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?

@hamstersarse

I really didn't think I'd see the 'oh it takes two minutes to...' bullshit on here. So wash the towels daily and don't use a toilet brush, scrub it by hand. And cook from scratch and don't forget to look pretty and smile nicely while you're doing it. And don't complain, just ask the men nicely to do half. They'll absolutely do it without any fuss

That’s the sort of bullshit that gets my goat about the constant patriarchy patriarchy patriarchy feminism.

Most women want to feed their children well. They just do. It bothers them. More than men.
It’s not social constructivism or because of socialisation, it just is. It’s fairly bloody obvious there is a biological grounding to this.

I’d rather the FWR stance on this would be around the support of women to fulfil the desires they have (in this case feeding their children well) and so that does mean sharing knowledge about how long it takes you to cut up potatoes. Given the marketing culture we live in, many people think it’s impossible to cook properly and beyond their capabilities....the marketing has worked, right!

Nothing 'just is' when it comes to gender roles though. It's all socialisation. That's what this thread is trying to unpick, rather than swapping recipes.

Nothing 'just is' when it comes to gender roles though. It's all socialisation. That's what this thread is trying to unpick, rather than swapping recipes.

I agree.
And in fact "biology" would suggest otherwise.
Almost all other male higher primates take an active hand in raising offspring- including feeding.
We have no evidence to suggest that it is only the female homo sapien who feeds her offspring.
core.ac.uk/download/pdf/46171167.pdf

Nothing 'just is' when it comes to gender roles though. It's all socialisation. That's what this thread is trying to unpick, rather than swapping recipes.

That is corrupt ideology.

Everything is socialisation. It's hard to know where to start with that but presumably you dismiss evolution as a legitimate theory?

We have no evidence to suggest that it is only the female homo sapien who feeds her offspring.

Apart from......breastfeeding?

Is that a socialised thing?

@SuperLoudPoppingAction

and so much ruddy meat.

Most vegan alternatives are the epitome of UPF. Regardless of their flowery packaging

hamstersarse

Stating the obvious.

Most women want to feed their children well. They just do. It bothers them. More than men. It’s not social constructivism or because of socialisation, it just is. It’s fairly bloody obvious there is a biological grounding to this.

I don't think it's obvious at all. And even if it were, there are all kinds of 'natural behaviours' which we have managed to ditch in the name of civilisation and fairness. I don't see why helping or encouraging women to embrace the uneven load and guilt is preferable to trying to get men to take more interest in raising healthy, well-fed children.

@speakout

The obvious being that mothers and fathers often have different priorities when it comes to parenting? Glad it was obvious.

And yes, women do more often give a shit about what food their children eat than men - and that is very little to do with socialisation bollocks, it is primal. I gave a shit from the moment they were born, quite intensely. I am very sure my dh did not, along with most men.

What would the actual problem be with this? Why is it such a problem that women may hold a lot of this element of responsibility in parenting? It's pretty important! And doesn't mean we do everything.

Of course breast-feeding isn't socialised. Being in charge of feeding your family is though.

I don't see why helping or encouraging women to embrace the uneven load and guilt is preferable to trying to get men to take more interest in raising healthy, well-fed children.

I'm not moaning about an uneven load and I don't have guilt. I don't know why you suppose all women do?

@lazylinguist

Of course breast-feeding isn't socialised. Being in charge of feeding your family is though.

You are in denial about the natural state of being a mother

And you genuinely think all of this is because you were told that because you are a girl, you must do all of the cooking for your children?

It's a ludicrous proposition

Wow, this takes me back to the 70s, when eco-freak women were saving the world one blistered finger at a time. We scrubbed everything extra hard rather than use a squirt of liquid from a plastic bottle. It was all so gentle on the Earth, but so hard on our hands. And every morsel of food was of course cooked from raw ingredients. Oh to have that energy now...

@WrongWayApricot not at all. Trying to make not feeding crap to your children a feminist issue is just ludicrous. Any woman or a man in charge of a child's diet should naturally make decent choices. I can't believe that it's being turned into a man/woman issue here. Many dads cook and buy food for their children. Many.

@Toothpaste123 Okay, well back in the real world women are more often in charge of their children's diets than men.

www.unwomen.org/en/news/in-focus/csw61/redistribute-unpaid-work

www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/majority-british-women-are-still-responsible-cooking-and-food-shopping-research-finds-9605815

www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/09/24/among-u-s-couples-women-do-more-cooking-and-grocery-shopping-than-men

Making it an issue worth pondering from a feminist perspective.

