Ultra-processed foods and the burden on women

[Shedbuilder]

I've had two conversations this weekend with people who saw a BBC documentary on the dangers of ultra-processed foods. Both of them are mothers, both say that as far as they can see, the only way to avoid UPFs is to cook everything from scratch. Both of them are very food-aware anyway but both also work full-time. They talked about how they're going to have to be even more organised than normal, invest in an extra freezer to take even more batch-cooked meals etc. The stress in the air was palpable.

I know some men cook for the family but isn't this yet another burden that's going to be loaded mainly onto women?

Yep.

Ditto the save the planet recycling, nappies, etc etc

Yes. And those (mostly male) TV chefs who say 'this would cost you £20 in a restaurant but you can make it for £4'. Yeah, if you don't value women's time as much as yours.

Yes.

But I'll say what I said on the other thread and that realky need to stop being our own worst enemy at the same time. Accept we can't do everything and just do what we can. Stop holding ourselves to impossible standards. If some meals are just basic/plain or left overs then that's fine, no ones going to drop dead if there's not some gourmet feast on the table every night.

But definitely, I doubt this is something lots of men are worried about right now. And certainly has the potential to be yet another way that women end up busy and isolated trying to achieve whike the men continue with their outing hobbies with yet another excuse to be strategically incompetent with regards to cooking for the family

Just thought this, having seen the thread on ultra processed foods elsewhere on MN.

Read somewhere - it was a book by a psychologist -that worrying a lot about what our DC eat can be a sign of a mum ‘burning out’ in terms of mental health. It struck a chord with me. Will try to dig it out.

There IS a lot wrong with our UK ‘food environment’ and globally, for farmers, workers, businesses, consumers, the environment etc. But it’s not anywhere near as straightforward as mothers ‘just’ spending even more time and money meal planning, shopping and cooking, to seek to ‘purify’ DCs’ food.

Totally agree

As a society level we need proper food in schools, colleges, hospitals and workplaces. Then there's more and fairer leeway for meals taken at home.

Plus Noone was saying 100% non processed food. There is a sliding scale with upf at one end. Plus it was the proportion that was the problem nowadays.

So seeing this as a call to have every meal homemade is an overreaction.

You can serve oven chips or pasta with tomato sauce out of a jar though without it being UPF. It's about buying the not necessarily more expensive ones that don't have the UPF stuff in.

100%.

I've said this on other threads before, but I worked as a food writer with two other men and 'fucks sake, did you realise that's doing a massive sexist' was one of my most oft-used pieces of feedback.

Of course this falls disproportionately on women, and of course the narrative has switched in a heartbeat from 'what could we as a society do about this kind of foodstuff' to 'how can women overhaul their kids' diets'. It's not even 'how can women overhaul their own diets'! Because we can only be seen in relation to other people!

You can serve oven chips or pasta with tomato sauce out of a jar though without it being UPF. It's about buying the not necessarily more expensive ones that don't have the UPF stuff in.

Really? I would have thought that tomato ketchup of whatever brand is UPF. And possibly oven chips too.

Something else to blame women for.
Our own selfish fault for wanting/having to work etc etc.

Yes, I feel like this about a lot of things. Sanitary wear is a particular bug bear of mine-there is so much discussion about how normal towels are full of plastic and are so bad for the environment etc., which I do understand, but I am not prepared to spend over a week every month feeling uncomfortable using inadequate protection and dealing with bloody knickers/mooncups and whatever else to appease the (usually) ignorant men who blather on about climate change on social media. It's so easy to be environmentally friendly when it's not you dealing with periods/nappies/feeding children/doing laundry for the whole family and so on and so on. The way I see it, the current climate crisis was created by the patriarchy, and men should bear the brunt of fixing it, and should stop expecting women to add yet another layer of labour onto their shoulders.

I think mums, generally speaking, do worry about this more than dads, and it can be a burden.

There are a number of things you can say about that with regard to women often doing more work in the home as well as work outside the home.

