Food is at the center of national debates about how Americans live and the future of the planet. Not everyone agrees about how to reform our relationship to food, but one suggestion rises above the din: We need to get back in the kitchen. Amid concerns about rising rates of obesity and diabetes, unpronounceable ingredients, and the environmental footprint of industrial agriculture, food reformers implore parents to slow down, cook from scratch, and gather around the dinner table. Making food a priority, they argue, will lead to happier and healthier families. But is it really that simple? In this riveting and beautifully-written book, Sarah Bowen, Joslyn Brenton, and Sinikka Elliott take us into the kitchens of nine women to tell the complicated story of what it takes to feed a family today. All of these mothers love their children and want them to eat well. But their kitchens are not equal. From cockroach infestations and stretched budgets to picky eaters and conflicting nutrition advice, Pressure Cooker exposes how modern families struggle to confront high expectations and deep-seated inequalities around getting food on the table.Based on extensive interviews and field research in the homes and kitchens of a diverse group of American families, Pressure Cooker challenges the logic of the most popular foodie mantras of our time, showing how they miss the mark and up the ante for parents and children. Romantic images of family meals are inviting, but they create a fiction that does little to fix the problems with the food system. The unforgettable stories in this book evocatively illustrate how class inequality, racism, sexism, and xenophobia converge at the dinner table. If we want a food system that is fair, equitable, and nourishing, we must look outside the kitchen for answers.
‘We can solve our problems’
"Searching for "Einstein" and "level of thinking" rather than "same level of thinking" turns up a much earlier example from The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, Volumes 1-4, which is dated 1969 by google books though these snippets show it contains pieces from 1969 and 1970. The quote, on p. 124, is "The world that we have made as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far creates problems that we cannot solve at the same level as the level we created them at." It's prefaced by "Einstein said an interesting thing", and the same phrase and quote appears in a 1974 book by Ram Dass (who needs his own wikiquote page!), The Only Dance There Is... so presumably the one in The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology is the same piece by Ram Dass.
Also, the next two earliest versions I find on google books (searching for "Einstein" and "level of thinking" on an advanced search with date range 1900-1979) use wording nearly identical to the version given by Ram Dass... The supposed Einstein quote from Skeptic reads "the world we have made as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far creates problems that we cannot solve at the level of thinking at which we created them", and the one from New Age reads "the world that we have made, as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far, creates problems that we cannot solve at the same level we created them", both identical to Ram Dass' quote in the first part and very close in the second part.
Instead of fixating on the perfect solution, focus your attention on the good and great ones. The right solution will address as many aspects of the original problem as possible while also being the easiest overall to implement. This will likely mean that there will be some compromise. Accept that problem solving is a never-ending cycle. Your solution will inevitably introduce new problems or fail to address some aspects of the issue fully. Do not consider these perceived shortcomings as failures. On the contrary, they are expected side effects of the process. Remember, the perfect solution is usually unattainable.
That means shareholders are often less interested in how individual companies perform than in how companies as a whole behave around the world. How BT performs against Vodafone, for example, matters less to investors than how industry in general is adapting to universal, global risks such as climate change, pandemics, social and political unrest. In its recent letter to clients, Blackrock notes that it is now reporting the proportion of its assets under management that are aligned with net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. Investors want business to solve, not exacerbate, problems.
Businesses cannot solve global problems on their own but nor too can governments. If either or both fail to recognize this then a combination of demagogues, political activists and regulators will rush in to fill the vacuum that capitalism and democracy have left behind.
I have bumped my head many times. But if you focus on one question for long enough, then eventually an answer will start to come to you. Here is the beginning of the answer that has come to me: If we want to be able to solve our toughest problems peacefully, then we have to become bilingual. We have to learn to speak two languages that are not translatable one into the other. We have to learn to speak the language of power and the language of love.
We need to learn to be bicephal, to be bilingual. We need to learn to speak both the language of power and the language of love. Power and love are not the same, but nor are they opposed to one another. Like our masculine and feminine natures, like our left and right hemispheres, they exist in different domains; they complement and complete each other. If we can become more bilingual, then we will become more able to solve our toughest problems peacefully.
Adam Kahane (kahane@reospartners.com) is the author of Solving Tough Problems: An OpenWay of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities. As a partner in Generon Reos LLC (www.reospartners.com), he is a designer and facilitator of processes through which business, government, and civil society leaders can come together to solve their toughest problems. During the early 1990s, Adam was head of social, political, economic, and technological scenarios for Royal Dutch/Shell in London.
In his book, Solving Tough Problems: An OpenWay of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities (Berrett-Koehler, 2007), Adam offers 10 suggestions for beginning to solve tough problems in partnership with others:
There are a number of barriers that prevent us from solving our social problems or that at least slow us down in making progress toward solving our social problems. At the same time, possibilities for solving our social problems are available. In this chapter I point out these barriers and possibilities so that you can become more aware of a number of the key factors that influence the solving of social problems. Note that our discussion of these barriers and possibilities might not, and probably does not, exhaust all of the factors that influence the solving of social problems. However, many sociologists would probably agree that these are key factors in solving ... 2ff7e9595c
Comments