I'm one of those people that just likes books about food I don't know why but I do and this was a fascinating look at how food equality and more importantly inequality can be found divided along race and gender lines. I confess, this was a little dryer than I expected but it's still a solid and in my opinion necessary read

Low income families often have unhealthy eating habits because healthy, fresh food is expensive and food desserts exist. Right? Maybe not.

In How the Other Half Eats, Priya Fielding-Singh interviewed and observed families in the San Francisco Bay area, studying their eating habits. She looks not only at what they eat, but what food means to them. By juxtaposing the stories of different families in very different positions, we see that the significance we attached to different dietary elements can vary drastically. One mom doing all she can to ban treats altogether, one mom using junk food as "teaching moments", and another using soda and treats as a way to say "yes" to her kids when she has to constantly say "no" due to lack of money.

I thought that this book added a lot of nuance to the topic of health disparities.

Was happy to include this interesting and illuminating analysis in the Activites & Allies themed list of my holiday gift books guide in December. (listicle is online at related link)

Excellent fresh take on food insecurity, motivations of the people responsible for feeding children, and family priorities. I learned a lot, and found myself thinking about how our country can do a better job at making healthy food freely available to families in a way that really serves them well.

Readers of "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America" by Barbara Ehrenreich would also enjoy this book! It chronicles the struggles of a range of incomes and how families tackle food challenges. The most insightful takeaway from the book is that people with higher incomes also have struggles in how they feed their families and it is with the luxury of having more money to outsource that families can eat heathier. Also, it is very apparent that the imbalance of gender roles with feeding a family is a problem in American society. That was a major theme of the book. I would recommend this to any reader interested in learning the challenges across income spectrums on eating in the U.S. today.

I am grateful to the publisher for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. The opinions and thoughts expressed in this review are my own.

I'll get straight to it: I loved this book. At the risk of resorting to a terrible pun, it gave me a lot of food for thought. (I know, I know. I couldn't help it.) Seriously, though, like many people, I thought I understood the basics of why low income families sometimes struggle with food insecurity. It has to do, so the conventional wisdom goes, with issues of accessibility (i.e. food deserts) and affordability. If low income folks just had the ability to shop at Whole Foods, they would be buying more fancy organic produce and making fewer trips to the drive thru.

All of that seems logical enough, but in <i>How the Other Half Eats</i>, Priya Fielding-Singh makes a strong case that the conventional wisdom alone isn't sufficient to explain the discrepancies in how moms families of different income levels feed their kids. All of the moms she studied for this book understood what it meant to eat healthy, and they all cared deeply about the health and well-being of their children. They all <i>wanted</i> to provide their kids with nutritious food, and what's more, all of them had access to a car and a grocery store within driving distance. Access to healthy food was not the issue for them. So why were the lowest income moms content--happy, even--to spend their last $10 on sugary Starbucks beverages for their teenagers while the highest income moms agonized over every calorie their teen ingested? There is so much more at play here than access to nutritious foods.

The core of the issue, Fielding-Singh argues, centers around what it means to be a "good" mother in America today. Good mothers are supposed to provide for their children, to nourish them and offer them opportunities. They are supposed to say "yes" to what is good for their kids and "no" to what is bad for them. But high income moms have more opportunities to say "yes" (whether it be to summer camp, a live concert, an international trip, or a new pair of shoes) than low income moms. For low income moms, buying a cheap soda or candy bar is a rare opportunity to put a smile on their kid's face; for higher income moms, saying "no" to that same soda or candy bar makes them feel like a good mom because they are maintaining a healthy diet for their kids. They have so many opportunities to say "yes" elsewhere, the "no" to junk food doesn't make them feel like a bad mom. But for low income moms, junk food is sometimes the only place they can afford to say "yes."

This in and of itself was eye-opening for me, and it makes so much more sense than implying that simply building more grocery stores will resolve all of America's issues with food insecurity, unhealthy diets, and/or obesity. Not that building more grocery stores is a bad thing. It's just that the issues involved in feeding families across the income spectrum are far more complex, and the author's thoughtful exploration of this complexity is what makes <i>How the Other Half Eats</i> so interesting. I would definitely recommend this one to anyone who is interested in sociology, economics, income inequality, and/or gender studies.

2021 Reading Challenge Category: A book with something broken on the cover.

This review was originally posted on <a href="https://booksofmyheart.net/2021/11/14/how-the-other-half-eats-by-priya-fielding-singh/" target="_blank"> Books of My Heart</a>
&nbsp;

<i>Review copy was received from NetGalley . This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.</i>

I admit I don't read a lot of non-fiction. I normally read it to expand my knowledge or research a topic.  I was interested in <strong>How the Other Half Eats</strong> but I think I might have thought of it from a nutritional viewpoint rather than the sociology it studies.  I liked the book, but it was not easy to read because it felt too detailed and I kept waiting for the point.  That is probably my fault from working in the business world. I stuck to the facts and conclusions unless someone asked for the "data."

There is a lot of data and examples with the shared thoughts of the author on how she sometimes believed one thing and learned something else.  The commentary on society and its expectations and judgements were also clear in frustration and constant worry of the mothers working to feed their children.

What children are fed in homes from the poorest single parent homes to the wealthiest two parent homes is different, and yet women handle the bulk of the burden.  The amount they accomplish toward healthier eating depends on more than dollars.  The general view has been how the poor don't have access to supermarkets or the best types of food - a food desert- but that isn't really the basis of the problem.  There are some factors relating to education and cultural differences in foods.  A bigger factor is related to the amount of time the mother has for shopping and preparing food.  Some of these factors relate back to societal issues for affordable housing,  paid leave, and livable wages.

