Archive for January, 2010

My column on the rise of the craft economy, “Handmade is the new black,” ran in USA Today this morning. We have grown accustomed to having high-quality, reasonably priced goods available whenever we want them. So now, increasingly, we want to make our world special. Buying truly one-of-a-kind handmade items is a way to do that. It is, on some ways, simply a redirected consumerism, but since that impulse gives American artists a real chance to make a living, I think that trend is worth cheering. So please check the column out!

(cross-posted at My168hours.com)

Michael Pollan has been making the talk show rounds discussing his new book, Food Rules. I’ve been meaning to write about him for a while. I read the brilliant Omnivore’s Dilemma last summer, and then downloaded In Defense of Food to my Kindle while I was in the hospital waiting to be induced (then the Pitocin kicked in and let’s just say I stopped reading for three excruciating hours until Sam was born. But since it was impossible to sleep in the hospital I did wind up reading much of it before my discharge).

Pollan’s books raise the very good point that we, as omnivores, can choose what to eat. But many of us don’t think about this question very much. In the past, we simply ate what our culture (“which, at least when it comes to food, is really just a fancy word for your mother” writes Pollan) and the seasons and location dictated we eat. But now, with factory farming and a global economy producing more food than we know what to do with, our choices should probably be more judicious. Judging by our growing national girth and the environmental destruction mass-produced food can cause, perhaps we should be a lot more judicious.

Pollan has several guidelines, a key one being to “eat food.” That is, food that your grandmother would recognize as food. There are no bonus points gained for nutrition claims on food-like substances produced by the “Nutritional Industrial Complex”; the fact that Go-Gurt has calcium does not make it healthy. We would probably all benefit from eating more fruits and vegetables. With this, I agree.

But Pollan’s messages go beyond that – and here is where I start to worry. He suggests that the grocery store is not a good place to buy groceries, though he recognizes that you need to buy some things there. He just thinks that you should also start visiting farmers’ markets frequently. He waxes eloquent that a great thing about buying CSA produce or from farmers’ markets is it forces you to hunt for new recipes and experiment with them.

All these things take time. Whose time? Historically, food purchasing and preparation have largely been women’s work, which is why “culture” means “mom.” Married moms in dual-income couples who work full time spend about 6.5 hours per week on grocery shopping and food prep and clean-up (their husbands spend 2.73 hours). While this is only about an hour a day, the problem is that it is often a very valuable hour for a working mom – in the morning as you’re packing lunches, or in the evening when the kids are home but you’re trying to get a meal on the table. While there is plenty of time in 168 hours to work full-time and spend massive amounts of time with your family, making the pieces fit means that these valuable hours when you are all home and awake are not a great time to be doing housework.

But Pollan advocates that women should spend more time on these chores, since these choices “have real consequences, for our health and the health of the land and the health of our food culture.”

He is cunningly persuasive in an era in which middle-class motherhood is prone to fundamentalism—to suggestions that if you’ve ever given your baby formula you’ve failed. And so, on some of the email lists I’m on, people fret about how to afford CSA produce and organic food on a budget, or the time they spend hunting for recipes that incorporate ingredients they have, or about how they spend an extra 3 hours each week processing the CSA produce so it won’t go bad. They spend time every morning packing lunches rather than send the kids to school with lunch money, even if brown bag lunches tend to get soggy while the school lunch will be fresh and hot.

The trouble is that these choices have other consequences. While I truly believe that we have more time than we think, time is in the larger sense a non-renewable resource. Time spent doing one thing is time not spent doing another. I could spend two hours going to the farmers’ market every weekend and an hour cooking every night. Indeed, I sometimes enjoy cooking elaborate dinners. But I usually don’t do it, for a simple reason: I believe it’s more important to spend that time interacting with my family or doing the professional work I love. I fail to see what would be gained by having women scale back their paid work (thus depriving the larger economy of their talents and insights, which often create opportunities for other people, including men who are supporting their families) in order to spend hours cooking. I fail to see what is gained when women try to do everything and thus feel guilty and stressed for time, or else do their paid work and the cooking but ignore their families. As it is, one reason I believe that fathers in 2-income families wind up playing with the kids more than moms do is that moms spend so much time doing cooking, cleaning and errands that these chores, rather than play, characterize big chunks of their family time. I think this is a mistake—much like in the Gospels, when Martha is obsessed with cooking for Jesus, while Mary actually sits and listens to him.

Jesus noted that Mary had chosen the better option. And so, my husband and I cook very simple preparations of veggies and meats and side dishes like couscous or instant rice from the supermarket. I’m sure the 5-minute couscous has nefarious ingredients, and so do the pre-marinated meats. Since my toddler is in a phase where the only fruit he’ll eat is pineapple, I buy pineapple—in season or not. It beats huge fights over dinner, especially since he’ll move on to a new fruit soon enough. This morning we all sat together eating cereal and talking. I definitely think this was a better use of my time than standing over a pot of steel cut oatmeal stirring, while family life went on without me. It is good to eat together whenever you can. If this means eating good enough food rather than good food, so be it.

