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Nancy Solomon: It's the Brian Lehrer Show. Good morning again, everyone. I'm Nancy Solomon from the WNYC and Gothamist Newsroom filling in for Brian Lehrer who is on vacation this week. Here's a question, what should we have for dinner tonight? If those six words inspired a feeling of dread or exhaustion, you're not alone.

Meal planning for a family, especially during the pandemic can often be just as laborious as cooking the meal itself, and yet, as my next guest argues, the work of meal planning is often invisible to the members of the family not doing it and even to researchers who track questions about domestic labor. My guest is Virginia Sole-Smith. She's a journalist who covers weight stigma and diet culture, the author of the book, The Eating Instinct, and the newsletter Burnt Toast.

Her recent piece on this topic is called The Tyranny and Misogyny of Meal Planning. Virginia, welcome to WNYC.

Virginia Sole-Smith: Thanks for having me.

Nancy: For those who might not have heard this phrase, what is the household's mental load, and how does meal planning fit into that?

Virginia: Mental load is the thousands of decisions that a household makes in the course of the day, month, year to keep the household running. It's where do the kids go to summer camp? It's when do we make doctor's appointments? Are we out of toilet paper? All of these details that we keep in our head. Meal planning is arguably the biggest chunk of the mental load in most families because you can be late on going to the dentist, but you have to feed your kids every day.

That decision, I had the same dreaded response when you just said it, that what should we have for dinner tonight? That decision is really complicated and really loaded for a lot of families and it's often being made by just one person, usually, the mom having to factor in all of these things that are really difficult to navigate.

Nancy: It's interesting because I've often used the term over the years, emotional labor to give a little bit of due to my partner who maybe makes much more of the social plans than I do. This goes along with that, the mental load of doing all this. Does this really still fall to women more than men in heterosexual relationships?

Virginia: Depressingly, yes. It's the type of thing that you would really hope would have shifted by now, but when I dug into it Pew Research, it has a survey from 2019, so that's pretty recent where we learn that 80% of moms do all the grocery shopping and meal preparation. They didn't even ask specifically about meal planning, which is deciding what you're having, making the grocery list, all of the mental piece, but I think that's because this work is so invisible that researchers often aren't even thinking to track it.

They're just assuming that whoever's doing the grocery shopping and the meal preparation is also likely doing this work. I did find another study from 2013 where 40% of women said they take main responsibility for meal planning and only 6% of men do. I think it's fair to say there's a pretty big disparity here.

Nancy: Listeners, do you already know what you're having for dinner tonight and who decided? The number to call is 646-435-7280. Does meal planning fall into your household on you and do you feel like it's recognized or invisible labor to the other members of your household? 646-435-7280. You write that you actually resisted a more regimented form of meal planning until a few months into the pandemic. What were you doing before the pandemic and what changed?

Virginia: Honestly, I can't even remember what we ate before the pandemic, but there was a lot of winging it. I'm someone who does enjoy cooking, and so that's why this is. My partner and I have a fairly equal division of labor in the house, both mental and physical. This is the chunk that I had taken on, but because I like to cook and I like to be creative when I cook, I would just show up at 5:00 PM and be like, "Oh, I don't know, what should we make for dinner tonight?"

The problem is that's fine if you are a child-free couple or maybe if you have older children who are doing their own activities around dinner time, but our kids are three and eight, so the hours between 5:00 PM and 7:00 PM, it's go time, it's chaos, everyone's cranky. They need to eat immediately, there's a million things going on.

I'd gotten to this point of realizing that I needed to do more work to figure out dinner and take into account the different eating abilities of my different aged children and their preferences and where we are with everyone's picky eating habits and all of these things. This is another thing we need to acknowledge with meal planning is you're also taking responsibility for developing your children as eaters, developing their pallets, their nutrition intake.

There's just so many responsibilities that come into it, but I really resisted doing it because I thought, "You know what? If I spend my Saturdays sitting out and making a calendar and looking on Pinterest for recipes, that's going to throw our balance." There's not an equal pot of labor that he can take on to balance that out, that work is going to need to happen, but it's all falling on me.

