How the Other Half Eats

Preface

Outstretched on a hospital bed, I clutched Veda’s slippery body close to my chest as she stared up at me for the first time, her wrinkly right hand wrapped around my thumb. At six pounds, five ounces and twenty-one inches long, my daughter stretched from my collar down to my hip bone. I took her in, admiring her full head of thick black hair, ten scaly fingers, ten stubby toes, and the surfboard-shaped birthmark above her left thigh. As I stared into her soft brown eyes, my heart swelled. It’s you, I thought. It’s been you all along.

The moment I met Veda was the moment I discovered a new, surprising kind of love. I had known the love a daughter feels toward her parents, a sister toward her brothers, and a wife toward her husband. But this love felt different. It was searingly visceral and uniquely overwhelming. For months, I had envisioned what feelings might arise upon finally meeting my daughter. I knew that I would care deeply for her. But what made my love for Veda distinct was this: At its core was an enormous, at times overpowering, feeling of responsibility. From her first moments resting on my chest up until today, I have not been able to separate my love for my daughter from the immense ownership I feel for her well-being.

Pregnancy provided the training grounds for this feeling. As Veda grew inside of me over the course of nine months, my sense of responsibility for her also ballooned. My body was her home. We were separate people, but we were inseparable. That inseparability made it challenging for me to act without first considering that action’s impact on her. I longed to be a self-assured, composed pregnant woman who “trusted the process” and knew her baby would be fine. But I was not that woman, and trying to be her proved fruitless. Every one of my behaviors held potential implications for Veda. Was it okay to use a certain skin cream? Had I accidentally eaten unpasteurized cheese at a holiday party? Would sleeping on my back deprive her of oxygen? When Veda was born, I knew these kinds of questions would only multiply.

Fourteen minutes after Veda’s arrival in the world, a postpartum nurse appeared at my bedside. It was time for my daughter to eat, she said, giving me a warm smile. The nurse gently scooted Veda up on my chest, then guided her nose and mouth toward the source of milk. My eyes focused on Veda, and I held my breath in anticipation.

By the time Veda was born, in 2019, I had already spent five years as a sociology graduate student researching the trials and tribulations of feeding children. That work, combined with countless conversations among friends and family about the challenges of breastfeeding, meant that I was braced for this moment. I expected nothing to be easy about feeding my daughter, now or in the future. Today I’d struggle with nursing a baby. In a year, I’d navigate a toddler’s pickiness. In a decade, I’d face a teenager’s love of fast food. When it came to food, the road ahead, as far as I could see, was anything but smooth.

Her skin glued to mine, Veda could barely open her eyes. I tracked her closely as she sniffed around. Then the nurse craned Veda’s head back, and my daughter’s tiny pink mouth opened. I watched her head fling forward as she clamped down on my breast and began to drink.

Thank God. I exhaled, feeling more relief than happiness. That nursing was physically painful was completely irrelevant. My daughter was eating. And if she was eating, that meant she was fine. Great, even. For a moment, I felt satisfied. I was ensuring Veda’s well-being. I was a good mom.

This was the first of many moments over the coming days, weeks, months, and years during which I would hold my breath. My husband, Ansu, also felt ownership for Veda’s well-being, but biology significantly raised the stakes for me. As the parent using my own body to literally grow our daughter every single moment of every single day, I often felt like I had no respite from my responsibility for her.

Society has only reinforced my maternal sense of accountability for Veda. One particularly fraught setting for me — where I often feel reminded most viscerally of this accountability — has been our pediatrician’s office. During those office visits, my daughter’s height, weight, and body mass index (BMI) is fastidiously monitored to track her nutrition and development. On Veda’s third day of life, Ansu and I brought her in for a routine checkup. In the exam room, we undressed her, fumbling like the new parents we were as we pulled her green-and-white-striped onesie up over her head and removed her diaper. Gingerly, Ansu placed her on the scale to be weighed.

“Let’s see how good of a job Mom is doing,” the nurse said cheerily, turning the scale on.

In that moment, my heart sank.

