Concerns about food and childcare transcend class lines

My family, friends, and the entire This Is Uncomfortable team could barely enjoy a meal without talking about something I learned from Priya Fielding Singh’s How the Other Half Eats.

Did you know that collard greens and kale (and the exact same species, Brassica oleracea) are nutritionally equivalent, yet racism and social prejudice have led to one being promoted as a superfood over the other?

Sociologist Fielding Singh interviewed 75 diverse families in the San Francisco Bay Area to get a broad picture of how Americans feed their families and why there are such persistent nutritional disparities between the rich and the poor.

“How the Other Half Eats” is the culmination of three years of research, but it’s not a boring, academic read. The book focuses on the four families Fielding Singh accompanied, who are so relatable that I could see myself shopping, cooking and eating with them for weeks on end. She learned a lot about the symbolic value of food and the anxieties mothers of all income levels face.

I love that these personal stories are the foundation of the book, and they remind me of how our show tries to tackle big economic issues through personal stories. I called Fielding Singh a few weeks ago to talk about this, and here are some excerpts from our conversation:

This is unpleasant: How would you describe this book for someone who hasn’t read it yet?

Priya Fielding Singh: My motivation for writing this book was to explore the phenomenon of nutritional inequality – the disparity in dietary quality between rich and poor. We have a strong grasp of the breadth of this problem – the number of people it affects, and the dire and disturbing consequences of this kind of inequality – but we have a much shallower understanding of how this inequality actually affects people’s lives. How do people make difficult, complex, and sometimes contradictory choices about food that extend into these broader inequalities?

So as a sociologist and as a qualitative researcher, I felt really motivated and prepared to use a human-centered lens to really spend time with families, parents, and children who are on the ground laboring, working, and making choices. A key goal of the book was to illuminate how difficult those choices are, and what that means, sometimes in surprising ways, about how inequalities play out on a larger scale.

TIU: Was there anything in your research that really surprised you?

Fielding Singh: Low-income families are actually know I can’t emphasize enough how wrong our assumptions about what is healthy and the importance of healthy foods are. Almost all of the mothers I interviewed for this book wanted their children to eat healthy foods, understood that healthy foods are important to their children’s health, and had a broad understanding of what healthy foods are. So nutrition education is do not have That’s the main barrier here. What struck me was that mothers from different income brackets actually had very different approaches to feeding their children because of the symbolic meaning that food holds.

Food not only has material value to us, but also has enormous symbolic value: what we eat, for example, is deeply connected to our place in society, which shapes what food means to us, how we use it to show affection to others, to uphold traditions, and to understand who we are and what we value. Right?

TIU: From what I’ve read, you started out intending to write a book about food inequality, but ended up writing a project more specifically about mothers and food. Was that something you expected?

Fielding Singh: No, I wanted to focus on families because I wanted to understand both the food and diet aspects. But once I started interviewing for this project, a few months into it, it became clear to me that this is a study of the unspoken and often undervalued labor of mothers, the role that mothers play, ideas about what it means to be a good mother, and how food and nutrition are connected to mothering and parenting. It was a story that really needed to be told, because it’s a story that nobody in the nutrition or public health field was telling. Not just the women who are doing this work and making these choices, but the women who are struggling to fit into societal definitions of what it means to be a good mother.

TIU: You write about “intensive parenting,” a term I’d never heard before. Can you explain it?

Fielding Singh: In the United States, there are such deeply shared beliefs about what makes a woman a good mother that sociologists call it “intensive mothering ideology,” a term coined in the 1990s by a sociologist named Sharon Hayes to describe the unreasonably, and unattainably high, standards held up for mothers in this country.

A “good mother” must act as her child’s primary caretaker, which is labor intensive and resource demanding. A “good mother” is self-sacrificing, prioritizing her child’s needs over her own. And what really matters is that a “good mother” is typically portrayed as being white, married to a man, and affluent. Yet, even though it’s out of reach for most American mothers, research shows that mothers across society are actually aspired to intensive parenting — an impossible standard. So mothers are forced to: do You need to feel like a good mother.

So through my work, I noticed that low-income mothers use food for two purposes. First, they use food to nourish their children emotionally in times of hardship, to protect them from scarcity and adversity. But they also try to prove to themselves that they are good mothers, that they can bring a smile to their children’s faces even in the face of deep poverty. And that’s why I use this concept of intensive parenting in a lot of the book, because it’s so important to understanding mothering behavior and the ways in which mothers of different incomes try to love and care for their children through food.

TIU: In the book, Nya, a low-income mother, gives her child two dollars to go buy ice cream, and while the two dollars won’t pay off her credit card debt or lift her family out of poverty, it makes her daughter smile and makes Nya feel like a good mother.

Fielding Singh: Absolutely. What struck me as I spent time with low-income mothers was that so much of their experience raising children has been about saying no. No to this, no to that. It’s so traumatic for the child and for the mother to have to say no over and over and over all the time. So it’s really quite a challenge to find something that’s relatively affordable and has such a huge impact on a child’s well-being. And that’s junk food in this country.

TIU: Speaking of which, you’ve written that class influences not only our eating habits but also our perceptions of other people’s eating habits. Can you explain that?

Fielding Singh: Yes, there is a double standard. So when wealthy, especially white, moms feed their kids, say, a bag of Cheetos, we judge them as not being overly dominant. They’re laid-back, they’re cool. So that’s good. But when low-income moms do it, they’re deemed neglectful, careless. They’re either ignorant or they just don’t care or don’t value what their kids should be eating. So it’s really amazing how the exact same food can generate such wildly different social evaluations.

TIU: I was really surprised reading the book to learn that even the most affluent and privileged moms still felt extremely stressed and like they weren’t good enough or didn’t have enough to feed their families healthy meals. Why do you think this was?

Fielding Singh: Yeah, that was really shocking to me too. I learned that mothers across the income spectrum feel some level of guilt or anxiety about how they feed their kids, and most mothers engage in what sociologists call “emotion work” to assuage that guilt. So the “emotion work” I’m talking about is the inner work that each of us does to monitor, evaluate, suppress, or shape our emotions in certain ways. Emotion work isn’t just about trying to project the right emotions outwardly, it’s about actively trying to manage the emotions that arise inside. So, for example, trying to turn feelings of disappointment into feelings of gratitude.

But I found that mothers at all income levels used very different strategies to shape their feelings as determined by their socioeconomic status: low-income mothers engaged in what I call downscaling, pushing aside guilt in an attempt to accept and reconcile. In contrast, high-income mothers often took the opposite approach, engaging in what I call upscaling, escalating guilt by raising already high and unattainable societal standards for intensive parenting.

And I realized that mothers across society share this oppressive sense of guilt. No mother escapes this labor unscathed. But you’d think that having more money or more time would give you the privilege of maybe not having to worry. But in fact it was the exact opposite. And it was a really interesting reflection of how money can affect our eating habits in unexpected ways.

TIU: Since you began this project, you’ve become a mother yourself. I’m curious how this research has influenced your own approach to your children’s feeding.Fielding Singh: Seeing the level of guilt and anxiety mothers feel around food has helped me come into this experience with a little more awareness and perspective, a little more gratitude for the resources I have and the time I have to work with food, a little less guilt and stress, and a little more forgiveness and gratitude towards myself.

📚Recommendations for the next Uncomfortable Book Club📚

In two weeks, we’ll be talking with linguist, podcaster, and past TIU guest Amanda Montell about her new book, The Age of Magical Overthinking. It’s a quick read that fits into the self-help theme we covered last season. Have you read it? Send us your thoughts and we might include them in the conversation.

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