A fascinating interview on Vox with three US sociologists who look at (and have a book about) the mythology and misunderstanding around home cooking - not least that for the first half of the 20th century most American upper middle class families employed a cook. At the heart of their observation, based on a close study of nine families is that Michael Pollan's contention - “We’re going to have to fix our diet before we fix the whole economy.” - doesn't reflect the actual lives of less well off Americans:
But in a lot of cases, there are other, non-food problems that are making it really hard for them to feed their families the way they’d want to. In one of the more extreme examples, there’s Patricia, who is living with her daughter and two grandchildren in a hotel room. She doesn’t have a kitchen. So yeah, she’s heating up frozen pizza — she doesn’t have a stove. And it seems like, no, “fixing our diet” is not going to fix this.This is an extreme case but one of the researchers explained:
A lot of people in the study had their own houses. But a lot of people in the study didn’t have basic kitchen tools. Their stoves wouldn’t work. They’d have pest infestations. The electricity would get cut off, or the water, for a period of time. A lot of people didn’t have tables or enough chairs for everyone to sit down. So really basic things of this kind of image of what dinner can look like and how you should do it didn’t map up with a lot of the experiences of the poor families in our study.So when we talk about bad diet, reliance on instant food, not sitting down together as a family - not, so to speak, meeting that middle class ideal - we forget that this lifestyle requires more than just the ability to cook, it needs also the resources to do that cooking and enjoy that dinner. Shouting at poor people about "junk food" is bad enough but when the government plans to deliberately make that food more expense we are actively making the lives of the poorest less tolerable.
Right now the UK government is consulting on a set of restrictions for HFSS food promotions (usually and lazily tagged "junk food" by the media) that includes bans on 'buy-one-get-one-free' offers and limits to advertising. The effect of this approach is likely (along with things like the sugar tax) to just make it harder for the less well off to feed their family. This research reminds us that we need to fix the economic circumstances not fix their diet.
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