An eye-opening and intimate study of what families eat and why.
Food, families, and motherhood in America.
Making an insightful book debut, sociologist and ethnographer Fielding-Singh brings her perspective as a biracial, South Asian American woman, and concerned mother, to this well-researched look at food choices among racially, ethnically, and economically diverse families. Based on interviews with 75 families and extended observations of four families’ daily lives, the book questions the assumption that food inequality can be “completely explained by the fact that healthy food was more expensive and farther away from lower-income folks than wealthier ones.” Parents across society, she discovered, “undertake sacrificial, complicated, and frustrating work to feed kids.” None lived in a “food desert” without access to affordable, healthy food, but there was a definite difference in the kinds of markets they frequented—Whole Foods vs. Costco—and the amounts they were able to spend, from less than $200 a month to over $1,000. Feeding fell largely to mothers, who all expressed concern about their children’s nutrition. Nevertheless, mothers who had to deny many of their children’s desires because of financial straits were likely to give in when it came to junk food, spending money on the chips and sugared cereal their children clamored for instead of fruits and vegetables. Lack of time, children’s pickiness, and food industry advertising all shaped what mothers put on the table. Fielding-Singh incisively explores “racist narratives pervading dietary discourses” that associate certain foods with Black and Latinx families, fetishizing kale rather than collard greens, for example, as well as how privileged mothers were “constantly ratcheting up the standards by which they evaluated their kids’ diets and themselves as moms.” To overcome food inequality, Fielding-Singh suggests—in addition to a living wage and affordable housing—incentive programs, which would stretch federal-assistance dollars for the purchase of more nutritious foods; improving the national school lunch program; and banning the food industry from marketing to children.
An eye-opening and intimate study of what families eat and why.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-316-42726-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown Spark
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
An oft-ignored but fully convincing argument that “we cannot prevent the next pandemic without creating a healthy world.”
The Covid-19 pandemic is not a one-off catastrophe. An epidemiologist presents a cogent argument for a fundamental refocusing of resources on “the foundational forces that shape health.”
In this passionate and instructive book, Galea, dean of the Boston University School of Public Health, writes that Covid emerged because we have long neglected basic preventative measures. “We invest vast amounts of money in healthcare,” he writes, “but comparatively little in health.” Readers looking to learn how governments (mainly the U.S.) mishandled the pandemic have a flood of books to choose from, but Galea has bigger issues to raise. Better medical care will not stop the next epidemic, he warns. We must structure a world “that is resilient to contagions.” He begins by describing the current state of world health, where progress has been spectacular. Global life expectancy has more than doubled since 1900. Malnutrition, poverty, and child mortality have dropped. However, as the author stresses repeatedly, medical progress contributed far less to the current situation than better food, clean water, hygiene, education, and prosperity. That’s the good news. More problematic is that money is a powerful determinant of health; those who have it live longer. Galea begins the bad news by pointing out the misleading statistic that Covid-19 kills less than 1% of those infected; that applies to young people in good health. For those over 60, it kills 6%, for diabetics, over 7%, and those with heart disease, over 10%. It also kills more Blacks than Whites, more poor than middle-class people, and more people without health insurance. The author is clearly not just interested in Covid. He attacks racism, sexism, and poverty in equal measure, making a plea for compassion toward stigmatized conditions such as obesity and addiction. He consistently urges the U.S. government, which has spared no expense and effort to defeat the pandemic, to do the same for social injustice.
An oft-ignored but fully convincing argument that “we cannot prevent the next pandemic without creating a healthy world.”Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-19-757642-7
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
Gates offers a persuasive, 30,000-foot view of a global problem that, he insists, can be prevented given will and money.
The tech mogul recounts the health care–related dimensions of his foundation in what amounts to a long policy paper.
“Outbreaks are inevitable, but pandemics are optional.” Thus states the epidemiologist Larry Brilliant, a Gates adviser, who hits on a critically important point: Disease is a fact of nature, but a pandemic is a political creation of a kind. Therefore, there are political as well as medical solutions that can enlist governments as well as scientists to contain outbreaks and make sure they don’t explode into global disasters. One critical element, Gates writes, is to alleviate the gap between high- and low-income countries, the latter of which suffer disproportionately from outbreaks. Another is to convince governments to ramp up production of vaccines that are “universal”—i.e., applicable to an existing range of disease agents, especially respiratory pathogens such as coronaviruses and flus—to prepare the world’s populations for the inevitable. “Doing the right thing early pays huge dividends later,” writes Gates. Even though doing the right thing is often expensive, the author urges that it’s a wise investment and one that has never been attempted—e.g., developing a “global corps” of scientists and aid workers “whose job is to wake up every day thinking about diseases that could kill huge numbers of people.” To those who object that such things are easier said than done, Gates counters that the development of the current range of Covid vaccines was improbably fast, taking a third of the time that would normally have been required. At the same time, the author examines some of the social changes that came about through the pandemic, including the “new normal” of distance working and learning—both of which, he urges, stand to be improved but need not be abandoned.
Gates offers a persuasive, 30,000-foot view of a global problem that, he insists, can be prevented given will and money.Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-53448-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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