For Healthier Americans, We Should Help Women Quit Their Jobs

Donald Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to Health and Human Services secretary has broken cultural and media taboos against noticing that Americans pay the most in the world for health care yet also have the most chronic diseases. Food is one of the top reasons.

Yet while Kennedy and Tucker Carlson-promoted health gurus like Calley and Casey Means rightly point to processed food, Big Pharma, Big Food, and Big Ag as systemically broken, not a lot has yet been publicly noticed about the other cultural shifts feeding this brokenness. For one: The decline in full-time mothers.

The only healthy and accessible alternative to processed “food” is home-cooked food made from scratch. The wealthy can hire personal chefs, but for we 99 percent the only way to access home-cooked food is to make it with our own hands. Traditionally, mothers have provided this crucial service to their families. It is a deep personal investment not only in one’s family, but in this age of socialized medicine it is also an investment in one’s country and neighbors.

Making from-scratch food is a significant part-time job. I estimate I spend 25-30 hours on it per week, including shopping time. And that’s with growing very little of our food. If we had a serious garden, which I’ve done in some years, it would add another 15-20 hours a week at least. That’s a full-time job right there just getting the most nutritious food possible. And if you don’t grow it yourself, you must trade your own work hours for the farmer’s.

The amount of time needed to produce slow food is hard to square with also holding down a full-time job out of the home. Yes, doing both is possible, but even with hacks such as making simple meals, feeding fewer people (we have six kids), getting help from family, and prepping on the weekend, getting good food is still a significant time spend. Singles and couples who mostly cook at home are spending a part-time job’s worth on that process, too, just a little smaller.

It takes a lot of time to find local farmers and go to their farms or the farmer’s market each week and to grocery shop at multiple places for the best food prices, not to mention to haul in the groceries, wash and chop the veggies, defrost the meat, soak the grains and beans, heat everything, and then wash all the dishes (because if we’re talking healthy then we’re not microwaving plastic!). Then of course there’s the time spent eating meals as a family, clearing the table, and putting away leftovers instead of scarfing down fast food in the car or living room catered via GrubHub or DoorDash.

Chronic Disease Rose In Tandem With Absent Mothers

Just as daycare is a very expensive and lower-quality way to care for children in the long run (because every child almost always prefers her own mother above any other person, and losing a mother inflicts a primal wound that often affects the community), so feeding children outside of the home is an ultimately extremely expensive and low-quality replacement for home-cooked food.

That’s because, while subsidized processed “food” is cheap at the grocery store or school lunch program, it inflicts national-budget-breaking costs on taxpayers and health insurance-payers. Every taxpaying American is paying tens of thousands every year for other people’s health care, so he has a strong interest in other Americans being healthy. Not to mention, of course, the incalculable suffering of sick people and their families.

Kennedy, Carlson, Means, and others have noted that the proportion of American children with chronic illnesses has skyrocketed in tandem with government takeovers of the agricultural and health-care markets. But the chronic disease epidemic has also occurred in tandem with the exodus of mothers in the home.

The chronic disease epidemic strongly linked to eating processed food has also skyrocketed in tandem with the proportion of American children eating government-provided food, such as via school meals and food stamps. Many poverty-concentrated schools now also provide snacks and even dinners, and many cities feed kids summer lunches and snacks through a federal program (that also makes public parks unvisitable by attracting masses of unparented kids).

Here, Bigger Isn’t Better

Of course the majority of people employed via federal food programs mean well, but it’s logistically impossible to provide a mass of 50 to 500 children meals and snacks from scratch-made ingredients. Just as with daycare, to ensure a decent quality taxpayers would have to spend 20 times as much on these programs, for real ingredients and many more staff to prepare the food in a far more labor-intensive way. No cafeteria in the world is going to provide true sourdough buns with grassfed beef burgers.

Not only does the public money for that not exist given existing entitlement bankruptcy, it is far more economical for each mother to provide this for her own children. In situations like this, scale worsens quality and costs more money.

Yes, it costs less and takes less time per person for one mother to provide from-scratch food for between one and eight kids. But if you’re shifting from eight children to 50, you’re going to need several staff paid with benefits, not to mention mass food sourcing. Then we’re back to the original problems of Big Food and Big Pharma.

At six kids, I’m already up to stocking the No. 10 cans of diced tomatoes instead of those piddly 14.5-ounce cans that normies buy. That’s so we can have leftovers the kids take with them for their school lunches. Pretty soon there will be more teenagers and I’ll have to do two No. 10 cans to get leftovers. The point is, there’s not much room to expand past a nuclear family size without going industrial, and industrial food is the problem we’re trying to solve here.

As a mother who has worked and provided almost entirely home-cooked meals for my kids since the first was born, I can testify to the difficulty of doing both at the same time. (Depending on the season, my husband has helped in many ways including doing the whole thing himself at times — bless him.) No one I know who works a full-time also cooks most meals for their families. It’s not because they don’t want to, it’s because it’s next to impossible to hold a full-time job and a part-time job for 18 years in a row, and if you try you’ll soon have chronic health issues.

If our society honored mothers and fathers willing to devote one-quarter of their waking hours to ensuring the health of their families (and therefore the nation), and if government didn’t force mothers into the workforce to pay for its malevolent spendthriftery, families would have more time to prepare from-scratch food.

And then taxpayers wouldn’t be paying billions for the chronic diseases caused by metabolically destructive “food.” Not to mention we’d see a much-welcome reduction in national suffering and increase in productive national energy.

Women With Time Are a National Resource

Full-time mothers are a national resource in many ways, of course. As Robert Putnam documented in Bowling Alone, something like one-fifth of the national decrease in community events and socialization since the 1950s derives from the reduction in women who have time to devote to hospitality because we’re devoting more time to paid work. Even the Biden administration’s surgeon general sees loneliness as a national crisis.

But, as with the food problem, feminism has made it politically and culturally unpalatable to express the truth that our nation is much stronger when women provide priceless services to their families and neighbors if we are free from the impossible pressure to provide all the food as well as prepare it.

Our capabilities as a sex are far more culturally productive than toiling to nudge the GDP another hundredth of a percent. What a stupid — and dangerous — measure for human flourishing that is, indeed.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist. Her latest book with Regnery is “False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America.” A happy wife and the mother of six children, her ebooks include “Classic Books For Young Children,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media including Tucker Carlson, CNN, Fox News, OANN, NewsMax, Ben Shapiro, and Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Joy is also the cofounder of a high-performing Christian classical school and the author and coauthor of classical curricula. Her traditionally published books also include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.