Abstract
Widespread debates about environmental pollution, population health and mortality, worker protections, family issues, and more are all related to something seemingly innocuous that we encounter every day: the food we eat. As Bowen, Brenton, and Elliott point out in Pressure Cooker, the food we eat is fundamentally intertwined with issues of race, class, and gender inequalities (and injustices) as well. Using the stories of nine families in the United States, the authors of Pressure Cooker show that families across race and class lines all want to be happy and healthy, nourished by high-quality, home-cooked food. However, precarious housing and work opportunities, the balancing of domestic and work obligations, and the near-constant struggle of placating everyone’s palate makes the work of navigating food and home cooking difficult and complicated for most. What’s more, the authors find that much of the tension around food-related issues in the family is still shouldered by women. While food reformers argue that home cooking and making “good” choices about food will help solve society’s ills, the authors dispute this claim given that personal food choices will not rectify structural inequalities that relate to what families eat. Bowen et al. ultimately conclude their work by offering advice about what might be done at the individual, community, and national levels to mobilize food as a force to help repair—rather than further entrench—social inequalities.
Pressure Cooker is comprised of seven sections, each of which is organized around a familiar mantra or piece of advice frequently offered by celebrity food experts or influencers, such as “you are what you eat” and “shop smarter, eat better.” While these mantras are aimed at manifesting healthier, happier families, in practice, the project of pursuing familial and health perfection through food and home cooking is far from simple. Contained in each section are a number of chapters, with each chapter highlighting one of the families studied. The lived experiences of these families unquestionably complicate food influencers’ and reformers’ quick-fix claims. Because nine families are profiled throughout 28 chapters, readers return to hear more about each family’s life across several chapters. In this way, the book seems to convey the sense that readers are visitors who are invited over to share a meal with the participating families on several occasions, whether it be during the holidays, homecoming parties, or just a regular day.
The first section, “You Are What You Eat,” introduces readers to the complicated interplay between race/ethnicity, social class, gender, and the pressure to live up to social expectations of home cooking and healthy food choices. These chapters also set up themes that are carried throughout the book: the association between food and “good” parenting practices and how the work of food choices is complicated by race, class, and gender. For example, one chapter introduces the participant Rae and her family and reveals Rae’s struggle around simultaneously feeling sentimental toward the soul food she grew up with and conflicted about sharing that food with her son due to her belief that soul food is unhealthy. The second section, “Make Time for Food,” problematizes the idea that if only more people would make time for food, broader issues around health and family problems would be solved. However, navigating food and home cooking is difficult even for expert chefs. Although participant Greely operates a restaurant herself, she struggles to get home-cooked meals on the table for her own family. At this point in the book, it becomes clear that mothers and grandmothers across race and class statuses believe that home cooking is usually the best option for their families. However, these women are most often tasked with the work of getting “good” food on the table and into the bodies of their family members; not doing so might be construed as a parenting failure.
Yet, getting home-cooked food on the table itself does not mean everyone will eat it. Section three, “The Family That Eats Together, Stays Together,” delves more deeply into just how difficult it sometimes is for women to get everyone in the family to cooperate when it comes to food. Although women associate cooking with keeping a family together and running smoothly, this undertaking is sometimes a struggle. Section four, “Know What’s on Your Plate,” transitions to discuss the idea that food choices are both political and up to the consumer. However, a trip to the supermarket with participant Melanie and her family demonstrates how having to rely on food assistance while trying to appease the food desires of everyone in the house puts pressure on women’s food choices. Section five, “Shop Smarter, Eat Better,” expands on the idea that food choices are an individual responsibility. Chapter 19, titled “The Checkout Line,” offers a particularly useful discussion of the history—and current state—of food assistance programs in the United States that complicates the idea that money doesn’t matter when it comes to the ability to eat—and be—healthy. Section six, “Bring Good Food to Others,” talks more about the challenges inherent to bringing good food to those in need despite the proliferation of nonprofits, community gardens, and food pantries in recent years. A trip to the food bank with participant Leanne outlines just how imperfect these solutions can be—and further, how difficult it is to access fresh, high-quality food through these means.
Section seven rounds out the book and also contains the authors’ concluding thoughts. In this section, the authors argue that nationwide understandings of food and food-related issues in the United States could use some shifting. For example, food preparation work in the family is still very much gendered and is experienced differently across social classes. However, conventional foodie advice often ignores—or dismisses—these differences. Also running through many of the stories throughout the book is the common thread that the women in Pressure Cooker are often blamed—and blame themselves—if they fall short of their own expectations when it comes to the health of their families and their food choices. As they continue to assume much of the responsibility for familial health, “bad” decisions and outcomes around food are easily understood as women’s fault. The authors argue that food choices are currently most often seen as personal—an understanding that is consistent with neoliberal cultural ideals that seem to have taken over the United States. Despite the availability of food options in the United States and the assumption that these options are available to all, food remains a social justice issue.
