Food Security Is Good. But Who Provides Meal Security?

Hint: it's mostly mothers. Stop saying cooking will save us.

Photo by Joel Drzycimski on Unsplash

In 2013, Michael Pollan's book Cooked came out. Its basic premise is that cooking is an act of empowerment for the average person, and a small way to fight against the corporate takeover of our foodways. In 2013, this sounded about right to me. I had no children and not a lot of money, but I usually had time to cook—and I enjoyed doing it. 

In 2013, no one was really asking why a white man living in Berkeley who did not have young children was telling us how we should be cooking from scratch more. Or question why he demonstrated the soundness of his argument through learning the art of pit barbecue, getting sourdough bread-making lessons from Tartine's Chad Robertson, having four-hour cooking sessions with Samin Nosrat, and fermenting his own mead. All very interesting endeavors that have absolutely nothing in common with cooking as I now experience it: the endless, often-joyless slog of feeding myself and my children multiple times a day, every day.

Some people talk about the shock of that first moment alone in the car with your baby at the hospital, after the nurse has checked to make sure the car seat is installed properly and waved goodbye, sending you on your way, now responsible for the life of this child until the end of your days. For me the bigger shock came in the kitchen, how suddenly I began to despise and dread making dinner when I became a parent. It has waxed and waned over the years, depending on what is going on in my life and my children's dietary habits, but the baseline setting hovers around “despair.” There is no escape, is the thing. At the end of the day, it is on me.¹

Our thinking around food security usually stops at making sure everyone has enough groceries, with a preference for shelf-stable ingredients and fresh produce. For good reason, we put a lot of effort into making sure the donated items are nutritious and culturally acceptable, that they include enough fruits and vegetables. We spend much less time thinking about how those ingredients will be eaten, the work that will go into transforming them into an acceptable plate of food, and who will be doing that work.

Meal security is having that plate of food.

And the gap between food security and meal security—a crowded space that includes the tools and equipment needed to cook, food preparation knowledge and skills, time to plan the meal and cook it, space to prepare food and store it—is typically the domain of women, especially mothers. Even under the best circumstances, it can be a dark and lonely place. For single mothers, mothers living in poverty, mothers with unstable housing, mothers working multiple jobs or jobs with unusual or unpredictable hours, and other living situations disproportionately experienced by Black, Indigenous, and Latina women, that gap is nearly impossible to navigate.²

Even the federal government isn't quite sure how to account for the time spent obtaining food and preparing meals in low-income households. Last year, the USDA thankfully updated the Thrifty Food Plan, the hypothetical "market basket" of nutritious foods whose calculated cost is the basis for the maximum amount of SNAP dollars a recipient can receive. It had last been significantly updated in 1975, so for decades the plan assumed that there was at least one household member who had hours each day to cook meals from scratch. For example, the old "market basket" included dry beans, but not canned beans, which are more expensive, but far more convenient. Hopefully no one living in a working-parent household between 1975 and 2021 needed to eat dinner before 10pm.

In the new Thrifty Meal Plan, time is addressed "indirectly," by including items that may be more expensive, but require less time to prepare, such as fluid, ready-to-drink orange juice rather than frozen orange juice concentrate that needs to be mixed. Their explanation sounds a bit defensive:

USDA believes that this approach is preferable to a separate monetary adjustment for time spent preparing or obtaining food at this time. It is not clear what an appropriate additional monetary adjustment would be based upon. Also, the value of time spent in food-related activities does not logically translate to SNAP benefits since these can only be used to purchase foods and beverages for at-home consumption and are not intended to compensate for time spent in food-related activities.

It is not clear how they might compensate a person—again, usually a woman, and often a mother—for her time spent planning and preparing meals because no one is ever compensated for that time. The USDA can assign a value to the food and beverages she buys, but not the time she spends transforming those foods and beverages into actual meals, because no one values that time.

We do not value the time mothers spend on ensuring meal security for their families, but we still judge them if the meals they present are not nutritionally ideal, prepared from scratch, sustainably- and/or locally-sourced, served in a calm and pleasant setting, and thoroughly consumed by every child at the table. Systemic barriers to achieving that ideal, which are disproportionately experienced by families of color, are treated as individual issues. The message is: If we're giving you the free bag of groceries, how you manage to get those groceries onto a plate and into your kid's body is your problem.

But if meal security was everyone's problem, we would talk about this differently. We would talk about time in relation to food differently. In their paper "Fast Food Sovereignty: Contradiction in Terms or Logical Next Step?" Louis Thiemann and Antonio Roman-Alcalá ponder the idea of fast food sovereignty, suggesting that we move beyond the binary of "bad" fast food and "good" slow food. Instead, we should look for solutions that make the "good, clean, and fair" food demanded by Slow Food and other food advocates affordable and available for anyone with a "legitimate, or rational, demand for fast food." (Their words. Living with young children, I would say all demands for a meal prepared quickly are legitimate and rational.)

What other solutions might we find, if we valued mothers' time and didn't pile the burden of meal security on their backs?

What if institutionally-prepared, communal meals were high quality, affordable, and convenient?³ What if cities paid chefs to prepare individual meals for families who needed them, as New Orleans did during the first year of the pandemic? What if feeding children was a community responsibility⁴, not a job for parents to do alone? What might food security look like, if we cared about those who transform food into meals?

1. Why isn't it on my husband, you ask? Well, hi! Welcome to 50% of my marital arguments. Nice to see you here. I have no satisfactory answer to the question I have been asking since roughly 2008, when we moved in together.

2. Pressure Cooker: Why Home Cooking Won't Solve Our Problems and What We Can Do About It by sociologists Sarah Bowen, Joslyn Brenton, and Sinikka Elliott should be required reading for anyone working with American parents trying to feed their kids. The authors interviewed and observed nine mothers from diverse racial, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds around Raleigh, North Carolina, all trying to feed their families while living with the realities of inconsistent income, punishing work schedules, social pressure to feed their families perfectly, and children who don't eat what their parents want them to—and the resulting book is much more eye-opening and human than Cooked.

3. It exists; I experienced it at various workplace cafeterias while taking a grad school class in Italy. They also had sparkling water on tap. So dreamy.

4. A bit of good news: Prop FF, Healthy School Meals for All, passed in Colorado last week! That means free school meals will be available to all children, and more resources will be invested in improving the quality of school meals in the state. Hooray!