The Mental Load of Feeding a Family
A guest post from Katherine Goldstein of The Double Shift
Hello friends! We’re back in Brooklyn after a week away, my son goes back to school today, and we’re planning a big family birthday party for this weekend, so needless to say I’m losing my mind a little bit! (There’s so much laundry and so many forms and not enough child care, and everyone is back to work and sending emails!) Luckily, I was smart enough to arrange a newsletter swap with Katherine Goldstein of The Double Shift way back in June, and I’m so glad Early Summer Lindsey had an inkling that this week would be insane. Plus, Katherine writes such a great and helpful newsletter that I think Purse readers will really enjoy.
A few quick things I wanted to share before we jump into Katherine’s essay. One, a big thank-you to Jane Ratcliffe for featuring me in The Body, Brain, & Books interview series. I had such a fun time answering the questions!
Two, Alisha Ramos, creator of one of my favorite newsletters, Downtime, wrote about how she and her husband split up their chores after having a baby, and she asked me to share some insights I’ve learned since starting the Division of Labor series. I feel like my one big takeaway is going to be controversial!
And three, I completely failed to do a giveaway in August! Sorry, guys! I’ll be back next week with a really fun one, so stay tuned!
Okay, onto Katherine’s essay! Good luck to all the other parents navigating September! We can do it!
About a year ago, my husband and I agreed to radically overhaul how we handled food and cooking in our family. Previously, we had a weird, not fully thought-out system where I’d shop at one store one week, he’d shop at another store another week, and we’d trade off cooking and cleaning by the day...sort of. It involved a lot of checking in and day-to-day planning and a heavy mental load.
We both agreed our system wasn’t awesome. We then got inspired by some friends of ours who were inspired by Fair Play to rethink how they managed their division of labor around food. One of Eve Rodsky’s most essential pieces of advice is allowing people to fully “own the whole task,” from planning to completion, rather than having one member of the couple defaulting to being “in charge” while the other person is “helping out.”
We have six people living in our house, three of them small children, so there are many, many conceptional and execution tasks between an empty refrigerator and enough food for three meals a day, seven days a week (give or take), including cooked family dinners for usually 6 of those nights. The problem is it’s hard to fully “own” some of the complex, interconnected tasks associated with food. If one person shops and the other person cooks, there is going to have to be a lot of communication and rejiggering when the store is out of three things.
My husband and I now have fully committed to a program we call “Food Weeks,” where one person is fully in charge of all aspects of shopping, prepping, cooking, and kitchen cleaning for a full seven days.... and then we switch off the next week. When it’s not your food week, you are totally “off” from both the mental load and the execution tasks of feeding the family.
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Why this works for our family: Our marriage generally thrives with strong divisions of labor and avoiding situations where we might be tempted to micromanage each other. We have other systems like bedtimes where we flip who does what so we are pretty comfortable regularly rotating tasks. We eat dinner as a family most nights, but we don’t plan breakfast or lunches. We mainly just have a list of items we need around for those meals, and the person whose week it is gets those at the grocery store.
Why I love it, and why I think you will, too. I love that we just know who’s in charge of food at any given time, there’s no negotiation. It’s one less thing to communicate about, which is great because that list is already pretty long. I enjoy cooking and generally like planning what I will make for my week. But when it’s not my food week, and I don’t have to do any shopping, cooking, or cleaning, I feel like I get way more time back in the evenings than I ever did with our previously haphazard system. When it’s not my food week, it feels like a real break. I will get in extra errands, a trip to the gym, longer workdays, or more downtime to read or watch TV in the evenings while never feeling like I should be helping with dinner or cleanup stuff.
I feel like “Food Week” has been a wonderful change for us, and I hope you’ll consider giving it a try.
The Food Director for a Week Experiment:
What We’re Trying to Solve: Equally sharing the load of the many separate but interconnected tasks that go into feeding a family
Target Audience: A pair of adults in the same household
Ages: Adults or teens old enough to shop for groceries independently
Estimated Time: Several hours during your week, but plenty of time off when it’s not
Length: At least two weeks, but I recommend committing to four
Difficulty Level: Hard
Directions:
At least three days before you want to begin, decide when you are starting (we like to go Sunday to Sunday) and who will go first in your trade-off.
Go over the schedule for the upcoming week and make note of anything the “Food Week” person should be aware of, like a potluck, existing plans to meet friends at a restaurant, etc.
Go over the list of what each person will be responsible for during their “food week.” Rodsky calls this a “minimum standard of care,” that partners or other family members should agree to before they hand off ownership of a task. This ensures everyone agrees what the person in charge should accomplish.
Here’s a basic list to start with, but you know your household and family dynamic best. Feel free to start from here and customize as needed. The food director each week should:
Decide what you are serving for the next 7 days of dinners (leftovers and double batches are fine, but food preferences/dietary restrictions of the whole household must be taken into account)
Evaluate what food items you need for the following week for both planned meals, and other meal items and staples
Make a grocery list
Procure groceries (through in-person or online shopping)
Unload groceries
At mealtimes:
Set the table
Cook dinner
Clear table
Load dishwasher
Wipe down counters
Take out kitchen trash/recycling if needed
Do additional dishes/kitchen cleanup.
If you have kids or other members of the household who can help out, the food director for the week can delegate to them to ease the load, but it’s important that the director is ultimately responsible for monitoring this work and making sure it gets done.
Optional: Do a one-time sharing of tips and information if a partner is taking on a brand-new task. For example, let them know your favorite recipe site, that a certain grocery store stopped carrying a preferred brand, or that there’s a quirk about dishwasher loading. Keep this to basic/essential information. The point of this exercise is for them to fully take on the tasks and do it how they want to, not to mimic exactly how the other adult does it.
Parameters: Mutually decide if you want any additional parameters to the food week, like a grocery budget to stay under, a limit on restaurant meals or prepared foods, or that dinner must be served around certain times, etc.
Sharing with family/kids: Let other household members know whose food week is coming up so they can direct any special grocery or meal requests to that person.
Why you should consider doing this for two rounds, for a total of four weeks. There is likely going to be a learning curve for one or both partners in trying out new tasks. I recommend alternating food weeks twice. The second food week may be a lot easier than the first, and that may give you better insight if this is the right system for your family going forward. And remember, just like my family set our own rules for this experiment, you can too! Try it out, and if problems arise, feel free to change up some of the rules to make this work for you!
Important Note: Once it’s someone’s food week, the other person may not micromanage, tell them what to cook, critique their dishwashing, or oversee in any other way. You may ask the person who is off from food week if they have any special requests from the grocery store, but the food week person must make the overall list.
Thank you so much, Katherine! Readers, I highly recommend you subscribe to The Double Shift!
I also want to hear from you: How do you handle dinner in your household? And how does it make you feel?
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so interesting how many women and commenting they do all of the cooking/shopping/planning and their male partner does the cleaning. I would say while they both take time, the execution piece has a MUCH heavier mental load than doing dishes, which has almost none.
We are also a no kids household and have a split similar to most (I do the planning /shopping/cooking + he cleans). I get so exhausted thinking about what to eat each week and get so frustrated sometimes. However my big issue is my husband does not habe the cooking skills or the food knowledge to do a “good job” (in my book) of doing a week of meals. I get very exasperated and tell him to watch YouTube videos to improve his cooking skills and read cookbooks but it does not help. He also is fine with picking the world’s ugliest head of lettuce at Kroger where I prefer farmers market / Whole Foods. All this to say, I really struggle with relinquishing control and finding an agreed upon minimum standard of execution. Has anyone else solved this conundrum?!