"In an ideal world, this book would be required reading for every food pundit and cookbook author." -- The Pacific Standard
"The authors of Pressure Cooker… make it clear that our food crisis is deeply intertwined with related crises, including income inequality, a fragile safety net, inadequate public transportation, and the scarcity of affordable housing. We’re not going to fix all of this with a nice pot of homemade chili.”
-- Laura Shapiro, author of What She Ate and Perfection Salad, in The Atlantic
“I could not put this book down. In the rich and compelling stories of nine families and how food shapes their lives, Pressure Cooker offers a necessary corrective to the nostalgia for the ‘lost family dinner,’ and shows just how difficult we make it in America for families to have the time, access, and opportunity to bond over a shared, healthy meal..”
--Brigid Schulte, author of Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time and director of The Better Life Lab at New America
"The authors of Pressure Cooker… make it clear that our food crisis is deeply intertwined with related crises, including income inequality, a fragile safety net, inadequate public transportation, and the scarcity of affordable housing. We’re not going to fix all of this with a nice pot of homemade chili.”
-- Laura Shapiro, author of What She Ate and Perfection Salad, in The Atlantic
“I could not put this book down. In the rich and compelling stories of nine families and how food shapes their lives, Pressure Cooker offers a necessary corrective to the nostalgia for the ‘lost family dinner,’ and shows just how difficult we make it in America for families to have the time, access, and opportunity to bond over a shared, healthy meal..”
--Brigid Schulte, author of Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time and director of The Better Life Lab at New America
Pressure Cooker is available from Amazon, Oxford University Press, or local book sellers. Click here for more details on Pressure Cooker.
Based on extensive field research in the homes and kitchens of a diverse group of American families, Pressure Cooker challenges the logic of the most popular foodie mantras of our time, showing how they miss the mark and up the ante for parents and children. Romantic images of family meals are inviting, but they create a fiction that does little to fix the problems in the food system. The unforgettable stories in this book evocatively illustrate how class inequality, racism, sexism, and xenophobia converge at the dinner table. If we want a food system that is fair, equitable, and nourishing, we must look outside the kitchen for answers.