A surprising factor in the poorest homes is when a mother has a couple extra dollars it is not put towards essentials like utilities or saved for emergencies or food at a later time, but it is given to make a child happy with candy or a soda or snacks or fast food / eating out . The "treat" may not be healthy but it is something the mother can give to make her child happy when most of the time she has to say no to so many other things the child wants.

In the homes with less dollars, it is more about the overall child welfare, including their having something to eat.  With more money, it is about controlling the quality of the food and choices to give the child the best chance for their future and an education of sorts for when they select and prepare their own foods. Of course, this is not black and white, families fall along the spectrum.  One option a wealthier family had, was to hire a shopper / cook to provide better meals, when the mother was working, earning higher wages.  With less affluent families, this role was sometimes taken on by a grandmother or older female relative in an unpaid and possibly inconsistent schedule.

While it was interesting to hear the personal stories of so many families, and helped me to gain more understanding into why they handled food the way they did, I would have preferred a more organized presentation of the conclusions with more specific examples. I'm not sure I needed to know all about the author's feelings as she did her research or the way she was careful not to be judgmental or how she found her families to study.   I would have enjoyed a shorter, more focused book.

I took a number of classes in college about inequalities in the U.S., and one particularly interesting one about food insecurities, so this book spoke to me when I saw it on Net Galley.

The author does a really comprehensive job interviewing hundreds of families, and diving deeply into four families from different socioeconomic backgrounds all in the same area of the country to paint a broad picture. Her effort to go above and beyond on her study design by choosing only families with school aged children really helped build her credibility for this well-researched work.

This book really makes you take a step back and examine not only the way you eat, but also the value we put into food. As an example, the author compares two families, one who uses small treats, like chips or soda, as a way to find ways to say yes to her kids when she can’t afford to say yes to bigger things, and one who is able to say yes in a number of other ways uses asks for junk food as a teachable moment on better nutrition. Throughout the book, she juxtaposes the families to illustrate how a basic need like food can mean something different to each of us.

The end of the book tidied up her conclusions into a neat bow, wrapping in the pandemic that we can all relate to. I also really enjoyed how she brought everything together at the end by proposing solutions to the problem and explaining the efforts already underway.

This book was received as an ARC from Little, Brown Spark in exchange for an honest review. Opinions and thoughts expressed in this review are completely my own.

I absolutely learned so much from reading this book that it changed my whole perspective on food especially concerning access to food. I count my blessings everyday that I have a stable job where I make enough money to feed my family healthy food but I know there are many others that can't afford to eat healthy and they visit food banks and food distribution centers just to get enough. It was so interesting to get an inside look of each of the four families and how they were feeding each other. It still breaks my heart that not everyone has access to food but thankfully there are places like the local library that has resources and books like this one that informs people how to get access to these resources and get the food that they need to feed their families and that is how no kid will be left hungry.

We will consider adding this title to our Non-Fiction collection at our library. That is why we give this book 5 stars.

How the Other Half Eats
by Priya Fielding-Singh
Pub November 16, 2021
Little, Brown Spark

A fascinating look at dietary differences along class lines, revealing that lack of access to healthy food is far from the primary driver of nutritional inequality in America.
I was thrilled to receive this book, however, it was something I could not get behind. Others may take more from the book than I did and that's great if you do, but given the choice, I'd pass on this one.
Thanks to Little, Brown, Spark and NetGalley for the ARC.

3star

This is a well-researched, well-presented study on food insecurity and food choice in the US. It should be noted that it focuses solely on families with school-age children, and that factors very much into the decisions the families make and the conclusions drawn. So, it shouldn't be taken as a complete study of the issue, but rather a deep and informative look at one part of the issue.

The writing style was very engaging and I really enjoyed getting to know the families the author featured. Their stories were compelling and didn't often lead to the obvious conclusions. How we acquire, consume, and experience food is so profoundly tied to our culture and economic status that it really feels like these families lived in different worlds, despite the relatively short physical distance between them.

The most striking thing this book revealed for me is confirmation of the universal idea that we are all doing the best we can with what we have available to us. Choices that don't make sense through one lens, are profoundly understandable when considered in context. At the end, the author's recommendation for fixing the issues revealed is basically "become Scandinavia" which would be awesome, but seems somewhat unfeasible. Still, there are multiple avenues for improvement and progress on any would be a boon to our society.

Many thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review!

How the other half eats attempts to change the way we perceive obesity, health issues, and food in general, claiming that contrary to some researchers and doctors,Obesity and other issues our families situations, personal responsibility is not to blame, instead Priya Fielding-Singh has placed the blame on the food itself.

Bold, personal, and well researched this book will attack popular myths about food and force the reader to pause and think about the level of inequality in our society and how that hurts our very selfs, endangering families while going mostly unnoticed, Priya Fielding-Singh has pulled the curtains back and shed some light on inequality and forces the reader to question their thoughts on the subject..

I was thrilled to receive this book, however it was something I could not get behind. Others may take more from the book than I did and thats great if you do, but given the choice I'd pass on this one in favor of other books.

Thank you to netgalley and publisher for providing me an e-copy so I can share my honest opinion.

I requested this one because it might be a 2021 title I would like to review on my Youtube Channel. However, after reading the first several chapters I have determined that this book does not suit my tastes. So I decided to DNF this one rather than push myself to finish it only to give it a poor review.

In-depth study. VERY interesting.
Thanks to author, publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book. While I got the book for free, it had no bearing on the rating I gave it.