Food pundits and celebrity chefs often put forth a narrative that growing your own vegetables and cooking meals from scratch can help cure many of society’s ills—everything from childhood obesity to environmental degradation. Joslyn Brenton, an assistant professor in Ithaca College’s Department of Sociology, disagrees.

In the new book, Pressure Cooker: Why Home Cooking Won’t Solve Our Problems and What We Can Do About It, Brenton and her coauthors, North Carolina State University associate professor Sarah Bowen and University of British Columbia assistant professor Sinikka Elliott, interviewed more than 150 mothers and spent 250 hours going with families to the grocery store and watching them cook and eat.

Their conclusions fly in the face of the above narrative. Rather than acting as a panacea for societal issues, the emphasis on family meals places a disproportionate burden on families and mothers. “

Food pundits and food experts—they’re giving us the same message: if we slow down, if we prioritize food in our lives, if we just take the time to care and get back in the kitchen, everything’s going to be better. We don’t find that at all,” Brenton said in an earlier interview. “What we’re looking at in the book are structural inequalities and how they shape people’s lives and what they eat.”

Structural inequalities—where one group of people is attributed an unequal status in relation to other groups—create societal imbalances in the roles, functions, rights, opportunities, and decisions available to these various groups.

“We wanted to know how diverse mothers of young children think about food and how they see their own relationship to food. What we find is a complex picture, and that’s sometimes hard to work with,” Brenton said.