RALEIGH – A trio of sociologists have penned a critique of home-cooked “healthy” meals and singled out First Lady Michelle Obama to receive a special dose of admonition.

Sarah Bowen, Joslyn Brenton and Sinikka Elliott are connected to North Carolina State University and just published the piece in SAGE, titled, “The Joy of Cooking?”

In the fight to combat rising obesity rates, modern-day food gurus advocate a return to the kitchen. Michael Pollan, author of Cooked, and America’s most influential “foodie-intellectual,” tells us that the path to reforming the food system “passes right through the kitchen.” New York Times’ food columnist Mark Bittman agrees, saying the goal should be “to get people to see cooking as a joy rather than a burden.” Magazines such as Good Housekeeping and television personalities like Rachael Ray offer practical cooking advice to get Americans into the kitchen, publishing recipes for 30-minute meals and meals that can be made in the slow-cooker. First lady Michelle Obama has also been influential in popularizing public health messages that emphasize the role that mothers play when it comes to helping children make healthy choices.

The message that good parents—and in particular, good mothers—cook for their families dovetails with increasingly intensive and unrealistic standards of “good” mothering. According to the sociologist Sharon Hays, to be a good mom today, a woman must demonstrate intense devotion to her children. One could say that home-cooked meals have become the hallmark of good mothering, stable families, and the ideal of the healthy, productive citizen.

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“Yet in reality, home-cooked meals rarely look this good. Leanne, for example, who held down a minimum-wage job while taking classes for an associate’s degree, often spent her valuable time preparing meals, only to be rewarded with family members’ complaints—or disinterest,” they write.

The sociologists interviewed 150 mothers and spent 250 hours observing 12 “working-class and poor families,” according to TheWeek.com.

The study concludes:

The vision of the family meal that today’s food experts are whipping up is alluring. Most people would agree that it would be nice to slow down, eat healthfully, and enjoy a home-cooked meal. However, our research leads us to question why the frontline in reforming the food system has to be in someone’s kitchen. The emphasis on home cooking ignores the time pressures, financial constraints, and feeding challenges that shape the family meal. Yet this is the widely promoted standard to which all mothers are held. Our conversations with mothers of young children show us that this emerging standard is a tasty illusion, one that is moralistic, and rather elitist, instead of a realistic vision of cooking today. Intentionally or not, it places the burden of a healthy home-cooked meal on women.

Obama has been criticized for having what has been deemed a condescending attitude towards parents and local school officials.

The First Lady recently gave an interview to MSN.com in which she said:

Before coming to the White House, I struggled, as a working parent with a traveling, busy husband, to figure out how to feed my kids healthy, and I didn’t get it right. Our pediatrician had to pull me aside and point out some things that were going wrong. I thought to myself, if a Princeton and Harvard educated professional woman doesn’t know how to adequately feed her kids, then what are other parents going through who don’t have access to the information I have?

 No wonder the sociologists called the push “rather elitist.”