It's biologically normal for me to cheat when ovulating. I don't though. Because I'm not an arse. So men should care what their children eat because they're not arses, regardless of their biological urge to feel their children turkey twizzlers.

@hamstersarse wtf has evolution got to do with a turkey twizzler?

Ever since people have organised into communities and families, finding food has been their top priority. Men and women worked towards this equally - yes, some of this work was divided based on physical strength/ability to breastfeed (although far, far less than we've been led to believe because history is written by men). But caring about feeding the weans was not a female-only concern until incredibly recently.

And I mean incredibly recently - if you look at between the wars, we had a malnourished and sick population. That's why the NHS was established, to improve the health of the canon fodder. It was vanishingly rare for a woman in that situation to be fretting about food quality - calories were the goal. People were hungry.

@ZoeMaye

It is so true that our idea of the past is distorted. We have this idealised view of history through an upper and middle class lens, when the reality for poor people was substandard food, working long hours in substandard conditions, two income families through necessity and often children working too (just as it is now without the child labour!)

The bread may have been fresh from the bakers, but the flour could well be cut with anything from heavy metals (Victorian era) to sawdust (wartime). A lot of food was processed, maybe not UPFs like now but certainly processed to help preserve them (spam and jam, for example).

We didn't have so much obesity a century ago, because we were a country crippled by malnutrition and extremes of wealth, with children starving in the last of the work houses. We don't need to go backwards, or look to the past for the answers. Let's look to the science which will hopefully have more answers for us, and to new innovative ways of getting the UPFs out of our foods. We don't need to be hiding at home trying to fix the flaws in our food systems, this is not our burden to bare alone. This is the kind of issue which has to be tackled systemically, we need change everywhere. There is no good punishing the women at home for feeding their families bread made from substandard flour. They don't control what goes into the flour. So like the scandals of food quality in the past, this needs to come from the people in charge.

I'm not here on this Earth to patch the holes in somebody else's boat. I've got better shit to do

This!

I'm not working even harder for a rose tinted paradigm that never actually existed.

I do cook from scratch a lot and enjoy it. But if I'm busy, shake & bake will do.

@WrongWayApricot so the real discussion here should be why are women still doing majority of the cooking and food shopping. No?
To say that we feed our kids crap because we are knackered and have no time is a lazy immature excuse as pointed out by many posters here. Cooking from scratch is not a time or money issue. It's an attitude issue. Maybe that's what should be focused on rather than defending a female right to feed children frozen pizza every night.

Waveafterwaveslowlydrifting

Im a full time teacher and DH works FT from home in a senior position. He cooks every day and usually from scratch. I appreciate that I'm lucky and in return I do the cleaning, we share laundry and he does more childcare than me. When I go back to part time I'll take on more of the childcare and offer to cook but he likes doing it“

Was a bit embarrassed to comment until I read yours! My husband does the cooking too, except Friday evenings when my son cooks for the three of us. Husband works FT, son is a student. I don’t do paid work. I’m physically much more able than my husband though so do everything else domestically, housework, diy repairs, gardening etc. Works for us.

@hamstersarse

You eat more if you use UPF.

It's a false economy.

A full chicken might be £5. But compared to the protein in processed nuggets, it will fill everyone up much more effectively.

If you eat proper meals you don't need snacks, and you also are much less likely to succumb to impulse purchases in every shop/place you go to, such is the culture we live in. I can't remember the last impulse bought food my family consumed - we just don't do it because we eat proper protein filled meals.

UPF is a trap - seemingly cheap and easy but absolutely makes you reliant on buying more and more, and actually consuming more of your time compared to if you just ate 2-3 meals a day

I sm actually shocked at how cheap chicken is - probably battery farmed but still...

The snacking culture has a lot to answer for. And the change in palate caused by UPFs. It's a vicious circle that leads to picky eating at main meals I feel.

Growing up we just did not snack, other than tuck shop mid morning. I didn't have activities after school though so got a meat and two veg - always heavy on v cheap basic potatoes - style meal pretty early in the day cooked by my dad who got home earlier than mum.

Lots of cultures survived for centuries and still do on just eating lots of variations of rice/potatoes and pulses. You wouldn't go hungry if you ate plenty of potatoes / rice and root veg and let's be honest, they are really not pricey. But folk don't want to eat basic, boring carbs to fill up. It's perfectly possible though. So UPFs are a choice on that level.

