What's for Dinner, Mom?

The women who want to change the way America eats

- Sophie Gilbert

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 darkchocolate 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. Once a week I dashed clumsily through the store's aisles, grabbing cans of beans and bags of apples while trying not to breathe, like a contestant on a postapocalyptic episode of Supermarket Sweep.

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.

What I didn't yet know was that I was tapping into a deep-rooted tradition-or that, even as I panic-shopped, it was evolving. Mothers are our first food influencers, and for most of history, they have been our primary ones. The process starts even before we're born, we now know: The tastes we're exposed to in utero inform the preferences we'll have much later in life. Culture, "at least when it comes to food, is really just a fancy word for your mother," Michael Pollan wrote in his best-selling 2008 book, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. Up until the mid-20th century or so, we humans ate much as our parents did, and their parents before them, and so on: food cooked at home, from fresh ingredients, made predominantly by women.