What people are saying about the book

"Twice, while working on this review, I wandered into my local bookstore to browse the latest home-cooking how-to manuals. These books are full of delicious-sounding, nutrient-rich meals, plus tips and shortcuts for making their preparation as efficient as possible. But they are completely divorced from the texture of real life and its daily challenges that runs through every page of Pressure Cooker. In an ideal world, this book would be required reading for every food pundit and cookbook author." --Peter C. Baker, ​Pacific Standard Magazine 
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“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. This is an important book.”--Brigid Schulte, award-winning journalist, author of the New York Times bestselling Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, and director of The Better Life Lab at New America

“Food matters to virtually everyone, from low-wage workers and harried mothers to foodies and celebrity chefs. But the changing conversation on food often ignores the reality most families face. Read this book if you want to really know what’s going on in America’s kitchens today.”--Saru Jayaraman, author of Behind the Kitchen Door and Forked​

“In a rare study, Pressure Cooker reveals how realities of family life clash with the idealized standard of putting a home-cooked meal on the table. As they show the barriers to cooking, the authors provide vivid and compelling portraits of family life today—and the role of food in centering family life.” --Annette Lareau, author of Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life

“Pressure Cooker is an important and timely response to the prevailing foodie mantra that home cooking can solve many of today’s social ills, from obesity to food insecurity to anomie. Drawing on very-difficult-to-obtain in-home ethnographic observation, the authors make a compelling case that it’s really difficult to make the ideal of the in-home family meal an everyday reality. Suggesting that women prioritize doing so is both unfair and unjust.” --Julie Guthman, author of Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism