What's for Dinner, Mom?

"Sometimes I think I became a mother not in a hospital room but in a Trader Joe's in New York City. It was May 2020. A masked but smizing employee took one look at my stomach and handed me a packet of dark-chocolate peanut-butter cups. "Happy Mother's Day!" she said. I was pregnant, with twins, during the early months of the pandemic, and all I could think about was food—what to eat and how to acquire it."

"Food then was interlaced with a sense of danger, the coronavirus potentially spreading (we worried, absurdly it turned out) even by way of reusable totes. Meanwhile, I knew from my relentless pregnancy apps that what I ate could have monumental implications for my future children's eating habits. I was scared, and I felt powerless, and food seemed like one of the few things I could control, or at least try to."

A pregnant woman carrying twins during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic experienced intense anxiety about acquiring and consuming safe, nutritious food. Weekly grocery trips felt risky and controlling food choices became a focal way to manage fear. Maternal eating patterns influence offspring preferences beginning in utero, and mothers historically served as primary culinary authorities. Post–World War II industrialization shifted diets toward mass-produced, packaged foods, altering maternal roles and cultural food transmission. The pandemic intensified reliance on food as control while intersecting with longstanding trends toward processed food and changing domestic food production.

Read at The Atlantic