What some people tell us about what we should eat and cook collides with the realities of food insecurity and systemic inequities.
Is it true that Americans have forgotten how to cook? Could we solve the problems in our food system by returning to the kitchen and remembering how to cook from scratch? Based on interviews conducted with hundreds of North Carolina families, Sarah Bowen, Ph.D., explains why home cooking is not necessarily the solution to creating just, healthy meals.
Bowen is professor of sociology at NC State. Her research focuses on food systems, social institutions and inequality, with a particular focus on the structural roots of diet disparities and food insecurity. Bowen is the author of two books: Divided Spirits: Tequila, Mezcal, and the Politics of Production (University of California Press, 2015) and Pressure Cooker: Why Home Cooking Won’t Solve Our Problems and What We Can Do About It (Oxford University Press, 2019). She uses mainly qualitative and community-based methods in her work and has conducted research in France, Mexico, Sweden and the United States.
Why Home Cooking Won't Solve Our Problems (Sarah Bowen)
This podcast was originally produced for an audience of entering first-year and transfer students at NC State University as a part of an interdisciplinary experience. It is available for noncommercial reuse under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 4.0 License, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.