Welcome to Indulgence Gospel After Dark! We are Virginia Sole-Smith and Corinne Fay.

Today, we’re going to revisit our conversation about Emily Oster, and her evolving views on kids, weight and health.

This episode first aired in November 2024, right after the presidential election. We’re now 8 months into Trump’s second term, and continuing to grapple with how America has slid to the right. So the story of a public health advocate and scholar who is now aligned with conservative media feels incredibly timely—especially because many of you are starting back at school this month, and Emily’s take on school lunches is particularly complex. That said, we also want to hold space for how much Emily’s work has meant to so many of us (including Virginia!).

This is a complicated conversation. To hear the whole thing, read the full transcript, and join us in the comments, you’ll need to join Extra Butter, our premium subscription tier: http://patreon.com/virginiasolesmith

Extra Butter costs just $99 per year. (Regular paid subscribers, the remaining value of your subscription will be deducted from that total!)

In these monthly episodes we get into the GOOD stuff like:

Dating While Fat

What to do when you miss your smaller body

Is Kids Eat In Color anti-diet?

And did Virginia really get divorced over butter?

Extra Butters also get exclusive weekly chats, DM access, and a monthly bonus essay or thread. And Extra Butter ensures that the Burnt Toast community can always stay an ad- and sponsor-free space—which is crucial for body liberation journalism. Join us here!

(Questions? Glitches? Email me all the details, and cc support@substack.com.)

PS. If Extra Butter isn’t the right tier for you, remember that you still get access behind almost every other paywall with a regular paid subscription.

Episode 206 Transcript

Virginia

I’m just going to say up front, I am nervous about doing this episode. It is a complicated one. People have very strong feelings about Emily Oster. But we are in our Extra Butter safe space, and I am trusting that.

So Corinne. You are coming in somewhat cold to this topic, because you don’t have kids, and Emily is primarily a parenting expert. What do you know about Emily Oster and her work?

Corinne

I know two things about Emily Oster. One is that she wrote a book about parenting or maybe pregnancy? And my main takeaway about that book is that it’s okay for you to drink a small amount of alcohol when you are pregnant. 

Virginia

Yes. This is a gift that Emily has given to the world. Unquestionably.

Corinne

And I basically just know about that from having friends who are pregnant. Then the other thing I know is that she was involved in some COVID controversies. 

Virginia

Uh huh. 

Corinne

The book came out before COVID, and then during COVID she started to become a controversial figure.

Virginia

She actually had two books come out before COVID, Expecting Better, about pregnancy, and then Crib Sheet, which is a parenting book. Expecting Better actually came out in 2013, the same year my first child was born. So it’s 11 years old. She’s been around for a long time!

Corinne

Did you use those books as a pregnant and child-having person?

Virginia

Well, Expecting Better was published on August 20, 2013 and Violet was born on August 18. So I did not use it for that pregnancy. But I did later read a lot of Emily’s work, and in particular the work she was doing around breastfeeding not being the most essential you-have-to-do-it-or-you’re-a-terrible-mother thing. She did a lot of really great research breaking down some of those myths and showing that the benefits of breastfeeding over formula are not as extreme as we’ve been told. All of that was super helpful to me during my own breastfeeding situations. So yes, she’s definitely been a parenting voice on my radar for a long time. 

Emily is also actually from New Haven, Connecticut, as am I. We are around the same age, but I don’t think we knew each other as kids. But we are both ladies from Connecticut. Emily has a PhD in economics from Harvard. She then went on to pursue research in health economics and is a professor of economics at Brown University. She is a mother of two, and her official bio says, “Emily was inspired by her own pregnancy and lack of clear information to guide her decisions. She decided to use her expertise in reviewing and analyzing data to help other parents navigate those topics. She’s a New York Times best-selling author.”

So we are both 40-something moms, originally from Connecticut. I think the other place our work has overlapped is that we both do some of this work of, “here is this mainstream thing you’ve been told that’s actually quite punitive towards mothers, and what if we looked at the data and flipped some of that on its head.” 

The work she did on pregnancy and breastfeeding was super helpful to me. It’s been super helpful to so many of my friends. My younger sister just had her first baby this summer, and she was reading Expecting Better. So I just want to go into this conversation saying I really think all of that work is valuable. 

Then more recently, as you noted, Emily launched ParentData, which started as a Substack newsletter that she sent out during COVID. Now it is its own standalone website. 

And during COVID she started sending out these newsletters that I think a lot of us, as parents, were living and dying by, because she was helping us calculate the risks. And then she started to push for schools to reopen before a lot of people were ready for schools to reopen. There was a lot of controversy around her takes at that point and how she was calculating risks. And in particular, I think, how she was calculating risks for kids from more marginalized backgrounds. It often started to sound more like she was just thinking about, “I want my kids back in school.”

 It was messy. I’m not going to talk a lot about her COVID stuff today, because we have a whole other issue to work through. But I do want to acknowledge that COVID is when a lot of folks started to feel very divisive about Emily. 

I also want to acknowledge right off the top that Emily blurbed Fat Talk and was a big supporter of Fat Talk and of my work. She’s interviewed me on ParentData twice, once before Fat Talk came out, once after. A lot of the early Burnt Toast community came from Emily’s community. So this is all the more reason why we should have this conversation. There are a lot of Emily Oster fans in our community. There are a lot of Emily Oster critics. We’re gonna talk about all of it. 

Corinne

I feel like we should say the reason that people have been asking us to do this episode is because she has recently joined forces with conservative journalist Bari Weiss and they are doing a podcast together. And there was an episode about childhood obesity? Feeding kids? Which a bunch of people have written to you, with questions about. 

Virginia

The new podcast is called Raising Parents with Emily Oster. It is produced in partnership with The Free Press, which is Bari Weiss’s publishing empire.

Do you want to talk to us a little bit about what The Free Press is, and that whole piece of things before we talk about this episode?

Corinne

Sure, yes. The Free Press is a website started by Bari Weiss. Bari Weiss is a journalist. She was hired by The New York Times after Trump was elected in 2016, in an effort to platform conservative voices at The New York Times. 

Virginia

They were trying to both sides it.

Corinne

Yes. And she notoriously quit with a manifesto-y <a href="https://ww