Read Online Pressure Cooker Why Home Cooking Won't Solve Our Problems and What We Can Do About It Sarah Bowen Joslyn Brenton Sinikka Elliott 9780190663292 Books
Download As PDF : Pressure Cooker Why Home Cooking Won't Solve Our Problems and What We Can Do About It Sarah Bowen Joslyn Brenton Sinikka Elliott 9780190663292 Books
Food is at the center of national debates about how Americans live and the future of the planet. Not everyone agrees about how to reform our relationship to food, but one suggestion rises above the din We need to get back in the kitchen. Amid concerns about rising rates of obesity and diabetes, unpronounceable ingredients, and the environmental footprint of industrial agriculture, food reformers implore parents to slow down, cook from scratch, and gather around the dinner table. Making food a priority, they argue, will lead to happier and healthier families. But is it really that simple?
In this riveting and beautifully-written book, Sarah Bowen, Joslyn Brenton, and Sinikka Elliott take us into the kitchens of nine women to tell the complicated story of what it takes to feed a family today. All of these mothers love their children and want them to eat well. But their kitchens are not equal. From cockroach infestations and stretched budgets to picky eaters and conflicting nutrition advice, Pressure Cooker exposes how modern families struggle to confront high expectations and deep-seated inequalities around getting food on the table.
Based on extensive interviews and field research in the homes and kitchens of a diverse group of American families, Pressure Cooker challenges the logic of the most popular foodie mantras of our time, showing how they miss the mark and up the ante for parents and children. Romantic images of family meals are inviting, but they create a fiction that does little to fix the problems in the food system. The unforgettable stories in this book evocatively illustrate how class inequality, racism, sexism, and xenophobia converge at the dinner table. If we want a food system that is fair, equitable, and nourishing, we must look outside the kitchen for answers.
Read Online Pressure Cooker Why Home Cooking Won't Solve Our Problems and What We Can Do About It Sarah Bowen Joslyn Brenton Sinikka Elliott 9780190663292 Books
"This book confirms and validates a lot of thoughts I've had about providing my family a home cooked meal, and the continued gender inequities in having a family. I appreciate that these smart women are talking about it, and spent an enormous amount of time interviewing women across socio-economic classes to shed light on this tricky subject.
The book was really well written, which is a real challenge when writing about research. The description of the home environments really transported you to those kitchens in North Carolina."
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Pressure Cooker Why Home Cooking Won't Solve Our Problems and What We Can Do About It Sarah Bowen Joslyn Brenton Sinikka Elliott 9780190663292 Books Reviews :
Pressure Cooker Why Home Cooking Won't Solve Our Problems and What We Can Do About It Sarah Bowen Joslyn Brenton Sinikka Elliott 9780190663292 Books Reviews
- This book is a very well-cited study of food, its acquisition, preparation, and consumption. It follows several families, mostly low income families, as they navigate feeding themselves. Women's roles and the perceptions around them are central, as are our country's policies about welfare. I was hoping to keep reading forever, but I've got a list of many other works to find out more thanks to the references section in this book. Definitely a must read for anyone concerned about our food supply, hunger, poverty, welfare, and policy and its outcomes.
- This book is not a critique of the benefits of home cooking, and that is unfortunate. My guess is that the authors were looking for a way to sell their research and came up with home cooking as a foil. The book has three parts, an intro that fails to lay out the argument against home cooking, the overly long and meandering look at nine women and their challenges and a “conclusion†that in essence says that we need to help poor people not be poor and the primary strategy is to raise minimum wage. As a taste one of the nine women lives in a hotel with her kids, another has a husband that works nights and eats junk food, another is likely an ex meth user, they don’t say that just hint by saying that her front teeth are like little brown sticks. She also has two kids and no job. You feel compassion for these people but they are not the target audience for the home cooking movement, they are just trying to feed their families and rightfully so. The theme of the book is that “white males†by suggesting that people benefit from home cooking is causing “anxiety†in these people.
- I liked how this research intense book was basically pointing out why white me foodie pundits are clueless about what goes on in family kitchens in the United States.
- This isn't a book about cooking. It's a book about how what we say, think, do, preach, and spend public money around food, health, and family puts more and more pressure on families, especially on mothers.