In 168 Hours (coming out May 27!) I discuss the idea of “strategic thinking time” as a best practice for the working chunks of our weeks. It is quite easy to get distracted from the important cerebral work of our professional crafts. Instead, we can spend hours chasing down every link sent us via Facebook, filling out paperwork, responding to phone calls or what have you, rather than problem solving. One technique is to carve out, say, 2 hours 3 times per week with no phone calls, no emails, etc., and focus on a question you’ve identified ahead of time as important. Your mind may wander–mine definitely does when I try to do this while running–but you try to keep returning it to the task at hand.

For many of us these days, one important task for this time is coming up with new ideas: new columns, new marketing techniques, new messages, new products. For a future project, I’m hoping to find out from people exactly how they come up with these ideas. Lots of people say “they just pop into my head,” but what kind of ground work do you do? Are you focusing on the question, or on something else? Do you need to tune out distractions as you would during the “strategic thinking time?” How do you recognize that the idea is a good one? Any insights are appreciated!

(cross posted at My168hours.com)

Over at The Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington and Cindi Leive (Glamour’s editor-in-chief) have taken up a new cause for the new year: getting American women to sleep more.

“Americans are increasingly sleep-deprived,” they write, “and the sleepiest people are, you guessed it, women. Single working women and working moms with young kids are especially drowsy: They tend to clock in an hour and a half shy of the roughly 7.5-hour minimum the human body needs to function happily and healthfully.” (That is, they clock about 6 hours of sleep per night).

The reason? According to sleep expert Michael Breus, whom Huffington and Leive quote at length, “They have so many commitments, and sleep starts to get low on the totem pole. They may know that sleep should be a priority, but then, you know, they’ve just got to get that last thing done. And that’s when it starts to get bad.”

It sounds like a good story. Unfortunately, it’s completely untrue. The figure that working moms of school-aged kids get only 6 hours of sleep per night came from the National Sleep Foundation’s 2007 Sleep in America poll, whose results are written about here.

There are two problems with this stat. One is that the NSF commonly partners with drug companies such as sanofi-aventis, maker of Ambien, one of the country’s most popular sleep drugs. They definitely have an interest in more people thinking they are sleep deprived than actually are. But the other problem is that the NSF’s annual poll is a “quick response” survey. The pollster simply asks you how many hours you sleep and you tell him. But people are notoriously unreliable at remembering these things, or averaging out exceptions (if you slept 6 hours 3 nights this week and 8 hours the other 4, you sleep over 7 hours a night — but you’ll probably remember the 3 lousy ones and say 6). In a culture in which sleep deprivation is a sign of how important you are– or how dedicated you are as a mom– it’s very easy to underestimate.

A more accurate way to figure out how many hours people sleep is to have them keep a time diary. This is exactly what the annual American Time Use Survey, done by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, attempts to do. Averaged over thousands of Americans, it paints a very different picture of our sleep habits. The average American sleeps 8.3 hours on weekdays and 9.3 hours on weekends.  That doesn’t sound like a nation that’s “increasingly sleep-deprived” to me.

Of course, one could assume that that figure is tipped to the high side by students and retirees — surely working moms sleep a lot less, right? Not really. Married moms who work full time and have kids ages 6-17, according to this chart, sleep 8.09 hours per night. As for women being more sleep deprived than men? Married fathers who work full-time and have school-aged children actually sleep slightly less than their female counter-parts, though they, too, clock a full 8.0 hours per night.

This does not mean that individual women aren’t sleep deprived. It’s entirely possible that Cindi Leive only sleeps 5 hours per night. Though is that because of her work and her young kids, or is it because of her “wicked TV addiction” (which she fesses up to in the post)? For most women, I’d wager it’s more likely to be the latter. Despite Leive and Huffington’s assertion that women often feel that “they still don’t ‘belong’ in the boys-club atmosphere that still dominates many workplaces” and so “they often attempt to compensate by working harder and longer than the next guy,” married moms who work full-time clock about 6.5 fewer hours of work per week than married dads who work full-time. In other words, they are not working longer and harder, on average, than the next guy. In fact, they’re working a lot less.

So why do these stats get repeated by very smart women? There is the danger of thinking one’s own personal experience is universal, of course, and a woman who runs a major magazine and a woman who runs a major website have very different careers than the average woman. They, personally, may not sleep that much. But also, these stats allow women to paint themselves as victims, and to complain, rather than owning up to their own choices. As a culture, we’ve developed a narrative that moms put everyone else first and hence have no time for sleep because it makes us feel holier-than-thou and makes us feel better about not doing things by allowing us to claim that we don’t have time to do them. The truth is that we just don’t want to make them a priority. Moms who work full-time spend more time watching television than they do caring for their kids.Even for moms who aren’t in the workforce, the TV and childcare figures are close . That doesn’t sound like a matter of having so many commitments that sleep goes to the bottom of the totem pole–which is why, in fact, women on average are getting enough sleep.