Can family cooking reverse the epidemic of obesity?

This link between poverty and processed foods is illustrated in a new book, "Pressure Cooking: Why Home Cooking Will not Solve Our Problems and We Can not Solve," written by three sociologists who study diet, food and nutrition. family and inequalities. The authors – Sarah Bowen, Joslyn Brenton and Sinikka Elliott – studied 168 poor and middle-class families in North Carolina, a state where one in three adults is obese and one in 10 has diabetes. The researchers followed the families for up to five years and drew up a detailed portrait of them, spending hundreds of hours visiting them at home and observing them while shopping, preparing meals and living.

Their research questions the idea, taken by many nutrition experts, that Americans can recover their health and reverse the obesity epidemic if they abandon processed foods, return to the kitchen, and prepare healthy meals at home. from scratch. Although it works for some people, Ms. Bowen and her colleagues say that this is not a realistic solution for families with little time and money. Nor is it necessarily an accurate perception: national surveys show that 48% of Americans prepare dinners six or seven nights a week and 44% of them cook two to five nights a week. The data shows that low-income families spend more time cooking than richer families and consume less fast food than middle-class households.

The researchers found, however, that many families were facing a series of barriers to healthy eating. Some of the families they studied lived in food deserts, far from a grocery store worthy of the name, and had to spend hours on a bus to grocery shopping or ask their friends and relatives to drive them there. Many would run out of money at the end of the month and would look for ways to stretch the little food they had. Some did not have reliable stoves or refrigerators, or lacked pots, pans and other basic kitchen utensils. Others have turned to their local larder, which provides a large amount of processed food stable for consumption, but high in sodium, sugar and other additives, such as breakfast cereals , pasta, crackers, packaged snacks, canned meats and soups.

The researchers found that working-class families often feared more expensive foods, spoiled quickly or needed a lot of preparation, and instead turned to things that they could cook easily and keep for a long time. and stretch in many meals.

"If you run out of money and you run out of food every month, as many families have done in our study, you can buy the cheapest, that 's ramen, hot dogs and canned macaroni, "said Dr. Bowen, Partner. Professor of Sociology at North Carolina State University. "We asked everyone in our study what you would buy if you had more money to spend on food, and the most common answer was," Fresh fruit for our kids. "