How the Other Half Eats

Starred review from September 20, 2021
Sociologist Fielding-Singh debuts with an enlightening examination of how socioeconomic inequities affect eating habits and health. Drawing on research she conducted as a Stanford University PhD student, Fielding-Singh profiles four families living in San Francisco’s Bay Area and documents their food choices and limitations over the course of several years. Nyah Baker, a Black single mother of two teenage daughters, relies on disability checks, payday loans, and occasional sex work to make ends meet. Meanwhile, Julie Cain, the wife of a corporate lawyer, spends roughly $900 per month on food for her family of four. Fielding-Singh reveals that an impoverished parent will spend more than she can afford on a luxurious meal because food is one of the few pleasures she can give her children, and that racial stereotypes affect ideas about healthy food choices (“There’s a reason why people sing the praises of kale but not collard greens”). Mealtimes are particularly complex for middle-class mothers balancing work and household duties, Fielding-Singh notes, while Blacks and Mexican Americans haven’t made the same dietary improvements as whites in recent decades. The author’s deeply empathetic approach allows her to personalize the copious data on nutritional and health disparities she cites. The result is devastating portrait of “the scarcity, uncertainty, and anxiety that permeates so much of the American dietary experience.”

October 1, 2021
Food, families, and motherhood in America. Making an insightful book debut, sociologist and ethnographer Fielding-Singh brings her perspective as a biracial, South Asian American woman, and concerned mother, to this well-researched look at food choices among racially, ethnically, and economically diverse families. Based on interviews with 75 families and extended observations of four families' daily lives, the book questions the assumption that food inequality can be "completely explained by the fact that healthy food was more expensive and farther away from lower-income folks than wealthier ones." Parents across society, she discovered, "undertake sacrificial, complicated, and frustrating work to feed kids." None lived in a "food desert" without access to affordable, healthy food, but there was a definite difference in the kinds of markets they frequented--Whole Foods vs. Costco--and the amounts they were able to spend, from less than $200 a month to over $1,000. Feeding fell largely to mothers, who all expressed concern about their children's nutrition. Nevertheless, mothers who had to deny many of their children's desires because of financial straits were likely to give in when it came to junk food, spending money on the chips and sugared cereal their children clamored for instead of fruits and vegetables. Lack of time, children's pickiness, and food industry advertising all shaped what mothers put on the table. Fielding-Singh incisively explores "racist narratives pervading dietary discourses" that associate certain foods with Black and Latinx families, fetishizing kale rather than collard greens, for example, as well as how privileged mothers were "constantly ratcheting up the standards by which they evaluated their kids' diets and themselves as moms." To overcome food inequality, Fielding-Singh suggests--in addition to a living wage and affordable housing--incentive programs, which would stretch federal-assistance dollars for the purchase of more nutritious foods; improving the national school lunch program; and banning the food industry from marketing to children. An eye-opening and intimate study of what families eat and why.

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