The challenges of healthy home cooking

Guests: Sarah Bowen, Sinikka Elliott

Food writers, nutritionists, and public health experts extol the benefits of home cooking and shared family meals. They suggest that problems like childhood obesity, fractured family relationships, industrial farming could be fixed if parents, often that still means mothers, took more time and care putting food on the table. But sociologists, Sarah Bowen, Joslyn Brenton, and Sinikka Elliott point out in their new book, Pressure Cooker, that this idealization of family meals ignores the realities that low-income and many middle-income women face – realities that include lack of time, money, support and security.  SARAH BOWEN, an associate professor of sociology at North Carolina State University and SINIKKA ELLIOTT, assistant professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia, join us this hour to talk about their interviews with 200 women on meal preparation and what they learned about the struggles, pressure and guilt mothers face about feeding their families.