As far as its applicability in the classroom, I find this book to be written in an exceptionally accessible style with broad appeal. I believe it would be especially effective for an undergraduate audience. Because the book focuses on food, it would be an obvious contender for courses specifically focused on the sociology of food. Furthermore, this book strikes me as appropriate for introductory sociology classes because it is recent, timely, and also draws on the themes of social inequality that are covered in many introductory-level courses. This book could also be used in undergraduate courses on gender or the family. It complements some of the classic texts, including Hochschild’s ([1989] 2003) The Second Shift and Hays’s (1996) The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. Pressure Cooker builds on these previous works by providing an updated account of how mothers and grandmothers are still struggling to juggle paid work and child care responsibilities (vis-à-vis food decision making and preparation). Pressure Cooker also reminded me of Norah MacKendrick’s (2018) excellent recent book, Better Safe Than Sorry, because both books highlight how women are tasked with the work of keeping their families as free as possible from potentially toxic chemicals in consumer products and foods.
Regarding what instructors might do in the classroom, there are two ASA TRAILS and Teaching Sociology activities that I believe would pair well with this book. The first activity I would suggest is some variation of Harris, Harris, and Fondren’s (2015) adaptation of the “hunger banquets” activity. In short, this experiential learning activity randomly divides students into assigned social class groups, with students spatially separated into their groups in the classroom to embody the physical segregation between classes that persists in the United States today. The students are then served different varieties of meals or snacks that are comparable but differ according to quality or desirability (e.g., fresh artisanal pizza vs. discount frozen pizza). The “upper-class” students are served the highest quality food before any other students, and the “lower-class” students are served lower quality food after the “upper-class” and “middle-class” students have been served (Harris et al. 2015). Students then have the opportunity to reflect on how food options can be constrained by social class status. Most students probably would prefer to consume the highest quality and most desirable food and will thus begin to understand how social class constrains—or broadens—their choices. One modification I would suggest is that instead of assigning specific foods to class groups, instructors could also offer “upper-class” students the opportunity to choose from any of the available food options first, while those students assigned a “lower-class” status for the activity must choose from whatever the “upper-class” and “middle-class” students have rejected. This modification would really highlight Bowen et al.’s point that the food low-income people receive through assistance programs is often not as high quality as some might think and effectively consists of leftovers rejected by more affluent classes. Furthermore, it illustrates a crucial difference between upper- and lower-class consumers: the presence or absence of extensive choice when it comes to food.
The second activity I would suggest is Stalp’s (2010) “Gender, Family, and U.S. Holidays,” which aims to show students how the work around holidays is gendered. This would pair well with Pressure Cooker given that the authors touch on food preparation labor around several holidays, including Thanksgiving and July 4. This activity asks students to list the preparation activities that accompany the holidays and to think about how these tasks are gendered. Depending on the course, instructors could also modify this activity slightly to focus solely on the work that goes into food preparation around the holidays. Instructors might also discuss with students how food preparation activities around holidays and special events are shifted by social class locations and racial identities in families.
While I have no doubt that Pressure Cooker would be an excellent resource for teaching undergraduates, more advanced audiences might be left with lingering questions after reading this book. For example, I was surprised by the authors’ decision to profile only nine families given that the authors also discussed interviewing 168 women—in addition to conducting ethnographic observations—over the course of a few years. Although I appreciate that the authors went in-depth when it came to the nine cases, I was left wondering about all those not profiled. Furthermore, because the authors take a largely descriptive approach in profiling their participants’ lives throughout the book, some audiences might be left with more questions when it comes to situating the theoretical contributions of the study.
Regardless, the presentation style the authors used in Pressure Cooker undoubtedly has widespread appeal that would be extremely useful for facilitating classroom discussions around how social inequalities manifest in everyday life—in this case, around food. This book is a strong choice if looking to teach undergraduates about food inequality and injustice as it currently stands in the United States. Many readers would likely approach the book with preconceived beliefs about food choice as a personal, private matter that is not necessarily connected to social inequalities. However, Pressure Cooker successfully disputes the assumption that food is simply a personal choice and also takes down the trite recommendation that social problems and inequalities could be solved if only everyone prioritized home cooking.