cellphones were dead to the world. Another food perversion of poverty.
She found that mothers were always comparing themselves, judging how well their families were faring, taking small satisfaction that there were some worse off than they were, and that they were doing a better job with what little they had.
Most of all, she found mothers of all economic strata were totally stressed. The wealthier ones were stressed by not having enough time to make dinners for the family or spend quality time with the kids. The poorer ones stressed over that they could not deliver the American Dream. PFS did not, could not find even one mother satisfied with her own performance as a mom. If it wasn’t homecooking, it was worry over what a balanced regimen should be, what advertising to believe, or putting too much pressure on kids, supervising them too closely or not enough, exploiting their talents too hard or not at all, having a great family life or not – it is endless. Motherhood is a gigantic negative force endured seemingly by all American moms.
From there, PFS jumps to a remarkable Conclusion. She calls outright for far more respect and resources for mothers. She wants programs like SNAP and WIC totally revamped and made effective for far more families. Schools should provide good breakfasts and lunches. She wants governments to make the American Dream and the safety net real and activated parts of family life. “Personal responsibility has never solved a public health problem or remedied an inequity. Food is no exception. Certainly, many of us could make small choices to eat differently. Many of the families I met had either done so or were trying to figure out how to eat more nutritiously with the resources they had. But, largely due to the structures implemented by the food industry and federal government, most felt like they were fighting an uphill battle—and losing.”
These conclusions do not flow from her study; they flow from being an eyewitness to the daily distortions that food, sexism, racism and classism engender in modern American life. They come from the heart, which is to be applauded and encouraged.
David Wineberg
Not being a nutritionist, she avoided judgment on what people ate. Being a sociologist, she wanted to know why parents bought what they did, why everyone ate what they did, and the role food played in their families. She networked her way to a balanced effort, with rich and poor, Black, white, Hispanics and Asians. (It was all but impossible to find a father responsible for the groceries and the feeding. She managed to profile one.) She was open to getting close to the families, and ended up helping make dinner, going to birthday parties, watching old movies and of course, shopping. She recorded their stories, listened to their histories and avoided getting personally involved in their crises. Like any ethnographer, her focus was observation, making endless notes on artifacts, décor, clothing, hair, activities, neighborhoods and foods, in order to write it all up as if no one had ever heard of these kinds of people before.
Her book is very personal as well as thorough. She weaves in her own story and the food she was raised on, and how she approaches bringing up her own child now, nearly ten years later. She is class conscious and very aware of privilege.
It takes about a hundred pages, but Priya Fielding-Singh (hereinafter PFS) finally discovers where conventional wisdom and common knowledge are plainly wrong. Everyone “knows” that being poor means being unable to afford quality food. That poverty makes people fat and sloppy, that it leads the higher quality supermarkets to pack up and leave, changing neighborhoods into food deserts. But PFS looked at the data and found that was not true.
Mothers will buy junk food for their kids when it is the only luxury they can afford. A couple of Starbucks Frappacinos, a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal or peanut butter cinnamon Oreos is not their idea of nutrition, but it is about the only thing they can do that makes their kids feel great. In wealthier families, the mothers have far less compunction about saying no to junk food. It actually makes them feel like good mothers, she says. Poorer moms spend all day saying no, so a treat they can actually afford is a no-brainer.
In the summer, richer kids go to camps, have laptop computers, take lessons or tutors as needed. They go on trips, they eat in restaurants on a regular basis. For the marginal, there is none of that. Their kids sit and watch videos all through the summer break. Ice cream from the passing truck is as good as it gets.
She found another myth regarding food deserts. The moms in the study had all the choice in the world, because Americans go far for their groceries. The “average American travels 5.2 miles to grocery shop, and 90 percent of shopping trips in the country are made by car. It turns out that people are willing to travel long distances to buy food and are less geographically constrained,” she says.
She found from her participants that quality foods were not more expensive or beyond their means. Processed foods cost more, not less, but were more filling. To that extent, they provided more value than raw ingredients. It was never a preference for junk; it was all thought through.
This brings up waste. Americans trash nearly 40% of the food they buy. In poorer households, that just cannot happen. Mothers quickly learn that brussel sprouts stay on the plate, but KFC is eaten completely, right to the bone, every time. When it is critical to get calories into growing (and growling) stomachs, they have no option but to cater to picky teenage preferences. It’s not their choice, but it satisfies their families and keeps them going. Mothers are clear that fast food and processed foods are not the legacy they want future generations to wax nostalgic over, like these moms do about their own mothers’ cooking.
She says “Food insecurity in the United States affects more than thirty-five million people and about two-thirds of households below the poverty line. In 2019, one in nine Americans lacked enough food.” Programs like SNAP and WIC did not solve the problem (nor were they meant to), but they alter behavior dramatically. When their cards are recharged on the first of the month, cardholders grocery shop like there’s no tomorrow. Rather than budget weekly, they spend it all gloriously at once (it also saves on gas), and eat really well that first week. As the month wears on, the cupboards empty out, sometimes leaving nothing at all before the cards recharge. It’s an artificial, unnatural and most unfortunate cycle for those who must pay half their income in rent. They are simply never out of the hole, and this is how they cope.
Food shopping is an ordeal, rich or poor. Junk foods, processed foods and candies line the aisles and end caps. Children ask, then beg, then cry for them. The tie-ins from all the commercials they see on TV and their own phones make them drool for the products when they see them within reach. Never mind the bad effects, their own cultural heritage, their economic position or the food’s bad effects: moms (must) cave on a regular basis. The processed food makers win, again and again. “They promise moms ease, comfort, and convenience. They promise moms quiet, happy children. They promise moms the chance to be ‘good’ by making their lives easier and getting their kids fed. They promise less sodium and fat and more whole grains and protein. They promise health. But apart from, perhaps, convenience, the industry does not deliver on any of these promises. In fact, it brings parents the exact opposite. It fosters nagging and begging. It prompts meltdowns and tantrums in the supermarket. It forces moms to sacrifice their preferences to keep kids quiet and content. It promotes lies about food’s qualities and benefits.” PFS is hardly the first to call for regulation banning food advertising to children.
She was initially shocked that poorer mothers had no problem blowing twenty bucks on fast food treats, even though the rent was short again and the cellphones were cut off for lack of payment. But sober reflection made PFS come to the same conclusion the mothers did: twenty bucks was not going to pay off a bill, appease the landlord or mollify the phone company. It was never going to make up for anything. A treat was a necessary event when cellphones were dead to the world. Another food perversion of poverty.
She found that mothers were always comparing themselves, judging how well their families were faring, taking small satisfaction that there were some worse off than they were, and that they were doing a better job with what little they had.
Most of all, she found mothers of all economic strata were totally stressed. The wealthier ones were stressed by not having enough time to make dinners for the family or spend quality time with the kids. The poorer ones stressed over that they could not deliver the American Dream. PFS did not, could not find even one mother satisfied with her own performance as a mom. If it wasn’t homecooking, it was worry over what a balanced regimen should be, what advertising to believe, or putting too much pressure on kids, supervising them too closely or not enough, exploiting their talents too hard or not at all, having a great family life or not – it is endless. Motherhood is a gigantic negative force endured seemingly by all American moms.