Nancy: You're listening to the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. I'm Nancy Solomon and we're talking with Virginia Sole-Smith who writes about weight stigma and diet culture. You can call with your question at 646-435-7280. Virginia, maybe you should explain the term diet culture, and then what's the relationship between that and meal planning?

Virginia: Yes, absolutely. Diet culture is the whole set of beliefs and messages we get around food and exercise to a large extent that are all based on the idea that when you're eating, your primary goal is weight management, either weight loss, or maintaining a thin body, and that our whole relationship with food should revolve around staying thin as possible and raising kids who are going to be thin. There's a lot of pressure on parents, especially in this day and age to feel like they are feeding their kids this "perfect nutrition", which is a unicorn that simply doesn't exist.

Diet culture has really complicated the way parents think about feeding our kids because it's given us this whole set of rules about good foods and bad foods that's really out of sync with the way most children eat. Most children love carbohydrates, for example, and diet culture tells us that carbohydrates are terrible foods. They're not, they're really nutritious, they're essential to kids growing bodies, but parents will struggle with a lot of guilt and anxiety if they feel like their kids only want to eat pasta five nights a week. How do you vary up that menu?

That pressure around meal planning, it's another whole added part of the work that we're talking about here. Of course, we do want our kids to eat nutritiously and to grow up healthy and there's just a baseline of nutrition you need to be providing, but there's this Instagram version of meal planning, which is like rainbow produce in your fridge and color-coordinated meal plans. It's very elaborate. There's a lot more labor involved in it and it's holding mothers, in particular, to this standard of perfection that most of us are just never going to meet and it doesn't really serve us even if we could.

Nancy: Now, that one I didn't know about. I would not say that describes my refrigerator.

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Virginia: Thank goodness, right? You probably have food you want to eat, not food that you feel like you have to be eating because you're trying to live a certain way, but yes, that messaging is really powerful, especially right now on social media, on Pinterest and Instagram and things like that. It's a tough added layer to navigate.

Nancy: I was recently on vacation with our large extended family and there was more than one conversation about weight loss and who was dieting and what they were doing and how they looked. After the trip, my 17-year-old said adults should not talk about dieting in front of teenage girls, that is just wrong.

Virginia: Absolutely. Your kids sound super smart and I agree with her 100%. It's one of the best things that parents can do to help our kids. You can't entirely protect kids from diet culture because it is everywhere, but they shouldn't expect to encounter it at their family dinner table. That should be a safe haven from messages around weight loss and perfect bodies and are you eating gluten or not this week? All of that stuff to whatever extent we can keep that out of our family meals is so important.

It's probably the most important thing you can do to raising a healthy eater is to redefine health, disconnect it from weight, and realize that the real goal of family dinners is to connect with your loved ones. It's to have that experience of community together at the end of the day. Maybe with your 17-year-old, there's less screaming than there is in my house with a three-year-old at the end of the day. It's this opportunity to come together and bond, and that's what we're working towards.

Even if it doesn't look like that every night. When we bring in diet culture in the mix of that and suddenly we're giving our kids these very conflicting messages that the foods they most want to eat are foods we're anxious about them eating or foods we don't let ourselves eat, all of that it's not age-appropriate, it's very disconcerting for children, and it's going to get in the way of them feeling safe around food and being able to trust their bodies.

Nancy: Screaming at our table maybe not so much anymore, but arguing, oomph, family dinner can be a battleground.

Virginia: It can be, which is the other reason. Yes, absolutely.

Nancy: Let's go to the calls. We have Katie in Butler, New Jersey on the line. Katie, what's your question?

Katie: Hi. I don't have a question, well, because my kids are older, and so good luck, three and eight is pretty easy to handle. Especially if you've got one person in the house with dietary restriction and nobody else does and you're the one planning the meals on top of society and even in pre-school where pretzels and Goldfish are considered a healthy snack where it's high sodium, things like that.