The book is a result of a research project, following multiple families of various socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, in the Raleigh, North Carolina area. It looks at how they eat, why they make their choices, and how they try to balance time, money, health, conflict in the family over food choices.
Everyone parent wants their children to be healthy, and wants to feed them in a healthy way. It's not that simple even for well-off families, though, and for the economically struggling, it gets even more complicated. Food isn't just nutrition. It's also culture, family tradition, personal memories and feelings, and a way that people assert identity. None of this is easy on the families deciding what are the best choices.
And making these choices is further complicated by the fact that fruits and vegetables are expensive. If you're on a limited income, especially if your food budget is SNAP benefits, it can be difficult or impossible to afford the recommended number of fruits and vegetables for the family. At the bottom end of the economic ladder, there is food insecurity--families who can't provide every member enough food to keep them healthy and active. In these families, adults have to decide who eats, and get enough calories into their children to keep them healthy and growing.
With money so limited, there is also the painful reality of deciding what bills to pay. If you have a medical emergency and need care, that's a large bill you probably can't pay, at least not and pay the rent and the electric and the phone, as well. Yet food is not a need that can be deferred. I'm an aging woman with no kids, but I've been through some of this myself, thank God with no one but me depending on my ability to balance things. When you have to feed others, especially children young enough that they can't even understand the issues, it's much worse. It's all well and good to say that this is what we need, this is what we can afford, so this is what you have to eat--but in real life, you can't make kids eat what they've decided they're not going to eat. I recall one memorable incident from my early teens. My younger sister was three. She liked peas. Really, she did. We all knew that, and had observed her liking of peas on a regular basis.
But that night, she had decided she was not going to eat peas.
My parents had a rule, I think an easy and flexible rule compared to many families around the subject of family dinner and food. Anything that was put on your plate, you had to eat three bites. Not finish it, just eat three bites. That night, my sister decided she was not eating any peas. At all. My dad, who backed down on nothing, backed down to the extent of insisting on, not three bites, but three peas. And my sister still refused. My mom and I watched in amazement, and distress, and inability to come up with anything that would make either of them budge, as this confrontation went on for nearly four hours. In the end, my sister did not eat the peas.
On other nights, later, she did eat peas.
That's one personal example. The simple fact is that there is no way to force a child to consume food they have decided they will not eat, and if you are already struggling to put enough food on the table, you can't waste money on what you know won't be eaten. The kids get no benefit from what they refuse to eat anyway.
Moreover, nearly all of the advice about what to eat, how to cook it, the central importance of the nightly family dinner, and how to afford good food is coming from white, male, upper income foodies and chefs who will never themselves have to figure out how to feed everyone with $1.45 per person per meal, in an urban center that may have no close supermarkets, and where costs are relatively high.
There is so much more in here, and I can't talk about even everything that moved or disturbed me greatly. Please, read the book, and think about it.
Highly recommended.
I bought this book. - I usually read fiction, but a friend inspired me to give Pressure Cooker a try. I found the women's stories compelling and the analysis refreshingly authentic. My friends and I are all in the feeding-small-ones time of life, and struggling. This book explores some common assumptions about the hows and whys families feed themselves the way they do in this day & age. Fabulous book club read!
- This book confirms and validates a lot of thoughts I've had about providing my family a home cooked meal, and the continued gender inequities in having a family. I appreciate that these smart women are talking about it, and spent an enormous amount of time interviewing women across socio-economic classes to shed light on this tricky subject.
The book was really well written, which is a real challenge when writing about research. The description of the home environments really transported you to those kitchens in North Carolina. - This book tells the stories of 9 families from different backgrounds and income levels as they relate to food. These stories are interwoven with thoroughly researched current information connecting the stories to broader societal issues. The authors are sociologists and they focus on the systemic issues that make the ideal of daily home-cooked meals hard to actualize. The basic message is that it's not helpful to blame individuals for being too lazy or ignorant to cook - solutions need to address the societal root causes. Not light reading but very readable, and worth the time.
- Pressure Cooker gives an in-depth look at food inequality by allowing the reader to see the challenges through the eyes of nine different women. I was completely moved and inspired reading this book. Pressure Cooker is a very easy and relatable read. A true wake up call!!!