From there, PFS jumps to a remarkable Conclusion. She calls outright for far more respect and resources for mothers. She wants programs like SNAP and WIC totally revamped and made effective for far more families. Schools should provide good breakfasts and lunches. She wants governments to make the American Dream and the safety net real and activated parts of family life. “Personal responsibility has never solved a public health problem or remedied an inequity. Food is no exception. Certainly, many of us could make small choices to eat differently. Many of the families I met had either done so or were trying to figure out how to eat more nutritiously with the resources they had. But, largely due to the structures implemented by the food industry and federal government, most felt like they were fighting an uphill battle—and losing.”
These conclusions do not flow from her study; they flow from being an eyewitness to the daily distortions that food, sexism, racism and classism engender in modern American life. They come from the heart, which is to be applauded and encouraged.
David Wineberg
February 25, 2022
Some really thoughtful discussion in here, particularly on the need for systemic level change, not just the same old same old personal responsibility line. I also really liked the discussion of cultural significance to food! Selfishly, I wish the focus hadn't been so much on family's nutrition/hunger, but that's just me. It wasn't the scope of the book
December 14, 2021
I really enjoyed this book but I would also be interested in learning more about adult's food habits outside of the context of feeding children. It might have resonated more if I was/wanted to be a mother.
February 1, 2022
I was really excited to read this but it mostly skirted around the topics I found most interesting. It’s an anthropological study about class and food that argues that expectations for mothers to take household-level responsibility for their family’s health are unrealistic and harmful, especially since busy middle and working class mothers will not have the bandwidth to combat Americans’ processed food-loving culture and cultivate healthier children’s preferences on their own. Most of the commentary about how American culture wrongfully shames working mothers for indulging in processed foods and upper middle class families use health discourse to assert status was unsurprising and better substantiated in other studies. Here I liked the depth of exploration of the four families studied and the richness around the choices less affluent mothers confront. Beyond more familiar arguments that a busy, cash-strapped mom doesn't have time or money to waste on their child saying “no” to healthier foods, contextualizing the single mothers’ decision to indulge their kids to as a way to preserve dignity was striking. For mothers that so often had to say no—to concerts, school trips, new clothes—being able to say yes to kids’ requests for a candy bar on occasion gave them an important opportunity to symbolically communicate that they would do anything within their means to make their child happy.
The narrative that will stick with me the longest is the one about Nyah, the black single mother and intermittent sex worker. Reading about abjection in a non-intellectualized way can sometimes really unsettle me, and I felt profound non-pity empathy towards her story. Fielding-Singh has anxiety about this, but her attitudes towards Nyah are largely in line with Daniel Patrick Moynihan. I mean this in an ok way - it made me believe that Moynihan's prescriptions about how to intervene in black social structures could come from a place of empathy and genuine desire to rescue individuals from untenable socioeconomic conditions.
I was surprised that the book focused more on motherhood than food and nutrition itself. Fielding-Singh argues that the ideals of “intensive mothering” translate to class-specific anxieties around how mothers should feed their kids. The back half of the book is primarily an exploration of how mothers feel, with discussions of the “emotion work” performed by individuals to regulate their feelings (here, in line with intensive mothering ideals, either to preserve a sense of dignity or agency). I’ve been thinking about the thanklessness of motherhood after seeing some reviews of The Lost Daughter and I was a little disappointed that this didn’t tackle dark / ugly feelings while being a mother in the same way. Every mom is unwaveringly selfless about putting their children’s needs above their own, and the author approvingly notes how each of her subjects ultimately spent their research stipend on their children. I feel like we’re on the precipice of having a “let moms have nuanced feelings and be unhappy” moment so it felt a little pedestrian to have “everyone’s absolved from poor nutritional choices because moms are universally well-intentioned.” Give them space to spend money on themselves!
I ultimately felt like this upheld more dogmas than revealed new ideas to me. The author offered a few interesting perspectives on the limitations of the money = health discourse: first, how the latest sociological research suggests that geographic access doesn’t solve nutritional inequality - i.e., opening supermarkets in food deserts doesn’t modify behavior - second, that a number of middle class people will perform revulsion towards mass-produced foods that are substantively equivalent to brands they admire (e.g., Annie’s Organic, Trader Joe’s) because they assume things consumed by their class strata are superior. These invite us to be more skeptical towards assuming wealth redistribution solves nutritional inequality since low income families have greater barriers to health than access and wealthier people will succumb to marketing that compromises the nutritional value of their choices. But what does solving nutritional inequality really mean and entail then? What consumption habits should we be trying to drive? As an intermittent fasting truther I am always on the lookout for when “nutrition” and “health” are invoked in a morally righteous way untethered to actual health outcomes. I want to read a book about the unproductive assumptions and social habits we hold around food, as well as what’s good. I think if we were a little clearer on what it means to be healthy it would make it easier to talk about affordable ways to eat healthy that doesn’t reproduce the personal responsibility discourse. For example, it’s not too difficult to eat cheap and healthy with Chinese groceries if you accept that healthy = lots of vegetables, non-breaded meats, limited frying, etc. I’m not a nutritionist but I would guess that a lot of ethnic food is healthy. She kind of suggests this when she briefly mentions how food acculturation drove an immigrant mother to shift from eating her native “nourishing” Sinaloan food to American fast food as a treat for her assimilating son, but then shifts focus to the symbolic value of a poor immigrant mother getting to celebrate a special occasion with the abundance that is dinner at Red Robin. I would have been more interested in a book that fleshed out the lower prestige (income) / better health impact space like this with perspectives from a dietitian on the nutritional value + cost / time efficacy of ethnic cuisines that lack pedigree. Chinese food at least can be cheap, fast, healthy, and tasty - it's not a choice between white supremacy, kid-unfriendly food, and nutrition!
Quotes that stuck:
- I feel like my relationship with food makes me part of the human race. It’s a complicated, ever-changing bond. I control my portions one moment and eat my feelings the next. I’ve had phases of overeating and phases of undereating. I’ve dug my heels in on some food habits and worked patiently to change others. I use food for all kinds of purposes. Survival and satiation are part of it, but so are comfort, nostalgia, boredom, vanity, and celebration.
- Nyah nursed a beer, and I followed the plot of another Rock movie. Mariah left to meet up with friends and came back with a carton of McDonald’s fries and a medium Coke for her little sister. Sharing the fries, the two of them perched side by side on the couch as the opening credits for another thriller scrolled across the screen. It was a day like any other day that summer. If I were to ask Nyah about any of it now, I doubt she’d remember it. Little happened. That was the point. The deeper I sank into Nyah’s couch, the more keenly I noticed something. As stressful as financial scarcity was, it could also be tedious. It could make daily life monotonous. With nowhere to go and nothing to do, Nyah had little she could give to Mariah and Natasha that they would get excited about. What’s more, with no signs of income on the way, there wasn’t a lot to look forward to. The next morning, the sun would again rise, and the girls would resume their positions on the couch. This time, Nyah would style Mariah’s hair. Someone else would call with an offer of seven thousand dollars or more, the neighbors would come over, and the ice cream truck would once again roll around the corner. The days would pass, but Nyah never seemed to have the financial means to take advantage of them. She had time, sure. But without money, she and her daughters were stuck in that garage.
- Dana was downscaling her frustration and exasperation to normalize everything. At times like this, I saw that downscaling wasn’t just about coming to terms with reality. It was also a way of preserving dignity, of being the hero of one’s own story rather than the victim. Dana had been a victim several times: of sexual assault, intimate-partner violence, cancer, and, now, two negligent fathers to her two children. But Dana didn’t want to see herself that way. It was exhausting and depleting to focus on those stories. So Dana did the emotion work to spin the situation and see it in a brighter light.
The narrative that will stick with me the longest is the one about Nyah, the black single mother and intermittent sex worker. Reading about abjection in a non-intellectualized way can sometimes really unsettle me, and I felt profound non-pity empathy towards her story. Fielding-Singh has anxiety about this, but her attitudes towards Nyah are largely in line with Daniel Patrick Moynihan. I mean this in an ok way - it made me believe that Moynihan's prescriptions about how to intervene in black social structures could come from a place of empathy and genuine desire to rescue individuals from untenable socioeconomic conditions.
I was surprised that the book focused more on motherhood than food and nutrition itself. Fielding-Singh argues that the ideals of “intensive mothering” translate to class-specific anxieties around how mothers should feed their kids. The back half of the book is primarily an exploration of how mothers feel, with discussions of the “emotion work” performed by individuals to regulate their feelings (here, in line with intensive mothering ideals, either to preserve a sense of dignity or agency). I’ve been thinking about the thanklessness of motherhood after seeing some reviews of The Lost Daughter and I was a little disappointed that this didn’t tackle dark / ugly feelings while being a mother in the same way. Every mom is unwaveringly selfless about putting their children’s needs above their own, and the author approvingly notes how each of her subjects ultimately spent their research stipend on their children. I feel like we’re on the precipice of having a “let moms have nuanced feelings and be unhappy” moment so it felt a little pedestrian to have “everyone’s absolved from poor nutritional choices because moms are universally well-intentioned.” Give them space to spend money on themselves!
I ultimately felt like this upheld more dogmas than revealed new ideas to me. The author offered a few interesting perspectives on the limitations of the money = health discourse: first, how the latest sociological research suggests that geographic access doesn’t solve nutritional inequality - i.e., opening supermarkets in food deserts doesn’t modify behavior - second, that a number of middle class people will perform revulsion towards mass-produced foods that are substantively equivalent to brands they admire (e.g., Annie’s Organic, Trader Joe’s) because they assume things consumed by their class strata are superior. These invite us to be more skeptical towards assuming wealth redistribution solves nutritional inequality since low income families have greater barriers to health than access and wealthier people will succumb to marketing that compromises the nutritional value of their choices. But what does solving nutritional inequality really mean and entail then? What consumption habits should we be trying to drive? As an intermittent fasting truther I am always on the lookout for when “nutrition” and “health” are invoked in a morally righteous way untethered to actual health outcomes. I want to read a book about the unproductive assumptions and social habits we hold around food, as well as what’s good. I think if we were a little clearer on what it means to be healthy it would make it easier to talk about affordable ways to eat healthy that doesn’t reproduce the personal responsibility discourse. For example, it’s not too difficult to eat cheap and healthy with Chinese groceries if you accept that healthy = lots of vegetables, non-breaded meats, limited frying, etc. I’m not a nutritionist but I would guess that a lot of ethnic food is healthy. She kind of suggests this when she briefly mentions how food acculturation drove an immigrant mother to shift from eating her native “nourishing” Sinaloan food to American fast food as a treat for her assimilating son, but then shifts focus to the symbolic value of a poor immigrant mother getting to celebrate a special occasion with the abundance that is dinner at Red Robin. I would have been more interested in a book that fleshed out the lower prestige (income) / better health impact space like this with perspectives from a dietitian on the nutritional value + cost / time efficacy of ethnic cuisines that lack pedigree. Chinese food at least can be cheap, fast, healthy, and tasty - it's not a choice between white supremacy, kid-unfriendly food, and nutrition!
Quotes that stuck:
- I feel like my relationship with food makes me part of the human race. It’s a complicated, ever-changing bond. I control my portions one moment and eat my feelings the next. I’ve had phases of overeating and phases of undereating. I’ve dug my heels in on some food habits and worked patiently to change others. I use food for all kinds of purposes. Survival and satiation are part of it, but so are comfort, nostalgia, boredom, vanity, and celebration.
- Nyah nursed a beer, and I followed the plot of another Rock movie. Mariah left to meet up with friends and came back with a carton of McDonald’s fries and a medium Coke for her little sister. Sharing the fries, the two of them perched side by side on the couch as the opening credits for another thriller scrolled across the screen. It was a day like any other day that summer. If I were to ask Nyah about any of it now, I doubt she’d remember it. Little happened. That was the point. The deeper I sank into Nyah’s couch, the more keenly I noticed something. As stressful as financial scarcity was, it could also be tedious. It could make daily life monotonous. With nowhere to go and nothing to do, Nyah had little she could give to Mariah and Natasha that they would get excited about. What’s more, with no signs of income on the way, there wasn’t a lot to look forward to. The next morning, the sun would again rise, and the girls would resume their positions on the couch. This time, Nyah would style Mariah’s hair. Someone else would call with an offer of seven thousand dollars or more, the neighbors would come over, and the ice cream truck would once again roll around the corner. The days would pass, but Nyah never seemed to have the financial means to take advantage of them. She had time, sure. But without money, she and her daughters were stuck in that garage.
- Dana was downscaling her frustration and exasperation to normalize everything. At times like this, I saw that downscaling wasn’t just about coming to terms with reality. It was also a way of preserving dignity, of being the hero of one’s own story rather than the victim. Dana had been a victim several times: of sexual assault, intimate-partner violence, cancer, and, now, two negligent fathers to her two children. But Dana didn’t want to see herself that way. It was exhausting and depleting to focus on those stories. So Dana did the emotion work to spin the situation and see it in a brighter light.
December 29, 2021
3.5, really. This is such an important topic and her work is completely fascinating, but this got repetitive, down to the same anecdotes with the same details repeated multiple times, and what felt like way too many chapters explaining the concept of lower-income moms being able to say yes instead of always saying no and hence allowing for less nutritious food choices and treats. It was a good point to make, especially as her research disproves the widely held theses of food deserts, barriers to access, etc. coupled with budget being the main factors in poor food choices, but felt done to death.
