As part of Hunger Awareness Month, we hosted a community book club with The Lakewood Bookstore on Saturday, May 30. The selected book was How the Other Half Eats: The Untold Story of Food and Inequality in America by Priya Fielding-Singh. Catch our Development Director Claire Aijian’s review and takeaways:
I always enjoy reading books that give us a chance to understand the lives of real people, “How the Other Half Eats” was no exception. Author and researcher Priya Fielding-Singh spends time with families in the California Bay Area to gain a better understanding of how families across different racial, educational, and economic backgrounds approach food choices. Because women are still most often responsible for food planning and preparation for families (she refers to a study that found that 71% of moms handle both shopping and food prep while just 11% of dads do both tasks), most of the people that Fielding-Singh spends time with are mothers.
All of the mothers that Fielding-Singh spends time with express their own concerns and worries around food. It was most surprising to see that costs did not frequently come up as the primary stressor for lower-income mothers. Mothers expressed other concerns such as tiredness and a lack of time to prepare meals due to long work hours and commutes. She heard many times from mothers that after a long workday, they would rather prepare or buy something fast and easy that they could enjoy with their kids. Moms also worried about changing preferences and pickiness, opting to make meals that they knew their kids would eat rather than making something new, which meant risking their kids would not eat at all or that food would be wasted.
The higher-income mothers spent more time worrying about the quality of the foods they fed their kids and expressed more concern over shaping their children’s preferences. All of the mothers expressed a certain level of frustration that their kids desired processed foods, but the higher-income mothers seemed to tie their own morality as a mother to the foods their kids were eating.
A bag of chips could mean something very different for each family. For one of the lower-income moms, the bag of chips was a way she could say yes to her daughters when so often she had to say no. To an immigrant mother, a bag of chips represented her feeling a sense of belonging in American culture. To a higher-income mom, a bag of chips represented “bad” mothering and letting her kids eat ultra-processed food instead of organic or fresh foods.
My biggest takeaway from the book is the idea of radical empathy. Radical empathy asks us to listen and understand another’s experience from their perspective, not how we imagine we would feel in that moment. It seems like every time I go on social media or watch the news, someone is judging the decisions made by a family that receives SNAP or visits food pantries. People often feel entitled to know HOW people are spending their money and that these families need to defend every dollar they spend. What would it look like if we trusted that every individual is the expert on their own life and can make decisions that will ultimately be the most beneficial for themselves and their family. I am proud to see that radical empathy is something that shows up at EFN and throughout our network every day, but how much better would all of us be if we could find just a bit more radical empathy for those around us?