How the Other Half Eats by Priya Fielding-Singh

Author:Priya Fielding-Singh [Fielding-Singh, Priya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-11-16T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

Fluctuating Finances

As a society, our image of middle-class families is that they are, for the most part, financially stable and secure. This image reflects nostalgia more than reality, as the stability that used to characterize the American middle class has been dwindling over the past forty years. The term middle class used to refer to Americans who had a steady income, a home, and savings for the future. But today, as the journalist Anne Helen Petersen has pointed out, being middle class mostly means being able to put bills on autopay and service one’s debt. Middle-class wages have increased over time, but those increases mostly keep pace with inflation rather than with the rising costs of living in the U.S. More of middle-class paychecks now goes to covering basic expenses, like out-of-pocket health-care fees, childcare, and educational investments.1

While the American middle class continues to buy and lease cars, purchase homes (though not at the rate they used to), go on vacation, and pay for kids’ education and activities, they are now doing so by taking on significant debt. Indeed, rates of middle-class debt have soared. In March 2020, household debt in the U.S. was $14.3 trillion and student-loan debt was $1.56 trillion, with the average student-debt load for an individual just above $32,000.

Many of the middle-class families I met reflected this reality. While their education placed them culturally in the middle class, their wages and accumulated debt could locate them just above the poverty line. This meant they were both scraping by and earning too much to qualify for government aid. For some, attending college had been a double-edged sword; on the one hand, it had propelled them into higher-paying jobs. But on the other, it had saddled them with payments they never seemed to be able to get fully on top of.

Of all the middle-class families I met, Renata and José seemed to be doing the best. They didn’t feel financially secure, but they were faring relatively well. They were contributing toward retirement savings. They had health insurance. They owned their three-bedroom house and were regularly making their mortgage payments. They weren’t paying off student loans. They could also afford to cover an emergency expense. But other middle-income families were not as lucky, and for those families, unexpected job losses or medical fees laid bare their hidden financial insecurities.

Middle-class families could find their financial situations fluctuating dramatically when one parent lost a job, business was slow, or unexpected costs arose. And I found that food’s meaning to middle-class parents could shift in lockstep with these financial changes. Overnight, food could go from being a teaching tool to a means of compensating for tougher circumstances. That is, how parents used food was extremely sensitive to whether they were making ends meet. When things were going well, parents could focus on food as a medium for teaching kids about nutrition. When things got tough, these same parents could turn to food as an antidote for hardship.

Alvaro and Sofia Morales, parents of three, showed me just how intensely food’s meaning could vacillate within a family.

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