Last weekend I had Avery for the whole weekend – usually he spends half with me and half with his dad. On Friday night my online delivery arrived just as we got in from Friday ice cream, our weekly ritual where instead of after school club, I pick him up and hang out for a bit before he heads over to his dad’s.
But this week, he came home with me just in time for our online shopping delivery. He helped me unpack things (begrudgingly), then we cooked dinner, cleared up, and started a few cooking projects. I showed him how to peel carrots and then grate them. He weighed things out on the scales and fetched things out of the fridge. After we’d done all this cooking he said to me ‘that was a really boring baking project’. Hard agree kid. It was not how I wanted to spend my Friday evening either. I made a point of telling him how, even though we had spent a few hours in the kitchen that night, all of this started days earlier when I booked a delivery slot, thought about the fact he was going to be spending more days with me that week than normal, and how we both needed to eat. How we had a busy weekend planned so it made sense to have food ready to go in amongst all our other activities. And that we would eat at home or bring a packed lunch to save money. I told him how I had made a list of things we needed and I picked some recipes we were going to make and how I checked what we already had in the freezer and cupboards and fridge.
‘Family foodwork’, for the uninitiated, is the name sociologists give to describe the mental, physical, and emotional labour of feeding a family. In their 2023 paper Unequal Foodwork: Situating the Sociology of Feeding Within Nutrition Disparities, Priya Fielding Singh and Merin Oleschuk say that foodwork is: ‘the household practices that support eating, such as meal planning, shopping, preparing, cooking, and cleaning up - [it] is a multifaceted and demanding form of domestic labor’. They add that ‘foodwork involves researching and purchasing foods, deciding where to procure food (including going to restaurants or ordering take-out), preparing appealing meals, negotiating preferences, accommodating allergies, and managing different family members' complex feelings around these activities’. It's all the silly little tasks that often nobody sees, acknowledges, or appreciates, that lead to bellies getting filled. It is relentless, Sisyphean work. And it’s mostly done by women. It feels really important to name it as work to my six-year-old who still seems to think that food appears on the table by magic.
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