And despite the repeated details, others are mentioned very specifically but end up feeling odd and inexplicable. One family of four (with teenagers, not little kids) goes through 36 rolls of toilet paper in 30 days?!?! If anyone from such a family of four can shed further light on the accuracy of this, please do so because wtf.
I also think parents will be able to take much more from this and probably understand their own choices and decision-making better. I got a little tired of reading about moms and the same-sounding issues and would’ve liked to have seen at least some focus on singles, couples, or the elderly, all of whom face unique challenges in this nutrition vs. economics area.
And despite the repeated details, others are mentioned very specifically but end up feeling odd and inexplicable. One family of four (with teenagers, not little kids) goes through 36 rolls of toilet paper in 30 days?!?! If anyone from such a family of four can shed further light on the accuracy of this, please do so because wtf.
I also think parents will be able to take much more from this and probably understand their own choices and decision-making better. I got a little tired of reading about moms and the same-sounding issues and would’ve liked to have seen at least some focus on singles, couples, or the elderly, all of whom face unique challenges in this nutrition vs. economics area.
March 30, 2022
Voyeurism masked as well-intentioned research. If you’ve never put any thought into social justice issues, particularly related to food, you may learn some valuable insights. For everyone else, it is 250+ pages filled with extraneous adjectives, personal details, and descriptions of what every person was wearing that comes to the conclusion that the causes of food injustice are, shock!, gasp!, multifaceted and complicated and require sweeping structural reforms.
The author spent hours discovering for herself that the reasons why food is such an issue is because parents (and in this hetero and gender normative framing there are no dads as primary or equal caregivers or other family structures that struggle with these things worth mentioning, only biological able-bodied moms) are, gasp! shock!, stressed by being strapped for time and money and the emotional toll of structural injustice and society’s unrealistic expectations.
Sprinkled with references to decades old already well-documented sociological theories to back up the author’s seemingly new-to-her observations, it was difficult not to read this book as a voyeuristic project to ‘find out’ how the ‘other half’ (read: the non academic elite) lives and eats and share the findings as if they weren’t already informing the efforts of many of the people working to implement the reforms the author crams into her conclusion.
***also, major attribution/citation error: the poem on page 67 was written by Hafiz, a prolific 14th century Persian poet, which Daniel Ladinsky expertly translated but is NOT the author.
The author spent hours discovering for herself that the reasons why food is such an issue is because parents (and in this hetero and gender normative framing there are no dads as primary or equal caregivers or other family structures that struggle with these things worth mentioning, only biological able-bodied moms) are, gasp! shock!, stressed by being strapped for time and money and the emotional toll of structural injustice and society’s unrealistic expectations.
Sprinkled with references to decades old already well-documented sociological theories to back up the author’s seemingly new-to-her observations, it was difficult not to read this book as a voyeuristic project to ‘find out’ how the ‘other half’ (read: the non academic elite) lives and eats and share the findings as if they weren’t already informing the efforts of many of the people working to implement the reforms the author crams into her conclusion.
***also, major attribution/citation error: the poem on page 67 was written by Hafiz, a prolific 14th century Persian poet, which Daniel Ladinsky expertly translated but is NOT the author.
August 21, 2023
This has to be my favorite non-fiction read for 2022
November 4, 2023
As a (former?) researcher in nutrition and mental health (among other things) - I've been waiting for a book like this.
I've said before that I love books that change my mind or challenge ideas I currently hold. As soon as I heard the intro of this stunning audiobook, I knew this would be one of those books. The author directly engages with how scientists (especially those doing nutrition research) can fall into the trap of shaming people, and especially mothers, for poor nutritional choices when the data clearly states the benefits of "healthy" food. It's easy to default to simple explanations with "easy" solutions: food desserts, food insecurity, price of "bad" vs "good" foods, lack of nutritional education, time and convenience, etc, etc... but these don't tell the whole story.
This book tackles the complexity of these factors and more through a case study of four families of differing socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, complemented by observations of several dozen other individuals. The focus narrows further to mothers with children old enough to make some of their own nutritional choices. The author does an amazing job of empathizing with everyone she interviews of offering compassionate and fresh explanations into how and why people relate to food the way that they do.
One interesting takeaway that will now live in my brain is the class divide: if you can economically ensure many things for your child and say "yes" to lots of their asks, it's easy to say "no" to a kitkat. But if you keep denying your child money for camp, hobbies, new clothes... the kitkat is one of the few treats you can actually give. The context of "treat" food is completely different.
(and all families eat "treat" food. And all mothers stress about food and about wanting to do well by their kids)
As a scientist and human, I've spent a lot of time thinking and stressing about healthy nutrition. I'm aware of what doesn't work: diet culture, shame spirals, restriction. In my own life, I try to practice abundance and to listen to cues from my body. And I have the great luck and joy of being able to spend time cooking my own with fresh ingredients or going out for greasy, deep-fried, and savoury comfort food. I'm hungry now and I feel like choosing the latter (for reasons that have little to do with nutrition).
Back on track: recommended if you're interested in how obsession with nutrition and food purity/righteousness doesn't necessarily translate well into daily life, the burden of modern mothering in an age of information and overwork, and if you enjoy excellently-written accessible sociology. 4.5 stars rounded up.
More thoughts here: https://youtu.be/N13GyePhEvk
I've said before that I love books that change my mind or challenge ideas I currently hold. As soon as I heard the intro of this stunning audiobook, I knew this would be one of those books. The author directly engages with how scientists (especially those doing nutrition research) can fall into the trap of shaming people, and especially mothers, for poor nutritional choices when the data clearly states the benefits of "healthy" food. It's easy to default to simple explanations with "easy" solutions: food desserts, food insecurity, price of "bad" vs "good" foods, lack of nutritional education, time and convenience, etc, etc... but these don't tell the whole story.
This book tackles the complexity of these factors and more through a case study of four families of differing socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, complemented by observations of several dozen other individuals. The focus narrows further to mothers with children old enough to make some of their own nutritional choices. The author does an amazing job of empathizing with everyone she interviews of offering compassionate and fresh explanations into how and why people relate to food the way that they do.
One interesting takeaway that will now live in my brain is the class divide: if you can economically ensure many things for your child and say "yes" to lots of their asks, it's easy to say "no" to a kitkat. But if you keep denying your child money for camp, hobbies, new clothes... the kitkat is one of the few treats you can actually give. The context of "treat" food is completely different.
(and all families eat "treat" food. And all mothers stress about food and about wanting to do well by their kids)
As a scientist and human, I've spent a lot of time thinking and stressing about healthy nutrition. I'm aware of what doesn't work: diet culture, shame spirals, restriction. In my own life, I try to practice abundance and to listen to cues from my body. And I have the great luck and joy of being able to spend time cooking my own with fresh ingredients or going out for greasy, deep-fried, and savoury comfort food. I'm hungry now and I feel like choosing the latter (for reasons that have little to do with nutrition).
Back on track: recommended if you're interested in how obsession with nutrition and food purity/righteousness doesn't necessarily translate well into daily life, the burden of modern mothering in an age of information and overwork, and if you enjoy excellently-written accessible sociology. 4.5 stars rounded up.
