Cooking Under Fire: Food Work Among Low-Income Mothers

• In Event: 025 - Regular Session. Culture and Inequality

Abstract

Food pundits and public health officials widely promote a return to home cooking as an essential ingredient to producing a healthy nation. This literature implies that if only we could make cooking and meal planning easier, or increase the amount of time that people have available to cook, we could get more people into the kitchen and improve people’s (and especially children’s) health. Many of these studies acknowledge the relationship between food work and gendered divisions of household labor. At the same time, most do not consider other contextual factors. We argue that both the scholarly literature and influential food gurus tend to assume a white middle-class notion of the home-cooked family meal: one in which family members of a nuclear household are all home and eat at the same time, do not experience food shortages, and can afford the equipment and energy bills necessary to prepare home-cooked meals. Based on interviews and participant observations with lower-income families, we demonstrate the purposeful strategies that poor and working class mothers enact when feeding their families. We find that mothers prioritize feeding as a way of creating a better life for their children than they had. For the mothers in our study, feeding is also embedded in a broad web of social relations. In addition, mothers’ strategies reflect a “middle-ground” approach to food and health. Our analysis of how low-income and poor mothers feed their children challenges popular notions of cooking that privilege a white middle-class habitus.

Authors

• Sarah Bowen, North Carolina State University

• Sinikka Elliott, North Carolina State University

• Joslyn Brenton, North Carolina State University