However I will also say, that where I see dads that do take on that role, they are often better at making a decision about the extent that they can or are willing to spend time on that sort of thing, and then leaving it there. That's a generalisation of course, I tend myself in that direction - I often find these things deeply serious but at the same time, I do what I can and can leave the rest aside. But many women find it difficult to put down that kind of burden. Some of that I guess is social expectation, but I also think a lot is internalised. Even with the social expectation, I've had conversations about this where I know some mums felt they were being really criticised for not living up to some standard, and I didn't take it that way myself. Possibly I am just thick skinned about that sort of thing. But I do think there is an element of how we as mothers place ourselves in relation to questions around how we parent, and that is something that we can do for ourselves.

The other underlying question though is how society deals with work and domestic and social responsibilities. It's a real question to me whether two full time working parents should be as normative as many people think,, if they are having to rely on shortcuts like that with food regularly, or want to live more lightly on the environment but are unable to, if they are struggling to deal with eldercare, etc. It's a situation that works for a few, but on a society wide basis I don't think the necessity for two incomes is a great social model.

Reading labels etc takes aeons!

And I don’t read about fathers - other than fitness types following a diet for themselves alone - doing it.

@SmokedDuck

I think mums, generally speaking, do worry about this more than dads, and it can be a burden.

There are a number of things you can say about that with regard to women often doing more work in the home as well as work outside the home.

However I will also say, that where I see dads that do take on that role, they are often better at making a decision about the extent that they can or are willing to spend time on that sort of thing, and then leaving it there. That's a generalisation of course, I tend myself in that direction - I often find these things deeply serious but at the same time, I do what I can and can leave the rest aside. But many women find it difficult to put down that kind of burden. Some of that I guess is social expectation, but I also think a lot is internalised. Even with the social expectation, I've had conversations about this where I know some mums felt they were being really criticised for not living up to some standard, and I didn't take it that way myself. Possibly I am just thick skinned about that sort of thing. But I do think there is an element of how we as mothers place ourselves in relation to questions around how we parent, and that is something that we can do for ourselves.

The other underlying question though is how society deals with work and domestic and social responsibilities. It's a real question to me whether two full time working parents should be as normative as many people think,, if they are having to rely on shortcuts like that with food regularly, or want to live more lightly on the environment but are unable to, if they are struggling to deal with eldercare, etc. It's a situation that works for a few, but on a society wide basis I don't think the necessity for two incomes is a great social model.

Yes that's true in my experience @SmokedDuck. 'Everyone fed, nobody dead' was pretty much DH's standard for childrearing. I think women do hold themselves to higher standards of 'doing it all' and that doesn't help us. And yy - caught between the patriarchy and capitalism wrt how we structure our collective lives.

twitter.com/manwhohasitall/status/1398896960753577990

We read alot on here about mums making multiple meals etc picky kids, picky husbands etc the husbamds in particular survived 30 odd years before they met their wives presumably sorting their own food out because many of us I our 30s and 40s now are from an age where if you didn't eat what was fir dinner then u went hungry. If they were as lucky as they make our they'd have been dead a long time ago.We could alleviate some of the burden immediately if we stopped pandering. I mean the husband can make.a dinner fir him.and the kids should he decide that nights offering was no good. And unless your kid has SN/allergies they will be fine going to bed hungry a couple of nights til they realise they arent gonna get the turkey dinosaurs.

If, we could just stop guilting ourselves over things we cant help..like having to work. Like haveing to say no to the.lids sometimes. That and learning the phrase fuck off to yell at anyone who tries to have a go, or ungrateful lazy husvands who never have to worry about working and cooking even even the wife works full time too..

I think some women are too ready to assume they have to care about everything. It’s utterly exhausting. It’s okay not to care about being vegan, the PTFA, climate change and a hundred and one other things. Yes, you might have one thing in particular that’s dear to your heart, but klaxon everything else is not your problem!

Turkey twizzlers once in a blue moon, or wraps instead of bread will not kill your children, or even harm them.

I hadn't thought of it like that OP. I watched the programme and was shocked but i totally get where you're coming from.