More thoughts here: https://youtu.be/N13GyePhEvk
September 5, 2023
This book actually looks at how families, mostly mothers, pick the food they eat. While the title may make it seem like it focuses on people in poverty, it actually looks across the socioeconomic spectrum. I learned a lot reading this book, as nutrition was not something I really thought about much. While it may seem logical that the price and ready availability of healthy foods are the primary drivers of America’s unhealthy diet, the author effectively argues for a much more complex set of influences. Turns out that, when actually studied, the proximity of a grocery store makes no apparent difference to what people choose to eat. These “food deserts” are not the reason poor people are not eating healthy. I was very surprised at that. Worthwhile read even if you, like me, have had very limited interest in the topic.
July 10, 2023
DNF at 37%.
November 3, 2021
I took a number of classes in college about inequalities in the U.S., and one particularly interesting one about food insecurities, so this book spoke to me when I saw it on Net Galley.
The author does a really comprehensive job interviewing hundreds of families, and diving deeply into four families from different socioeconomic backgrounds all in the same area of the country to paint a broad picture. Her effort to go above and beyond on her study design by choosing only families with school aged children really helped build her credibility for this well-researched work.
This book really makes you take a step back and examine not only the way you eat, but also the value we put into food. As an example, the author compares two families, one who uses small treats, like chips or soda, as a way to find ways to say yes to her kids when she can’t afford to say yes to bigger things, and one who is able to say yes in a number of other ways uses asks for junk food as a teachable moment on better nutrition. Throughout the book, she juxtaposes the families to illustrate how a basic need like food can mean something different to each of us.
The end of the book tidied up her conclusions into a neat bow, wrapping in the pandemic that we can all relate to. I also really enjoyed how she brought everything together at the end by proposing solutions to the problem and explaining the efforts already underway.
The author does a really comprehensive job interviewing hundreds of families, and diving deeply into four families from different socioeconomic backgrounds all in the same area of the country to paint a broad picture. Her effort to go above and beyond on her study design by choosing only families with school aged children really helped build her credibility for this well-researched work.
This book really makes you take a step back and examine not only the way you eat, but also the value we put into food. As an example, the author compares two families, one who uses small treats, like chips or soda, as a way to find ways to say yes to her kids when she can’t afford to say yes to bigger things, and one who is able to say yes in a number of other ways uses asks for junk food as a teachable moment on better nutrition. Throughout the book, she juxtaposes the families to illustrate how a basic need like food can mean something different to each of us.
The end of the book tidied up her conclusions into a neat bow, wrapping in the pandemic that we can all relate to. I also really enjoyed how she brought everything together at the end by proposing solutions to the problem and explaining the efforts already underway.
November 18, 2021
I typically don’t gravitate towards nonfiction, but this book is too important to ignore and too well-written to put down. Sociologist Priya Fielding-Singh writes from the narrative of several families from various socioeconomic, educational, and ethno-racial backgrounds to help examine food insecurity and food choice in our country. Throughout the book, she plants us in the homes of the families she interviews. We then ask the questions she couldn’t ignore throughout her research. She then works through why similar concerns across the spectrum of families from various circumstances occur.
This is a fascinating book on a topic that pertains to all: how and why we eat the way we do. Fielding-Singh discusses how families (namely mothers) have the cards stacked against societal ideals of motherhood, how that translates to feeding their families, and importantly why this happens. We learn that many families Field-Singh spends time with, regardless of differences in backgrounds struggle with these societal expectations. She shares one important quality all mothers share: putting their children’s happiness and well-being before their own. While there is so much we need to strive for as society to address these concerns, the overall message is one of compassion for mothers and the choices they make to do what’s best for their children. As someone with no sociology background and no children of my own, I found this book still very relevant and captivating.
This is a fascinating book on a topic that pertains to all: how and why we eat the way we do. Fielding-Singh discusses how families (namely mothers) have the cards stacked against societal ideals of motherhood, how that translates to feeding their families, and importantly why this happens. We learn that many families Field-Singh spends time with, regardless of differences in backgrounds struggle with these societal expectations. She shares one important quality all mothers share: putting their children’s happiness and well-being before their own. While there is so much we need to strive for as society to address these concerns, the overall message is one of compassion for mothers and the choices they make to do what’s best for their children. As someone with no sociology background and no children of my own, I found this book still very relevant and captivating.
November 8, 2023
First off, let’s talk about what this book is actually about. This is a book about MOTHERS feeding families: single-mothers below the poverty line, single-mothers straddling that line, and married mothers who are middle- or upper-class. There is only one brief exception sharing a father’s experience. Given that the title and the summary make no mention of this focus on mothers and my hopes of reading about diverse economic, ethnic, and gendered experiences with food, I found the subject focus to be my single greatest disappointment with this book.
What it does NOT contain is a substantial argument for what we can do as a society to support people and families who struggle with food insecurity and malnutrition. There is only one chapter that is dedicated to exploring how we can change current conditions. As a fellow scientist, I struggle mightily with the scientific community’s absolutely appalling ability to 1. communicate their findings in an accessible and relevant manner and 2. to advocate for change. Western scientific methods require maintaining a dispassionate distance from their research in order to maintain “objectivity.” I could argue all day about how this is complete egotistical bullshit, half of which would be dedicated to how maintaining this farce does a disservice to truth-seeking and humanity as a whole. This is unfortunately not the correct venue for said rant, so suffice it to say that I found this lack of discussion frustrating.
Fielding-Singh perhaps goes overboard on communication (albeit it in an entirely accessible manner – points to House Sociology!) and could have benefited from a stricter editor to streamline her findings, but once again I hoped for more. Soft science fields such as sociology, anthropology, and some aspects of psychology are perfectly situated to improve mankind’s situation, which I believe the author wanted to reveal. Instead, she devoted most of her energy to describing how societal structures (including institutionalized racism), familial status, financial stability, and time availability influence a mother’s response to feeding their children.
What I found to be the most interesting take aways were:
-Food desserts actually play a small role in diet disparity. One study estimated that just 10% of socioeconomic diet disparities in the US can be traced to differences in access to healthy food. A number of studies have supported this new reality that improving food access does little to improve poor communities’ diet inequality.
-Our identities often inform or influence our food selection. Food’s different meanings to families across society are central to the story of nutritional inequality today.
-Foods’ cultural and racial associations also influence to a degree what foods are thought of us as healthy or unhealthy.
-The food industry inundates children’s and parent’s food desires on a physical and emotional level through aggressive lobbying and advertising.
-Windfall child rearing is a central aspect to raising and feeding poor families. This extends to poor mothers saying yes to their children’s pleas for unhealthy foods since they are so often unable to financially support their children’s other desires.
-Thanks to this underlying social belief that mothers are the primary takers whose primary duty is to nourish and support their children in all ways (termed “intensive mothering”), mothers do so much emotion work in order to survive these unreasonable expectations. Achieving this idealistic goal is difficult for any mother, but especially so for poor mothers with fewer means.
Overall, I found this to be an interesting teaser book that covered a small fraction of humanity’s food/eating situation.
What it does NOT contain is a substantial argument for what we can do as a society to support people and families who struggle with food insecurity and malnutrition. There is only one chapter that is dedicated to exploring how we can change current conditions. As a fellow scientist, I struggle mightily with the scientific community’s absolutely appalling ability to 1. communicate their findings in an accessible and relevant manner and 2. to advocate for change. Western scientific methods require maintaining a dispassionate distance from their research in order to maintain “objectivity.” I could argue all day about how this is complete egotistical bullshit, half of which would be dedicated to how maintaining this farce does a disservice to truth-seeking and humanity as a whole. This is unfortunately not the correct venue for said rant, so suffice it to say that I found this lack of discussion frustrating.
Fielding-Singh perhaps goes overboard on communication (albeit it in an entirely accessible manner – points to House Sociology!) and could have benefited from a stricter editor to streamline her findings, but once again I hoped for more. Soft science fields such as sociology, anthropology, and some aspects of psychology are perfectly situated to improve mankind’s situation, which I believe the author wanted to reveal. Instead, she devoted most of her energy to describing how societal structures (including institutionalized racism), familial status, financial stability, and time availability influence a mother’s response to feeding their children.
What I found to be the most interesting take aways were:
-Food desserts actually play a small role in diet disparity. One study estimated that just 10% of socioeconomic diet disparities in the US can be traced to differences in access to healthy food. A number of studies have supported this new reality that improving food access does little to improve poor communities’ diet inequality.
-Our identities often inform or influence our food selection. Food’s different meanings to families across society are central to the story of nutritional inequality today.
-Foods’ cultural and racial associations also influence to a degree what foods are thought of us as healthy or unhealthy.
Foods are classified as healthy not just because of what they are but also because of what they represent and who they have been historically consumed by. Discourses around soul food underscore this point. There’s a reason why people sing the praises of kale but not collard greens.
-The food industry inundates children’s and parent’s food desires on a physical and emotional level through aggressive lobbying and advertising.
In 2017, food companies spent 11 billion dollars on television ads, 80% of which were for their unhealthiest offerings, including soda, fast food, candy, and snacks.
-Windfall child rearing is a central aspect to raising and feeding poor families. This extends to poor mothers saying yes to their children’s pleas for unhealthy foods since they are so often unable to financially support their children’s other desires.
In a context where moms felt like they didn’t have all the options to present to their kids, that their kids’ lives were already constrained by the realities of growing up in poverty, food was one of the few things kids really got to choose.
Saying yes and saying no was as much about the moms as it was about the kids. Moms used food to care for their children, but they also used food for themselves – to feel a sense of worth as caregivers.
-Thanks to this underlying social belief that mothers are the primary takers whose primary duty is to nourish and support their children in all ways (termed “intensive mothering”), mothers do so much emotion work in order to survive these unreasonable expectations. Achieving this idealistic goal is difficult for any mother, but especially so for poor mothers with fewer means.
So, with limited chances to make things materially better for themselves and their children, moms fought to feel better about how things were, to accept their current realities rather than constantly wishing for better ones. They took this fight on internally, trying to change how they felt inside. …Emotion work is the work people do to manipulate their own emotions – monitoring, inhibiting, evoking, and shaping them in different ways – so that their feelings are in line with what they think they should feel or what they want to feel.
Overall, I found this to be an interesting teaser book that covered a small fraction of humanity’s food/eating situation.
February 2, 2024
3.5 / 5 - insightful, well researched, and thoughtful. made me think about my parents and how hard they had to work to give my brothers and i food. even if it was burger king at 10 pm after they finished work, it was something that made us full and happy, so who cares if it’s “unhealthy”. food is for nutrition, emotional comfort, and life enjoyment, so let’s not judge anyone for what they eat!! xx
August 9, 2023
This book opened my eyes to all kinds of perspectives and factors around food, families, and socioeconomic status, and has stayed in my head all week, even when I wasn’t reading.
December 14, 2023
well-written and educational, what more could ya want
December 18, 2021
This was fantastic, though not quite what I was expecting. I didn’t realize that the research, and thus the book, was focused on parents (mostly mothers) feeding children. I found it fascinating, moving, critical to the food security conversation that I engage in at work, and the beginning of what I hope could be a shift away from personal responsibility for food choices, and toward systems and society levels problems and fixes.
Priya follows four families closely, and interviews dozens (maybe hundreds) of families, investigating what they eat, how they spend their money, what motivates their choices, how their socioeconomic and racial identities influence their food choices, and so many other things. The findings are stunning, and obvious at the same time. In short, it’s complicated, and the parents responsible for feeding (again, mostly moms) are concerned about the food their kids eat. They all want to meet their kids physical, emotional, and cultural needs for different foods, and they have different avenues available to them.
I can’t recommend this book enough if you are engaged in food system work at all.
Priya follows four families closely, and interviews dozens (maybe hundreds) of families, investigating what they eat, how they spend their money, what motivates their choices, how their socioeconomic and racial identities influence their food choices, and so many other things. The findings are stunning, and obvious at the same time. In short, it’s complicated, and the parents responsible for feeding (again, mostly moms) are concerned about the food their kids eat. They all want to meet their kids physical, emotional, and cultural needs for different foods, and they have different avenues available to them.
I can’t recommend this book enough if you are engaged in food system work at all.
March 9, 2022
Book club selection for March 2022.
I'll be thinking about this book for a long time. Over the past couple of decades, I've become more aware of food inequality in our society, primarily through news reports. "How the Other Half Eats" is a focused and in-depth look at how mothers at different financial and social levels feed their families, and the factors that limit and influence their choices. The author describes without prescribing, and in the case of making kids happy by indulging them with fast and junk food, understanding of the pressures on mothers.
I was most taken by Fielding-Singh's vivid descriptions of those pressures, particularly upon poor mothers. As they say, it's expensive to be poor, and moreover every greedy corporation, credit card company, landlord, on-the-take police department, envious neighbor, and scammer is after you 24/7.
I now have a renewed fear of food insecurity. We all live paycheck to paycheck. Now imagine an international conflict, pandemic, or climate disaster that disrupts supplies and creates food shortages everywhere. Food deserts expanding to encompass not just the poor parts of town with their Dollar Stores, but the good side of the tracks as well ... bare shelves everywhere. Now imagine being a middle class Ukrainian trapped in a city under Russian bombardment, or a Syrian in Aleppo, or a Palestinian in Gaza, or a Congolese ... well, it wouldn't take much to rip away the foundations of our personal security.
How many of us can even imagine what it would be like to be hungry, what money we may have worthless, no food to be had anywhere. My spider sense of living in a society where only the thinnest and most frayed of safety nets keeps us from falling into total chaos is more than tingling after reading this book.
Jesus, how do these moms do it, day in and day out?
