Have you ever stood in line to checkout at the grocery store and judged the person in front of you for what they bought? Most Americans do1. But why do people buy what they buy?
The answer is more complicated than you might expect, which Fielding-Singh shows in How the Other Half Eats. Fielding-Singh is a sociologist who shadows a number of families from different economic backgrounds to understand how they shop for food and eat - and what is behind the choices they make.
The book centers on 4 families in Silicon Valley, with the protagonists being the moms that are largely responsible for shopping and feeding their families. The families come from a range of backgrounds and include:
One below the federal poverty line (about $23k a year for a family of 3)
A working class family just above the federal poverty line
A middle-class family (making ~$175k / year)
An affluent family (making ~$400k-500k / year)
While I am not a mother, I am fairly involved in feeding my kids, whether that’s shopping for food (made easier by Instacart), packing their lunches, meal prepping for them on Sunday, or giving them dinner during the week. Given this, I feel comfortable having a perspective on this book.
Summary
Why do parents struggle to feed their kids healthy food?
Contary to popular belief, it’s not due to “food deserts” or neighborhoods that don’t have stores with healthy food choices - most families have access to supermarkets either nearby or in driving distance
It’s also not due to ignorance or parents not knowing better - she found that parents across the socioeconomic spectrum generally understood what healthy eating was (e.g., fruits + vegetables, not too much processed food or added sugar or soda)
Instead, it’s due to:
Lack of time - in general, healthy food takes longer to prepare, and working families who couldn’t pay for any help were more likely to grab a pizza or takeout. For moms with limited free time, cooking dinner represented a real tradeoff as that time could be spent with their kids or doing something else. Well-off families can pay their way out of this issue (e.g., hiring a helper to cook food, ordering freshly prepared healthy food from a meal delivery service, just having more childcare in general), but other families cannot
General mental and physical fatigue - when your kids ask for something, it takes a certain amount of mental energy to not give it to them and deal with their whining / complaining. Mothers who had more stress-filled days (being a single mother, having to fight off an eviction) or more manual jobs (cleaning houses, etc) might have had less mental energy to push back against their kids, leading them to just give in
Food being an affordable luxury - for less well-off families, tasty (but unhealthy) food was one luxury they could give their kids and one thing they could do to make their kids happy. They might not be able to move their kids to a bigger house or take them on a fancy vacation, but they could buy them a Starbucks Frappucino for $4 and see them smile for a minute
Other differences between less well-off and better-off families:
Less well-off parents get some benefit from giving their kids “junk food2”: as mentioned above, it’s a way to say “yes” to their kids amidst all the “no’s” they must tell them.
Better-off parents get happiness from denying their kids junk food: it’s a way to set limits on their kids, who already have everything they need.
Less well-off parents tend to be optimistic as a coping mechanism: “it could be much worse,” or “we used to have it even harder.”
Better-off parents tend to be harder on themselves: “we’re not doing enough for our kids,” or “that other family eats even healthier.”
Thoughts and reactions
The idea of constantly beating yourself up as a parent definitely resonated. While I don’t do it much with food, I often feel that I could be a much better parents in lots of different ways. Why do we / I do this?
Part of this comes from anxiety on how competitive and winner-take-all the world is: you want your kid to get into a good college, which requires good grades in high school, which requires a good education in middle school, blah blah blah…There’s an idea that parenting is essentially zero sum - it doesn’t matter if your kid is smart, simply that they are smarter than other kids
Worrying that you are not a good enough parent is a way of coping with this anxiety - we think that if we actively feel bad about ourselves as parents and put in the “emotional labor” of sorts, we will somehow make our kids better off
There is also a social element to this. People who brag about their kids can be pretty insufferable, so maybe we think that if we are hard on our kids (and ourselves) as parents, we’ll avoid coming across this way. Of course, false humility is its own type of arrogance, so this doesn’t always work (“our son only got into Columbia and Penn and not Harvard or Yale, we’re really disappointed in him!”)
I do think this is one area where comparisons are dangerous. Multiple mothers in the book talk about how their friend’s kids eat even healthier, etc. I have no idea what my friend’s kids eat. It doesn’t really matter to me. If somebody wants to make their 3-year old a super fancy lunch, good for them. Sometimes having your “head in the sand” and avoiding mimetic desire can be helpful
The idea of getting pleasure from saying no to your kid definitely resonated as well. This made me realize that getting pleasure from saying no is a privilege and means that you are in a position to say yes a lot
I thought the book was also a good reminder about empathy and not judging people. When you read about some of the choices people make in the book (e.g., why is a mother buying her daughter a fancy Frappuccino when she can’t pay her rent?), it’s easy to judge, but Fielding-Singh does a good job of explaining people’s perspectives:
In this case, the mother is so deeply in debt that she feels that she’ll never be able to get out of it - so what does spending another $4 on a coffee matter?
This is the cheapest way to deliver a smile to her kids - she can’t buy them a new smartphone or take them on an exotic vacation
And while it might be “better” to homecook dinner every night, it does take time and there is a tradeoff involved - if you are a single mother working and trying to keep everything together, do you really want to spend much or all of your precious free time cooking a meal your kids might not even enjoy?
There’s an interesting discussion about food as a signifier of social position and status symbol: “do people like us eat this”? For a more affluent family, organic pizza might be OK, whereas they’d never eat Domino’s - even if the nutrition is the same. I touched on this in my discussion of The Secret Life of Groceries and Trader Joe’s (which makes high-status junk food):
There’s a great (and lighter) chapter on Trader Joe’s and how it’s succeeded at branding itself as a unique grocery store, one for people who maybe want a more “interesting” shopping experience. And it’s true! I will sometimes find trader Joe’s cookies in my house, and think “OK, these look good, let me try not eating them.” But when we accidentally ordered Chips Ahoy from Instacart, my reaction was “who bought this junk food?” even though it was calorically equivalent to the other stuff
One thing I wish the book talked more about was parent’s attitudes on food and how they impacted their kids. If parents struggled (or still struggle) with their weight, how does that impact how they feed and talk about food with their kids? And is that the “right” way to do it?
The food industry is a key culprit according to Fielding-Singh. She recommends banning marketing to children:
Banning marketing to children would benefit kids and parents. If kids weren’t inundated with ads for unhealthy treats on TV, on their phones, and in schools, they would stop asking their parents for them nonstop. Moms wouldn’t have to decide between saying no and risking a battle with their kids and saying yes and giving their kids something they don’t want to. Currently, corporations hide behind the guise of “helping” moms feed their kids. 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. It also increases maternal guilt, anxiety, and shame. Today, because feeding families largely remains moms’ work, moms are the ones who primarily suffer from the food industry’s power and reach. They are the ones who have to navigate their kids’ preferences. They have to bear the weight of judgment — by society at large and internalized by themselves — for what goes into their kids’ bodies. Corporations make moms harder on themselves than they already are by reinforcing the idea that moms alone are responsible for what their kids eat, all the while bombarding kids with ads for foods that deviate from the nutritious diets moms want them to eat. Banning marketing to kids would give moms a fighting chance of being able to feed their kids what they want rather than what corporations push on them. Currently, only those families with the most money, time, and bandwidth have a shot at prevailing against the industry — and even those families often struggle and even fail. Protection from the food industry should be a right granted to all families, not a privilege reserved for the few.
I’m defining junk food here as food that 90%+ of parents would agree is not what their kids should be eating: heavily processed food, fast food, high-calorie beverages like soda