I am so glad you're talking about this because, especially during COVID where I have three, my big kids at home, high school and college-age, myself and my husband, and having to do the food has been horrific. Horrible, I hate it, I'm about to go food shopping now and I'm having my alone time, so I'm here on the phone with you guys because I don't want to go in. I just wanted to put my two cents in and the dietary restriction is just very difficult. That's it, that's about it.

Nancy: The pandemic really put a point on all of that because I think for many of us, we went from maybe being able to pull off a family dinner three times a week. It went to three meals a day, seven days a week, a lot of dishes too. I don't know what dishes fit into this.

participant: Absolutely, so much. The workload really tripled, quadrupled, quintupled during the pandemic and the burnout is real from that. Certainly, if you're navigating family members with food allergies or intolerances, just people in different stages, different relationships with food, I think one of the most important things we can all do is let ourselves off the hook a lot and say, what if we were only doing family dinner together a few nights a week before the pandemic?

It's okay if there's nights where the kids are eating Pizza in front of the TV and you and your partner eating a meal you actually like later or dinner is spools of cereal. We did that a lot during the pandemic at my house because you need to keep your stamina up. Again, we need to get away from this perfectionist model the diet culture has taught us about meal planning and we need to think, "What's actually going to help me connect with my kids? What's actually going to help us in the day in a calm place versus making this more complicated?"

Nancy: Let's go back to the phones. We have Laney in Brooklyn with a question about meal planning. Laney.

Laney: Hi, can you hear me?

Nancy: Yes.

Laney: Great. I'm a health coach, I think about this a lot. One of the things is that, I think that we get decisions to cheat from having to make all these decisions and this is like brain research and stuff like that that it becomes more difficult to make the decisions. One of my goals is really to find a way to automate it as much as possible. One of the things that I do is I make an automated electronic grocery list that lines up with my grocery store.

That helps a little bit, but I was wondering if you had any other thoughts or things that you talk about as far as automating the process for meal planning and shopping.

Virginia: That's a great question. I'm a big fan of the Shared To Do App. My husband and I used the Microsoft To Do App, but there's a couple of different ones where multiple people can be adding to a grocery list, so that way whenever something runs out, whoever uses it up has to put it on the app. It's not just one person's job to go around and scab it and try and figure out if you need cereal or whatever. The other thing that really simplified this for me, that works particularly well with kids is to have theme nights like loose themes.

Monday is pasta, Tuesday is tacos, Wednesday is chicken, whatever foods you guys like to eat, and then you can from there, it doesn't have to be the same exact tacos every week unless you're my eight-year-old who wants them exactly the same way every week, but the rest of us can vary it up. Then that reduces some of that decision fatigue you're talking about because I'm not like approaching the kitchen thinking, "I could be making anything." It's like, "Okay, I'm making some kind of taco." That certainly helped.

I also think really involving the rest of the family and saying, "Okay, guys, even if I'm the one whose job it is to make this grocery lists, I need input, I need people saying more than what's for dinner and actually coming to the table with some suggestions and telling me what you like," and involving people in more of the prep too. If the meal planning is this huge amount of work, other people can be doing other parts of the food job, it should not all fall on one person.

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Nancy: Okay, so I think we're going to have to leave it there. We have been talking with Virginia Sole-Smith, she's a journalist who covers weight stigma and diet culture and the author of the book, The Eating Instinct and the newsletter Burnt Toast. Her recent piece on this topic is called The Tyranny and Misogyny of Meal Planning. Thanks so much, Virginia.

Virginia: Thank you for having me.

Nancy: I'm Nancy Solomon filling in for Brian Lehrer who's out this week. Tomorrow, you'll be in very good hands with my colleague, Bridget Burgen, who's going to be taking the mic. Thanks so much for listening today. The Brian Lehrer Show's producers are Lisa Alison, Zoe Azulay, Mary Croke, Amina Srna, Carl Boisrond, and Zach Gottehrer-Cohen takes care of our podcast. Our interns this summer have been Sammy Ali, Peter Sims, Meechie, and Raphael Helfand.

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