I'll be thinking about this book for a long time. Over the past couple of decades, I've become more aware of food inequality in our society, primarily through news reports. "How the Other Half Eats" is a focused and in-depth look at how mothers at different financial and social levels feed their families, and the factors that limit and influence their choices. The author describes without prescribing, and in the case of making kids happy by indulging them with fast and junk food, understanding of the pressures on mothers.
I was most taken by Fielding-Singh's vivid descriptions of those pressures, particularly upon poor mothers. As they say, it's expensive to be poor, and moreover every greedy corporation, credit card company, landlord, on-the-take police department, envious neighbor, and scammer is after you 24/7.
I now have a renewed fear of food insecurity. We all live paycheck to paycheck. Now imagine an international conflict, pandemic, or climate disaster that disrupts supplies and creates food shortages everywhere. Food deserts expanding to encompass not just the poor parts of town with their Dollar Stores, but the good side of the tracks as well ... bare shelves everywhere. Now imagine being a middle class Ukrainian trapped in a city under Russian bombardment, or a Syrian in Aleppo, or a Palestinian in Gaza, or a Congolese ... well, it wouldn't take much to rip away the foundations of our personal security.
How many of us can even imagine what it would be like to be hungry, what money we may have worthless, no food to be had anywhere. My spider sense of living in a society where only the thinnest and most frayed of safety nets keeps us from falling into total chaos is more than tingling after reading this book.
Jesus, how do these moms do it, day in and day out?
April 6, 2022
Interesting and eye opening read for someone like me who has never worried when/if the next meal will come. Had a lot more opinions than I was expecting but wasn’t necessarily put off as my opinions/biases largely aligned. Would have been much better with more statistical data/ facts revolving food but sometimes qualitative data gives a different view than quantitative
January 21, 2022
I put a special request in at the library in order to have the chance to read this. For a while, I've been interested in the (surprisingly inverse) correlation between income and obesity in the US. You'd think my interest would be enough to motivate me to skip over the first-person mombie narrative. You'd think wrongly.
I'm disgusted whenever these autobiographical clippings are presented under the guise of works falling into any other nonfiction classification. Didn't waste my money (thankfully). Not wasting my time. Abandoned.
I'm disgusted whenever these autobiographical clippings are presented under the guise of works falling into any other nonfiction classification. Didn't waste my money (thankfully). Not wasting my time. Abandoned.
December 8, 2022
For anyone who wants to think beyond simply providing poor people with access to fresh foods, this book does a deep dive into why people might make the food choices they do. Priya Fielding-Singh interviews many families of different cultures and income levels and includes why she makes some of the choices she does. There is a heavy focus on mothers of families, as they did the bulk of the food purchasing for their families. She explores judgements made on poor people, on mothers of all incomes. Compelling.
May 29, 2023
Very anecdotal and often seemed more like a memoir than a non-fiction consideration of the impact of socioeconomic status on nutrition. I was frustrated that the viewpoint of the children received little consideration. The solutions the author puts forth at the end didn't seem to match the results of her interviews. Because the focus was on family stories rather than hard data, it was fairly easy to read, although repetitive at times. I'll give this 2 stars because it did make me think about my own shopping experiences, as well as the meals I had growing up, but I wouldn't recommend it.
October 12, 2022
Though this book reads like a modified dissertation, I was really intrigued by the analysis of what food means to different families (happiness? success? control? etc.). I read this book the same week the FDA proposed a new definition of "healthy food," so it was interesting to see how different parents conceived of their own roles in providing healthy food for their families. The author considers the way race, class, and gender impact decisions and opportunities.
July 25, 2022
This book took me a few chapters to get invested, but once I was, I was hooked :) I found myself thinking about things I’ve never thought about before: why those of different socioeconomic groups eat the way they eat, how mothers often bare the burden of food and feeding, how judgmental society can be of diets, and how valuable empathy is to this whole conversation. It was particularly interesting to read this soon before moving out to an apartment, where I will be responsible to feed myself for the first time)…. I found myself not quite satisfied with the solutions Priya gave at the end of the book, because I had more questions about the practicality of her ideas. I expect myself to keep thinking about these issues in the days to come :)
October 17, 2024
This was an interesting read on food and inequality, yes, but also on scarcity, the differing views on poverty and how to overcome and persevere (or struggle to escape what feels inescapable). I found that the title was a bit misleading-it wasn't so much "the other half" that was described here as much as it was four select families from differing socioeconomic backgrounds and their lives/decisions around food-but even so, it was an insightful, interesting read that made me think about the lives of those I encounter regularly, my own upbringing through financial instability, and so much more.
May 17, 2022
SO MANY THOUGHT PROVOKING IDEAS
I read on the recommendation of Kids Eat in Color and could not put it down. I found myself nodding along throughout and taking notes. The central idea of mothering being central to nutrition because of the way society has placed the pressure of food on women made so much sense. That feeling like a good mother is a large driver of what we feed our kids is EXACTLY right. I saw myself and people i know in the women she interviewed.
I highly recommend this to everyone, but particularly those who are interested in nutrition and poverty policy.
I read on the recommendation of Kids Eat in Color and could not put it down. I found myself nodding along throughout and taking notes. The central idea of mothering being central to nutrition because of the way society has placed the pressure of food on women made so much sense. That feeling like a good mother is a large driver of what we feed our kids is EXACTLY right. I saw myself and people i know in the women she interviewed.
I highly recommend this to everyone, but particularly those who are interested in nutrition and poverty policy.
March 10, 2025
In conclusion: tell your mom you love her! She probably worked really hard to feed you healthy food!!!
March 19, 2022
Five stars for the research, one star for the writing.
Priya Fielding-Singh starts this book by writing about herself. At length. She had a baby. It was a deeply profound experience for her and her love of this baby is so all-encompassing that she writes about it for a while before food is even mentioned. Fielding-Singh continues to write about herself and her experiences of eating; I listened to the audiobook and Fielding-Singh goes on for at least an hour before she comes to the important research that she actually did, looking at the food habits of families of various socio-economic statuses in the Bay Area. Fielding-Singh interviewed dozens of families with adolescents and spent significant time with four families at various income levels. Her conclusions are fascinating and will hopefully influence public policy for years to come. The pre-How the Other Half Eats explanation of the association between low-income people, poor nutrition, and obesity, was that the poor live in food deserts and fresh vegetables should be sold closer to their houses. Fielding-Singh shows that this is not at all the case. She finds that lower income people use food as a way to say yes to something, to give their children a treat that they want when there is so little else that they can give them. It is also important to lower income people to provide food that their children will definitely eat. Food that children refuse to eat is an emotionally costly argument and a waste of money. As incomes increase, people buy more food that is less immediately satisfying but satisfies their understanding of nutrition and a balanced diet.