I knew the medical questions that lay behind the nurse’s casual comment, and I assumed her intentions were good. I felt confident that she wasn’t trying to single me out or place an added weight on my shoulders. She wanted to know how much Veda had been eating. She wanted to see whether my daughter had gained any ounces since being discharged from the hospital. These were reasonable questions about a newborn’s development. But these were not the questions the nurse had asked. Instead, she had conveyed a very different message to me — one that made clear that I was only as good a mother as the number on that scale revealed. My daughter’s body, I now understood, was feedback about my parenting.

Food is foundational. We eat multiple times a day from the day we are born to the day we die. To eat is to live. By extension, to feed others is to provide the means for them to survive and thrive. When parents feed their children, they act on an almost primal instinct to nourish their kids physically and emotionally. As a parent, to feed your children well is to succeed; to feed them poorly or to struggle to feed at all is to fail.

This book is about feeding families and the weight that bears on parents from all walks of life. Feeding, like any act of love, is both challenging and fulfilling. There are moments of frustration, triumph, and comic relief. But in this time and place — America in the twenty-first century — feeding has become both an extremely difficult task and a high-stakes parenting endeavor. Parents today feed their children against a national backdrop of mounting inequalities in wealth and health; a food environment increasingly saturated with sugar, salt, and fat; rising rates of childhood and adult obesity; and an insidious national discourse that emphasizes personal over social responsibility. This broader context shapes the obstacles parents today must overcome to fill kids’ stomachs. It also showcases parents’ creativity and devotion.

What parents feed their kids — and what gets eaten within families — also has profound implications for society at large. All of us were once kids ourselves. Most of us grew up within a family. That family may have taken different shapes — with one or two parents, with few or multiple generations, with or without siblings — but whatever the particulars, the food practices of our childhoods have had ripple effects extending into our adulthoods. As kids, we learned — either through explicit conversation or by observation — what and how to eat. We learned what constitutes a meal, what’s “healthy” and “unhealthy,” what foods are meant for daily consumption and what foods are reserved for special occasions. Our childhood diets cultivated our taste buds, familiarizing us with certain flavors and cultural traditions. Whether we identify today with what we ate as kids — whether we eat the same things our parents ate or whether we’ve paved new dietary paths for ourselves — what we saw, touched, smelled, and tasted as kids affects what we consume now. What we learned about nourishing ourselves then affects how we nourish ourselves today. And all of these lessons influence how we then nourish the next generation. While this is a book about how parents feed their kids, its stories, lessons, and relevance extend to every single one of us.

This book is a work of nonfiction. It is the product of years of ethnographic research on families’ diets, most of which I conducted as a doctoral student in sociology at Stanford University. The people, places, and events I describe are real.

I carried out this research with the approval of Stanford University’s institutional review board, an organizational body that oversees and protects the rights and welfare of people who participate in research studies. Everyone I spoke with consented to be part of a scientific study and all were made fully aware that their perspectives would be anonymously reported in journal articles and, potentially, a book. To safeguard the privacy and ensure the anonymity of my research participants, I replaced their real names with pseudonyms and altered any details that could help identify them, like the particular suburbs they lived in or the companies they worked for. I promised participants anonymity first and foremost for their own protection. But this promise also granted them the freedom to speak candidly without fear of one day having their identities disclosed.

To represent my research participants and to reconstruct events and conversations as accurately as possible, I used thousands of pages of field notes, interview transcripts, e-mails, and text records. From this extensive documentation I have edited quotations for length and, when absolutely necessary, clarity. I kept these edits as minimal as possible to allow the richness and diversity of individuals’ voices and personalities to shine through. The families that participated in my research brought incredible generosity, candor, and vulnerability to our interactions. My aim here is to bring their experiences, struggles, and triumphs to life as truthfully and empathetically as possible.

“What’s your goal with all this?” Joaquin Vargas, a stay-at-home father of two, asked me one afternoon. Joaquin was one of the first parents I interviewed for my research. Two cups of tea between us, refilled after almost two hours spent discussing his family’s diet, Joaquin was curious to know whether he’d ever hear of me and my research again. Other parents echoed Joaquin’s question. What was the point of all this work?

It’s a question I’d often asked myself as well. At first, my principal goal was to contribute to social science research, an objective typically achieved through publishing articles in academic journals. I enjoyed — in fact, I still enjoy — much of this process. The deep and dynamic analysis of thousands of pages of interview transcripts and field notes, the grappling with sociological theory, and the challenge of ushering in data to substantiate an argument — accomplishing these tasks transformed me from a student into a sociologist. But I also felt called to reach broader audiences with my work and to move beyond the peer-review process to participate in a more public conversation. I began writing op-eds and doing radio and TV interviews about my research for outlets like the Los Angeles Times, Univision, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. These led to further media appearances around the country and e-mails from physicians, researchers, students, parents, and activists with whom my research resonated. It was gratifying to engage with others about my work. In using my research to bring new data and ideas to public discourse, influence readers’ views, and instigate conversation on issues I cared about, I felt, for the first time, that my work might actually help people.

These experiences gave me the answer to Joaquin’s question. I wanted to write a book — this book — and a particular one at that. Books about food and diet are numerous. And I’ve spent years poring through them, carefully underlining passages, highlighting arguments, and scribbling my own notes in the margins. Having immersed myself in these texts for over a decade, I’ve noticed a shared trait: Books about food are often filled with insights or advice that makes us feel bad about how we are eating. They tell us that we should follow a plant-based diet or that our TV dinners are irreparably harming the planet. Because these books, informative as they may be, tend to be highly prescriptive, they can inadvertently make us more judgmental. They can encourage us to be increasingly critical of ourselves and others. This is a different kind of book. I hope you will find it short on judgment and long on empathy and evidence about the feeding challenges that unite and divide families across American society.

My professional role as a sociologist — and my own personal identities — are also woven into the story that follows. For years, I have written scientific articles partially in the passive voice: interviews were conducted, observations were made, data were analyzed. Such scientific norms have never bothered me, but they underscore how we scholars tend to abstract ourselves out of our research. Whether to sound more sophisticated or feign a veil of objectivity, we can make it seem as though we, as researchers, are nothing more than tools through which scientific truth is uncovered and knowledge is produced.

Yet try as we might, we are always a part of the research. As scientists, we cannot help but bring ourselves — how we identify, our past experiences, the biases we hold, the assumptions we’d rather not admit to — into the work we do. The research featured in this book exists only because I conducted it. I was the one who approached families at food banks, department stores, pharmacies, and gas stations. I designed the interview questions that asked parents about their kids’ favorite snacks or whether they had ever not had enough to eat. I stood on my tiptoes to grab moms cartons of cereal from top supermarket shelves, chopped cherry tomatoes for salads, pulled frozen pizzas out of ovens, and sat beside kids at kitchen counters. I wrote up the field notes from my observations, analyzed the data over cups of tea at my own kitchen counter, and put the words to the pages you’re reading now. All of these things made me part of the research that features in this book.

What follows here is my earnest attempt to be transparent about what it was like to be there and how I have come to understand those experiences. For a scientist, there can be safety in hiding behind a third-person voice and vulnerability in exposing one’s own subjectivity through a first-person narrative. At the risk of criticism, I have chosen the latter. Throughout this book, I share not only what I saw but also what I thought, felt, questioned, and contended with over the years. My hope is that exposing this hidden part of the research process will bring clarity and context to you as a reader and help you understand how I arrived at my central arguments.

I brought to this research my own history and my own relationship with food. These reflect the multiple identities I hold as a biracial, second-generation South Asian American, highly educated millennial woman. As with most people’s, my story with food began before I was born. What I know starts with my father, who grew up in India, and my mother, who was raised in both France and the United States. My parents’ paths crossed in 1976 in New York City. That their first date was at a steak house aptly foreshadows meat as a dietary staple in our household.¹

As in most American families, my mother was in charge of food at home. Her own childhood experiences shaped how she approached that task.

“I have great memories of food, and I have terrible memories of food,” she explained to me one afternoon. Her fond memories were formed on both sides of the ocean. Some took place in Normandy, France’s northwesternmost region, in her maternal grandmother’s home. Normandy is filled with sparsely populated farmland: gently rolling hills dotted with cows and sheep, scattered houses framed by stone walls, and the occasional roadside stand selling fresh apple cider. My mother loved the food of Normandy; she delighted in warm baguettes with thick slabs of bright yellow butter, fatty soft cheeses, rich mashed potatoes, slow-cooked pork chops, and any and all vegetables my grandmother grew in the backyard. My mother similarly reveled in many of the dishes she ate during the summers that she spent in New York City. Her father, who was of Russian Jewish descent, would take her to Jewish delis in Manhattan, where they would enjoy pastrami sandwiches and dill pickles. On Saturdays, they would hop on the ferry to Staten Island for ice cream. Sunday nights meant Chinese food.

My mother’s terrible memories of food were equally as sharp, centered mainly on the dishes her mother prepared. My grandmother, a petite Frenchwoman with an eye for order, placed severe restrictions around food. My mother was forbidden to eat American junk food. Portion sizes and snacks were limited, and my mother recalls feeling hunger pangs in the hours leading up to late dinners. But what my mother remembers most is being forced to eat foods that she loathed. Just the thought of a particular sour cream and green pepper salad is enough to make her shudder even now, sixty years later.

“I didn’t want to do that to you,” my mom told me, smiling. “I wanted you to love food.”

For my mother, loving food meant having some say in what one ate. As a result, I grew up with very few dietary restrictions. My mom said no to some things — Twinkies and Cocoa Puffs, for instance — but yes to almost everything else. At home, we ate a smorgasbord of American, French, and Indian cuisines. There was a steady flow of bread, butter, and cheese in our kitchen. My mom prepared the pork chops and mashed potatoes of her youth, and she learned to cook new dishes like sausages and cabbage and salami-and-Gouda-cheese melts. We also devoured North Indian food. My father had fond memories of his childhood diet, which was rich in chicken, lamb, chana, and chapatis. “Everything was fresh, local, and delicately prepared,” he told me. When he moved to Chicago, at twenty-three, my father quickly became a fan of American food’s convenience, tastiness, and affordability. But because he missed the spices and flavors of his New Delhi childhood, he learned a few simple dishes, which he later taught my mother. Those were the dishes I grew up with: a ground lamb dish called keema, aloo gobi, dal, and well-buttered basmati rice with peas.

Looking back, what I remember most about my diet growing up is the freedom. I basically ate whatever I wanted. Many of those foods were nutritious. I adored peas and corn, bananas, roasted chicken, eggs, broccoli, and milk. But like many children’s, my palate was primed for sugar and salt. There was nothing I wouldn’t do for ice cream, cookies, and, most notably, hot dogs.

“For a year,” my mother said, laughing, “you ate a hot dog for breakfast every morning.” Hot dogs were delicious, but I also loved them because I was the one who chose and prepared them. They made me feel independent and capable. At six years old, I would carefully remove one link from the refrigerator, poke four holes in it with a fork, wrap it in a wet paper towel, and heat it for exactly one minute in the microwave. Then I’d set it inside a white, fluffy bun and scarf it down. While my breakfast habits became a running joke in the family — the particular irony being that I later became a vegetarian — I don’t recall being chided or scolded for my food choices as a child.

My parents also treated us to inexpensive takeout on occasion, letting us choose Mexican, Chinese, or Italian food. Every time my dad picked me up from high-school volleyball practice, I’d ask for a dollar milkshake, and he’d oblige. I drank soda and ate fast food.

“I didn’t want to deliberately feed you junk,” my mother told me when I asked her about it while writing this book. “But junk was always a part of what we ate.”

“We’re not saints!” my father added.

Age later brought changes to my own diet. At twenty, I began to eat more plants and fewer animals. Since then, I’ve had my fair share of dietary phases, pescatarianism and veganism among them. But for the most part, vegetarianism has been my home base for over a decade.

How I eat is a work in progress. I go through periods where my diet feels rich in whole foods; other times, I find myself leaning more on processed and prepared products. I genuinely love most vegetables and some fruits, but I will readily forgo them for a greasy slice of pizza or a generously iced wedge of carrot cake. I snack constantly, stockpile pastries, and notoriously oversalt my dinner. Cooking has long been a hobby of mine, but I don’t know how to bake bread and I don’t enjoy spending hours over a hot stove. Like most women in America, I’ve spent time worrying about my weight; I’ve gone through stretches where eating has been far less about enjoyment or health and far more about striving to meet societal standards of beauty. I consider myself extremely fortunate that I have always had enough money to buy not only the food I need but also the food I want.

Having now interviewed hundreds of people about how they eat, I feel like my relationship with food makes me part of the human race. It’s a complicated, ever-changing bond. I control my portions one moment and eat my feelings the next. I’ve had phases of overeating and phases of undereating. I’ve dug my heels in on some food habits and worked patiently to change others. I use food for all kinds of purposes. Survival and satiation are part of it, but so are comfort, nostalgia, boredom, vanity, and celebration. I devour foods from my childhood because they remind me of happy moments, particular people, or special places. I eat foods to signal my membership in different communities or my various identities. And other foods end up in my stomach simply because I’m tired and impatient.

Balancing such priorities has shaped how I feed my daughter. As an infant, Veda drank breast milk and formula. She ate store-bought baby food. When she became a toddler, I fed her peas and oranges as well as Cheerios, pasta, and uthappam. Ansu and I care about how our daughter eats, but this concern is not the sole determinant of her diet. How we feed her on any given day depends in part on how tired we are and how much patience the three of us can muster during a meal. Sometimes Ansu and I have the bandwidth to negotiate with a stubborn toddler to get her to eat more of what we want her to; other times, Veda emerges from the meal victorious, the crumbs of her less preferred foods scattered across the dining-room floor. For me, as her mother, feeding Veda remains a source of both joy and conflict. Nourishing her feels at once natural and burdensome, as each spoonful I provide reminds me that I am on the hook for her. It reminds me that, try as I might, I cannot shake the responsibility that the nurse in my pediatrician’s office assigned me years ago.

Let’s see how good of a job Mom is doing.

To this day, this comment continues to ring in my ears. It reminds me of just how readily — casually, even — parents are put on trial for what and how much goes into their children’s bodies.

The evidence summoned for these trials is often buttressed by metrics, like height, weight, and BMI, that assess whether children are being fed well, too much, or not enough. In the broadest sense, I support these measures as public health tools; limited as they may be, they also allow us to easily evaluate and compare kids’ health across a population and identify precursors and symptoms of disease. In fact, the nutritional and health inequities revealed by such metrics provided one motivation for my research and this book. But these metrics have their limits and downsides. BMI, for instance, is a blunt diagnostic tool and an imprecise measure of health; calculated merely as a ratio of a person’s weight to height, it does not take into account age, sex, or an individual’s body composition, including how much of the weight comes from fat and how much from muscle. What’s more, metrics like BMI can promote tunnel vision, focusing societal attention on kids’ nutritional outcomes and leading us to overlook why there may be gaps between those outcomes and parents’ efforts.²

Most parents I met as part of my research wanted to do what was best for their kids nutritionally and shared overlapping ideas of what “best” was. But they were dealt dramatically different hands to do so. Some parents had ample resources — enough time, a living wage, job security, stable housing, quality health care, social support, safe neighborhoods, and intergenerational wealth. Other parents lacked some or all of those resources. I saw how parents with fewer means struggled not only to get food on the table but also to maintain their dignity while being indicted for their kids’ dietary outcomes. With inches and pounds as largely agreed-upon measures of kids’ well-being, parents found — like I did — an upsetting truth: that their children’s bodies served as an external signal of their worthiness as caregivers.

But scholarship and motherhood have opened my eyes to a different truth: While parenting is measured in outcomes, it’s largely about effort. Much of this effort is hidden, performed daily by parents in a million unseen moments. A drawing by the artist Paula Kuka captures this reality nicely. On the left-hand side, under the words What I Did, she has drawn images of a mother changing one child’s diaper, cooking for her children, consoling them, playing with them, nursing them, reading to them, dancing with them, and teaching them how to ride a bike. On the right-hand side, under the words What You Saw, we see a mom pushing a stroller.

As a society, we see numbers and outcomes. And it’s tempting to believe that there exists some linear relationship between parents’ efforts and children’s outcomes. Especially in America, a country largely rooted in the idea that people get what they strive for and deserve, it can be difficult to accept that the parents of kids with “poor” outcomes work just as hard as the parents of kids with “good” outcomes. It doesn’t seem fair.

But just because something isn’t fair doesn’t make it any less true.

This book is an earnest attempt to expose and explore a largely hidden truth: that parents across society undertake sacrificial, complicated, and frustrating work to feed kids. Because the shape this work takes is context-dependent, it continually risks being overlooked, misunderstood, or, worst of all, condemned.