You are in denial about the natural state of being a mother. And you genuinely think all of this is because you were told that because you are a girl, you must do all of the cooking for your children? It's a ludicrous proposition

No, nobody said to me "lazylinguist, mothers are in charge of buying and cooking food for the family. It's not the father's job." However, probably like most people of my generation, I grew up in a family where my mother did all the food shopping and cooking.

Do I believe that was somehow down to my mother's innate femaleness or mothering instinct? No I absolutely definitely do not. She too had been brought up in a family and society where those things are expected of a woman.

Out of interest, do you think that in couples with no children (in previous generations and also now), that a roughly equal share of food shopping and cooking was/is done equally by men and women? I seriously doubt it. So the 'natural state of being a mother' wouldn't apply. Women do this stuff because of societal expectations. It is true that these are often ramped up when a couple have a child, but that's because women are the default caregivers.

The argument that women notice/care more than men about X aspect of parenting and that this is for biological reasons seems well dodgy!

The argument that it is cheap, quick and easy to feed a family healthily (however one defines that!) seems simplistic. Unhelpful to label people who struggle as ‘lazy’.

I do think that even IF it isn't 100% due to socialisation, it must be mostly (like, nearly all) due to socialisation that women feel such a responsibility to provide nutritious, healthy food for the family. As lazylinguist says, this happens a lot even n families without children. Yes, you get couples where both are equally unbothered about the nutritiousness of their food. And yes, there will be some heterosexual couples where the man is more interested in food (and actually puts that into practice providing it). But in the vast majority of couples and families that I have seen, the woman is much more worried about providing a balanced diet, keeping the kids / partner healthy, not giving the kids food hang-ups or eating disorders etc, spends a huge amount of headspace on it and a vast amount of time and labour shopping for ingredients, and on on preparing meals (after carefully planning them to fit in with health advice and with family members' pickiness, schedules etc). If men do get involved, it is often to say they've read some health advice and "we shouldn't feed the kids nuggets" without stepping up to cook more. Or cooking simple meals that require expensive ingredients which the family couldn't afford to have every night.

I think we do need huge changes in society. Really good nutritious school dinners, bring back office canteens etc. "Takeaways" on every street corner selling good lentil stew, vegetable curry etc that you could take home for the family (or for yourself as a single person). But these would need to be completely ubiquitous , and cheap, to work. And I don't know how we could make that societal shift when we are all addicted to the highly processed, salty foods and many would not find these hearty, healthy meals appealing.

Definitely needs to be some government regulation of ready meals etc though, so that people who need them can just grab one without having to peer at the ingredients with a dictionary.

@Bergamotte

I do think that even IF it isn't 100% due to socialisation, it must be mostly (like, nearly all) due to socialisation that women feel such a responsibility to provide nutritious, healthy food for the family. As lazylinguist says, this happens a lot even n families without children. Yes, you get couples where both are equally unbothered about the nutritiousness of their food. And yes, there will be some heterosexual couples where the man is more interested in food (and actually puts that into practice providing it). But in the vast majority of couples and families that I have seen, the woman is much more worried about providing a balanced diet, keeping the kids / partner healthy, not giving the kids food hang-ups or eating disorders etc, spends a huge amount of headspace on it and a vast amount of time and labour shopping for ingredients, and on on preparing meals (after carefully planning them to fit in with health advice and with family members' pickiness, schedules etc). If men do get involved, it is often to say they've read some health advice and "we shouldn't feed the kids nuggets" without stepping up to cook more. Or cooking simple meals that require expensive ingredients which the family couldn't afford to have every night.

I think we do need huge changes in society. Really good nutritious school dinners, bring back office canteens etc. "Takeaways" on every street corner selling good lentil stew, vegetable curry etc that you could take home for the family (or for yourself as a single person). But these would need to be completely ubiquitous , and cheap, to work. And I don't know how we could make that societal shift when we are all addicted to the highly processed, salty foods and many would not find these hearty, healthy meals appealing.

Definitely needs to be some government regulation of ready meals etc though, so that people who need them can just grab one without having to peer at the ingredients with a dictionary.

Forgot to say that yes, we need society to be organised in such a way that it is much easier to eat healthily, and then of course we also need men to step up and take their share of responsibility of all the work associated with feeding the family!