How the Other Half Eats as a title shouts out Jacob Riis "cleverly," but the book covers the whole economic spectrum. Fielding-Singh should not be allowed to title books or describe things. She says Americans are obese because of, among other things, their ability to super-size, when McDonalds stopped super-sizing after the movie came out in 2004. She describes the people on a coffee shop patio as "old people playing chess and high school students doing their homework on laptops." Really? Is that the two groups of people who hang out at the coffee shop near the highway and what those types of people are doing? Every time Fielding-Singh introduces a non-white, non-Indian person, she describes them by comparing their skin color to a kind of food (chocolate, coffee, caramel), but will later say something like, "Carol and other affluent African-Americans..." if the interviewee's race is pertinent to the point she's making. Why can't she just identify people by race when she's describing them instead of making it weird? Fielding-Singh implies that some of her interviewees are overweight or obese but won't come out and say it, which means that she's weirdly skirting the associations of obesity and income that she's also researching? And if a low-income interviewee buys an unhealthy meal, Fielding-Singh will say something like, "People judge a low-income woman like Monica for buying Twinkies." I'm aware that judging low-income women for their food choices is a small thread in our national discourse, but it's not enough of a thread that Fielding-Singh wouldn't be better off citing an article, or an anecdote, or literally anything beyond a broad generalization about the judgement of society.
Fielding-Singh finds that even the most affluent mothers, but especially the middle class mothers who work outside the home, don't have the time to feed their children to the standards they aspire to, and when they generate time, they raise their standards. Mothers are in almost all cases the parent most concerned about their children's nutrition, and fathers even undermine moms by, when they are occasionally in charge of feeding, choosing "oh boy, let's go through the drive through" over vegetables and whole foods. Because children want fast food, and sweet food, and snack food, and filling food, and salty food, and food in little packets, and all the food they see advertised everywhere, which along with everything else that goes into feeding children, mothers are expected to counteract the influence of unhealthy direct-to-children advertising overload on their children singlehandedly, when their children are constantly being bombarded with messages that they should be eating the processed stuff. Fielding-Singh's last few chapters, about the importance of public policy as an alternative to forcing mothers to shoulder the entire, insane burden of child-feeding, are excellent. Michelle Obama has probably read this book already. How the Other Half Eats needs a new title, a ghostwriter, and an editor, but at its core it is an excellent piece of research that should make American society change foodways and expectations.
Priya Fielding-Singh starts this book by writing about herself. At length. She had a baby. It was a deeply profound experience for her and her love of this baby is so all-encompassing that she writes about it for a while before food is even mentioned. Fielding-Singh continues to write about herself and her experiences of eating; I listened to the audiobook and Fielding-Singh goes on for at least an hour before she comes to the important research that she actually did, looking at the food habits of families of various socio-economic statuses in the Bay Area. Fielding-Singh interviewed dozens of families with adolescents and spent significant time with four families at various income levels. Her conclusions are fascinating and will hopefully influence public policy for years to come. The pre-How the Other Half Eats explanation of the association between low-income people, poor nutrition, and obesity, was that the poor live in food deserts and fresh vegetables should be sold closer to their houses. Fielding-Singh shows that this is not at all the case. She finds that lower income people use food as a way to say yes to something, to give their children a treat that they want when there is so little else that they can give them. It is also important to lower income people to provide food that their children will definitely eat. Food that children refuse to eat is an emotionally costly argument and a waste of money. As incomes increase, people buy more food that is less immediately satisfying but satisfies their understanding of nutrition and a balanced diet.
How the Other Half Eats as a title shouts out Jacob Riis "cleverly," but the book covers the whole economic spectrum. Fielding-Singh should not be allowed to title books or describe things. She says Americans are obese because of, among other things, their ability to super-size, when McDonalds stopped super-sizing after the movie came out in 2004. She describes the people on a coffee shop patio as "old people playing chess and high school students doing their homework on laptops." Really? Is that the two groups of people who hang out at the coffee shop near the highway and what those types of people are doing? Every time Fielding-Singh introduces a non-white, non-Indian person, she describes them by comparing their skin color to a kind of food (chocolate, coffee, caramel), but will later say something like, "Carol and other affluent African-Americans..." if the interviewee's race is pertinent to the point she's making. Why can't she just identify people by race when she's describing them instead of making it weird? Fielding-Singh implies that some of her interviewees are overweight or obese but won't come out and say it, which means that she's weirdly skirting the associations of obesity and income that she's also researching? And if a low-income interviewee buys an unhealthy meal, Fielding-Singh will say something like, "People judge a low-income woman like Monica for buying Twinkies." I'm aware that judging low-income women for their food choices is a small thread in our national discourse, but it's not enough of a thread that Fielding-Singh wouldn't be better off citing an article, or an anecdote, or literally anything beyond a broad generalization about the judgement of society.
Fielding-Singh finds that even the most affluent mothers, but especially the middle class mothers who work outside the home, don't have the time to feed their children to the standards they aspire to, and when they generate time, they raise their standards. Mothers are in almost all cases the parent most concerned about their children's nutrition, and fathers even undermine moms by, when they are occasionally in charge of feeding, choosing "oh boy, let's go through the drive through" over vegetables and whole foods. Because children want fast food, and sweet food, and snack food, and filling food, and salty food, and food in little packets, and all the food they see advertised everywhere, which along with everything else that goes into feeding children, mothers are expected to counteract the influence of unhealthy direct-to-children advertising overload on their children singlehandedly, when their children are constantly being bombarded with messages that they should be eating the processed stuff. Fielding-Singh's last few chapters, about the importance of public policy as an alternative to forcing mothers to shoulder the entire, insane burden of child-feeding, are excellent. Michelle Obama has probably read this book already. How the Other Half Eats needs a new title, a ghostwriter, and an editor, but at its core it is an excellent piece of research that should make American society change foodways and expectations.
October 22, 2021
This book was received as an ARC from Little, Brown Spark in exchange for an honest review. Opinions and thoughts expressed in this review are completely my own.
I absolutely learned so much from reading this book that it changed my whole perspective on food especially concerning access to food. I count my blessings everyday that I have a stable job where I make enough money to feed my family healthy food but I know there are many others that can't afford to eat healthy and they visit food banks and food distribution centers just to get enough. It was so interesting to get an inside look of each of the four families and how they were feeding each other. It still breaks my heart that not everyone has access to food but thankfully there are places like the local library that has resources and books like this one that informs people how to get access to these resources and get the food that they need to feed their families and that is how no kid will be left hungry.
We will consider adding this title to our Non-Fiction collection at our library. That is why we give this book 5 stars.
I absolutely learned so much from reading this book that it changed my whole perspective on food especially concerning access to food. I count my blessings everyday that I have a stable job where I make enough money to feed my family healthy food but I know there are many others that can't afford to eat healthy and they visit food banks and food distribution centers just to get enough. It was so interesting to get an inside look of each of the four families and how they were feeding each other. It still breaks my heart that not everyone has access to food but thankfully there are places like the local library that has resources and books like this one that informs people how to get access to these resources and get the food that they need to feed their families and that is how no kid will be left hungry.
We will consider adding this title to our Non-Fiction collection at our library. That is why we give this book 5 stars.
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