The University of Michigan’s Food Literacy for All series is a community-academic partnership course that invites guest speakers each week to address “challenges and opportunities of diverse food systems.” Hosted by the U-M Sustainable Food Systems Initiative, the series attracts over 300 people each Tuesday evening, a mixture of enrolled students and community attendees from across the globe. The February 15 class featured Dr. Priya Fielding-Singh, a sociologist and assistant professor at the University of Utah, who has experience researching the causes and consequences of health disparities in the United States, with a focus on gender and family. 

Fielding-Singh’s lecture, “How the Other Half Eats: the Untold Story of Food and Inequality in America,” which is also the title of her book that was published in 2021, focused on how mothers feed their children and how mothers’ emotions influence the way they feed their children. In the United States, feeding children is predominantly a mother’s responsibility; in four out of five heterosexual couples with children, mothers, rather than fathers, are in charge of feeding kids. Our society places less emphasis on fathers in their role of feeding children, Fielding-Singh noted, which creates a double standard for mothers. “Dads don’t feel like it’s their job to get their kids to eat healthy,” she said. 

Mothers, therefore, play the dominant role in providing food for their children, and this role creates many complexities for them. “Emotions are actually really central to how mothers feed their kids,” Fielding-Singh said. Driven by the concept of intensive mothering—a child-centered, emotionally absorbing, and labor-intensive ideology of mothering—mothers report strong feelings of guilt about the way they feed their children. Many mothers feel “as though they are constantly falling short,” Fielding-Singh said. 

In her research, Fielding-Singh took this knowledge of mothers’ emotions towards feeding their children and investigated differences between mothers of different income levels in the San Francisco Bay Area. She found that mothers across income levels share many ideas of how they should be feeding their kids, including the belief that their children should eat a healthy diet and that “good” moms are invested in what their children eat. 

Where Fielding-Singh found discrepancies between income levels, however, was in the way that mothers navigate their feelings of guilt about the way they feed their children. She found that low-income mothers typically use the strategy of downscaling to cope with their guilt, while high-income mothers rely on the strategy of upscaling.

Downscaling involves pushing down feelings of guilt to come to terms with the mothers’ current reality. Mothers rearrange their priorities based on their situation, which can lead them to shift focus away from diet and nutrition to prioritizing their kids’ safety and security. They will “downscale their guilt to make themselves feel like they’re doing just fine,” Fielding-Singh said.

On the other hand, high-income mothers use upscaling as a coping strategy for their guilt. This means mothers are “escalating feelings of guilt to fuel additional physical and cognitive labor,” Fielding-Singh said. These mothers become “hyper-focused on diet.” They have very high expectations for themselves, and they compare themselves to other mothers in their community, which leaves them feeling as if they’ve fallen short of where they should be.

Fielding-Singh explained these patterns and differences among mothers’ emotions towards how they feed their children, and noted how we can use this information to think about nutritional inequality in the United States. She advocated for policies that institutionalize food support for families and mothers, such as universal school meals, which helps take the pressure of feeding children off of mothers.

Watch Fielding-Singh’s lecture.

More information: Food Literacy for All series