Abstract
Food scarcity. Time poverty. Social judgement. Individual preferences. Local, credible sourcing. These are a few of the issues that shape what we eat every day. In their compelling study of nine underprivileged American families, sociologists Sarah Bowen, Joslyn Brenton, and Sinikka Elliott relate to us commonplace problems in organizing everyday food. The book’s equivocal title, Pressure Cooker, comes from the myriad tensions that middle/lower-middle class homemakers face as they try to put the best possible fare on the table while, at the same time, dealing with their troubled and disadvantaged circumstances. The harsh but real outlook, which reads depressing at times, shares stories that unveil the underlying canvas of deep-rooted structural concerns that persist in the American political, socio-economic, and cultural landscape.
Laid out in seven parts that are further divided into 27 bite-sized chapters, Pressure Cooker is well-organized and edited. The ethnographic description is meticulous, relatable, and at times emotion-arousing. The interview analyses provide substance. Many of the chapters begin with a captivating snapshot vignette of one of the nine families, which are based in or around Raleigh, NC, in an everyday setting relevant to the food-related tension that the chapter aims to highlight. This illustration is ostensibly the result of a detailed observational period, which the authors say comprised about 250 hours in total. The vignette is followed by a larger piece on the family’s historiography or social context, which is again related to the main issue discussed in the chapter. This family backdrop was probably written with the aid of in-depth interviews with the family members (the authors conducted over 150 hours of interviews during the course of their study). Finally, the authors summarize the main topic of the chapter as it pertains to broader American society, leveraging copious amounts of secondary research. An introductory and concluding chapter, which provides an analytical summary of the complications of food provision, bookend the story-based chapters.
The problems that beset the families are varied and so are the ways that the families are structured. In this regard, the authors do a tremendous job of encapsulating the diversity of problems that plague American families through the lives of just nine case studies. The authors argue that what incapacitates lower-class families to have healthy, high quality food is not an issue of lack of knowledge, seriousness, or desire, as many food experts would make you believe. Instead, a web of uncontrollable factors that these households are entangled in hampers their food choice. At times, it is surprising that for one of the most developed economies in the world, the rich–poor divide is so stark, the right for partaking good food becomes an everyday challenge, and where surplus, accessibility, and conglomeration of good and affordable food in some of the country’s areas are balanced by extreme paucity of the same in others. Thus, the book is an expose into the inadequacy and the inefficiency of the American food system.
The authors highlight multifarious vexations for the families. One is work-life balance. Since most adults, men and women, in the United States today are working outside the home (almost a necessity to make ends meet) and with work schedules that are usually beyond their control, cooking ability and choice are at a premium. This is particularly so given the other constraints that families go through. Issues that, inter alia, arise in home cooking are time constraints, unsupportive partners or children, changing nutrition advice, immobility, celebrations, schedule conflicts, dependency on support networks, broken families, peer pressure, unavailable ingredients, and juggling other errands in the process.
The book intends to be a rebuttal to food experts and nutritionists who advise home cooking as a panacea to food problems. These mainly white, well-off male pundits who appear in the media suggest maxims such as ‘Make Time for Food’, and ‘Shop Smarter, Eat Better’. The authors demonstrate convincingly that for the kind of families that they studied, by and large, the adages do not hold true; the ‘freedom’ to follow these suggestions is a mirage and there are other variegated factors (sometimes as simple as not having the money to buy proper utensils) that need to be accounted for. Moreover, most of the families in the studied sector already cook at home. The experts’ advice itself may not be bad, but the authors argue that it is not even relevant in many contexts.
However, it may be pertinent to point out that in all likelihood the audience that the experts are talking to and those whose stories are transcribed in the book are very different groups of people. The studied families are probably not getting their advice from such experts as they deal with more urgent, low-income concerns such as a place to live, health problems, racial discrimination, and crime and make choices such as whether to spend money on food or to pay the bills in order to avoid going to court. In contrast, families in upper-middle class America, which are most likely the experts’ audience, are generally free from the aforementioned issues; for such a public, home cooking is perhaps a feasible, recommended option. Regardless, while getting back into the kitchen may not be one-size-fits-all solution, it may help those who are not doing it and if it is possible to do so.
The book is very much a gendered take on food in American culture. The authors make it clear that even in contemporary egalitarian-motivated America, women bear the grunt of shopping, preparing, and cleaning up food; men continue to play a side, almost apathetic role in what is described as the invisible work of food provision (it may be added that follow-up studies may analyze life from the male perspective). There is a fair bit of discussion on trying to become a good mom and working towards serving the idealized meal and distress at not being able to do so. Relatedly, young children (which each of the families has) are a central issue in the accounts and the authors’ compassionate analytical gaze casts sufficient light on how the next generation of under-privileged Americans are being brought up.
The solutions to America’s food worries are deeper than one imagines. The concluding section offers some answers, like improving regulation, multi-use of large school kitchens, and increasing base incomes. However, this is the part of the book that could have been developed further considering that the subtitle of the book leads readers to this direction. Nevertheless, the book does offer more than an icebreaker to start the discussion on engrained problems.
Pressure Cooker is an excellent read for any social scientist who intends to study food preparation in modern homes. The book may be light on theory, but it is vivid in description. While the setting is the American lower-middle class, many of the issues are universal. Hence, even if fine details do not apply to another context, they are useful as a point of comparison. In this regard, the book is accessible to any global lay reader. In sum, Pressure Cooker needs to be lauded for its very accessible approach to pervasive complexities in America’s food dilemma.
