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4.5
Americans are flooded with information about food and nutrition. Mainstream and social media, network television, and the Internet are saturated with cooking shows, websites, blogs, recipe troves, and promotional advertising. Print media are equally replete with culinary magazines, cookbooks, restaurant reviews, coupons, and junk mail touting culinary offerings. Despite a plethora of information about groceries and food preparation, very few people possess a realistic perception of the issues and struggles faced by American families to nourish their children. How the Other Half Eats is an absorbing, thoroughly researched book that merits reading by everyone from concerned parents to school administrators to social workers and teachers as well as education, government, and health policymakers at all levels. While pursuing a Ph.D. at Stanford, Fielding-Singh, a sociologist, embarked upon a research project in 2014 to uncover the factors and problems typical Americans confront in making decisions about how and what to feed their families. During her investigations, she interviewed 160 people in the San Francisco Bay Area later deciding to embed herself to intensively observe and study four voluntarily participating families of diverse racial, ethnic, economic, and social backgrounds. Told in the first-person, the author discusses their individual and collective circumstances in nourishing their families in relation to factors of gender, time, money, educational level, immigration, access to food and housing, and individual priorities. The choice to relate her findings in the first-person opens a window onto the food purchasing and eating habits, dietary status, and choices made by participants. Her narrative conveys a tone of sincere engagement and personal investment in her work leaving the reader curious about each family and wanting to know more. From the outset, it becomes clear that feeding and nourishing a family is a gendered responsibility falling almost exclusively upon the shoulders of wives and mothers. As a consequence, male partners and spouses are detached, yet influential when it comes to food work in the selected households. Gendered responsibility for outcomes within these families plays an outsized role in their choices, both nutritional and economic, of what to feed their children. In the concluding chapters, Fielding-Singh is direct and forceful in stating the consequences of food scarcity for low-income families, many of whom face a lack of access to nutritious food because of housing, transportation, and financial problems. She singles out the inferior quality of federally subsidized school lunch programs in the United States and emphasizes that schools should play a greater role in promoting good nutrition, growing of food, and food preparation as well as providing spaces for community engagement around events to educate parents and children about sound choices in their daily lives. There is a compelling need for collective responsibility to address and expand public health and food assistance as well as more serious regulation of the food industry to limit exposure of children to junk food. The cost of doing nothing to address the very real inequities in providing nutritious food to all Americans, especially growing children, deserves attention at the highest levels in every state and in the halls of Congress. To ignore children’s health and nutritional status is a disinvestment in the future. How the Other Half Eats makes a clear case for action, regulation, proper funding, and reform of this critical task.