My mother bitched at me about using disposable nappies (I had zero support apart from husband). I felt guilty but I just didn't need an extra thing to worry about.

I mostly cooked from scratch but occasionally used baby food jars and she'd roll her eyes at that too....

Agree OP. It is most definitely not individual women’s jobs to make up for systemic failings in our food industry and social structure.

There’s a definite historical pattern whereby every advance that eases women’s domestic labour is replaced by a societal expectation that increases it.

An example I heard recently was that when the egg beater became a widely available and affordable domestic item around the 1860s, Angel food cake (which needs twice as much egg beating as normal cake) rose in popularity. It’s a trite example but it happens over and over.

In our generation the expectations of time and effort for good parenting have risen massively compared to the last. And in my grandmothers day helping with homework or crossing the school threshold was called interference. Until women started working outside the home and suddenly there’s huge pressure to help with schoolwork and volunteer to listen to reading.

It’s always compelling - educational attainment, breast feeding, environmentalism, food quality ... but the underlying message always seems to be back to the house with you

‘Everyone Fed, nobody dead’! I will cheer myself up with that thought from now on!

There’s a definite historical pattern whereby every advance that eases women’s domestic labour is replaced by a societal expectation that increases it.

When DD was quite small, I was surprised and puzzled by FIL saying something about how clean we kept her. I figured out he probably meant that she had clean clothes every day.

The other underlying question though is how society deals with work and domestic and social responsibilities. It's a real question to me whether two full time working parents should be as normative as many people think,, if they are having to rely on shortcuts like that with food regularly, or want to live more lightly on the environment but are unable to, if they are struggling to deal with eldercare, etc. It's a situation that works for a few, but on a society wide basis I don't think the necessity for two incomes is a great social model.
This.
It seems those in work are working longer and longer hours to keep things going (being less productive as well apparently), while things like family and social time are being sacrificed and cooking decent food and having time to sit down and eat it becomes really difficult for many. And no, it shouldnt be assumed that the burden of all of this falls on women.

I mean, I absolutely agree that the burden of this will fall on women (and the mum guilt if they feed UPFs in public now 🙄) but I don't think this needs to be so life changing. We can all reduce the UPFs without any major changes, just switching a few products from UP to processed is a step in the right direction, and increasing fruits and vegetables, you can easily improve your ratio of UPFs. The bigger improvement would be to have lots more ready prepared foods that aren't UPFs in shops (and as school dinners!) which would be great, and hopefully less obesity.
BUT I do get that there will be a lot of people (mostly women) who are already taking the majority or all of the responsibility for the health decisions of their families, and who feel like they have just had the rug pulled out from them as regarding feeding themselves and their families now. And that is so gendered. We have an incredibly low bar for single dads, the single dads I know who manage to clothe their kids and feed them get the most fabulous praise, whilst single mums get blamed for all societies ills. It's the same in relationships, just behind closed doors. Women (mums, also those in other caring roles) hold all the anxiety and daily responsibility and the men in power do their best to dodge responsibility and never lose a moments sleep over it. It's not the mother in Brazil who can't stop her child eating nestle biscuits, it's the CEO of nestle who sent a boat of UPF's into the rainforest for financial gain.

I hope this will mean an end to food banks and a proper look at the nutrition our kids are getting, at home, at school, eating out, and all the snacks advertised to them. Instead I fear the responsibility will go to the women who can (just about) afford it and the shame will go to all the women who can't, who are struggling to feed their kids in the holidays, who are in food or fuel poverty, maybe using food banks, and are the most likely to be in that 80%.

I read something about whether formula milk is UPF, as though we need another stick to beat mums with.

It's also difficult with kids who have SN or eating disorders, and I feel that personally and for other parents in my boat, but also to deny the science and not help prevent our children having futures crippled by obesity, that'a not right either. I don't think this is really a revelation to many of us though. I know feeding my DC UPF is bad, but I also have given up on feeling guilt and shame over feeding them. On my worst says I just think "what would a single dad do?"