Citings and Sightings

The Globe and Mail has published an interview with two University of Toronto sociologists who have written a new book on “foodies.” According to the article:

As the authors explain in their new book Foodies: Democracy and Distinction in the Gourmet Foodscape, for which they interviewed 30 people and analyzed hundreds of articles, today’s foodies might find classic French haute cuisine stuffy. They may be willing to try goat testicles and sheep brains. And they’ll happily visit the city’s best hole-in-the-wall eateries, no matter how dumpy the decor. But one thing foodies flat-out refuse to eat is dinner at a mundane, generic chain restaurant.

Sociologists Josée Johnston and Shyon Baumann argue that being a foodie isn’t just about consuming good food, it’s also about garnering cultural capital. Says Johnston:

A lot of elements of foodie culture are still relatively exclusive, and part of what foodie culture is about is dabbling in all sorts of different ethnic cuisines and food traditions. What makes that a kind of privilege is to have the kind of knowledge to go to all of these kinds of places [whether it’s a fancy restaurant or hole-in-the-wall eatery], so you’re not just familiar with one type of ethnic cuisine, you’re familiar with the whole range of them. And that can end up constituting a kind of cultural capital people use to display their sophistication.

However, this may entail ignoring inequalities. Says Baumann:

…if you’re going to be a foodie and value authentic and exotic cuisine, it’s going to lead you to places of poverty, to contexts of impoverished food production and consumption. Through romanticizing those conditions of poverty, you can get the good food without having to dwell on the uncomfortable fact of poverty.

The authors also noticed gender differences among foodies:

Johnston: One thing that was surprising to me was the different ways that men and women embody their foodie culture. Men often emphasize their expertise more, and they’re often much more interested in the exoticism, especially eating things that are wildly unconventional, like goat testicles. And women didn’t do that as much. They talked more about how their interest in food was also about protecting the health of their family.

The Philadelphia Inquirer recently examined Americans’ tendency to turn on the poorest members of their society during hard economic times:

Last month, Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer of South Carolina said that when the government helps the poor, it’s like people feeding stray animals that continually “breed.”

And just last week, Colorado state legislator Spencer Swalm said poor people in single-family homes are “dysfunctional.”

Both statements riled some Americans from the Piedmont to the Rockies and underscored a widely held belief: In tough times, people are tough on the poor.

It’s not just politicians playing the blame game, either:

In an April 2009 poll by the Pew Research Center in Washington, 72 percent agreed with the statement that “poor people have become too dependent on government assistance programs.” That’s up from 69 percent in 2007.

“The economic downturn has made the middle class less generous toward others,” said Guy Molyneux, a partner at Hart Research Associates, a Washington firm that researches attitudes toward the poor. “People are less supportive of the government helping the poor, because they feel they’re not getting enough help themselves.

The Inquirer also featured sociological commentary on the phenomenon:

Matt Wray, a sociologist at Temple University, agreed: “Hatred of the poor is fueled by the middle class’s fear of falling during hard times.”

Americans don’t understand how the poor are victimized by a lack of jobs, inefficient schools, and unsafe neighborhoods, experts say.

“People ignore the structural issues – jobs leaving, industry becoming more mechanized,” said Yale sociologist Elijah Anderson, renowned for his study of the Philadelphia poor. “Then they point to the poor and ask, ‘Why aren’t you making it?’

According to the Jamaica Gleaner, University of West Indies sociologist Claudette Crawford-Brown has identified a new phenomenon: Western Union children.  She said this is replacing “barrel children” in Jamaica:

Barrel children in the past were identified as those who did not have the physical presence of their parents, but were sent goodies through shipments from overseas.  The sociologist, however, said that the barrel-children phenomenon has been surpassed by parents who give their children remittances. The difference between the two is the amount of care involved.

“You don’t have the barrel children as I highlighted seven years ago, where you had parents sending children things in a barrel. We now have what you call ‘Western Union’ children, and these are children who are parented by cellphones and they are sent the money. However, when you have a barrel child, that mother goes into K-Mart or Wal-Mart and I see them and watch them and they say: ‘I wonder if this going fit Sasha’, and she takes out the shoes with the mark out on the paper and match it with the shoes, and say this will fit her, this will fit her. You know what that shows? Some amount of care,” she said.

There are consequences of these changes in long-distance care:

Crawford-Brown pointed out even with remittances and barrels, the absence of mother in a child’s life has the same impact on youths as the absence of fathers. She noted that the absence of parental guidance leaves these children vulnerable to negative influences, where many turn to violence and drugs to cope.

According to her, many of these children who receive money through remittances are not given proper guidance, thus the money they have access to can be used to purchase drugs or facilitate their participation in illicit activities.

The noted child advocate and sociologist said many behavioural problems shown among some children are as a result of the breakdown in the family and exposure to violence. Crawford-Brown also said that Jamaica needs to tackle apathy towards murder in the society, which has trickled down to children she has worked with.

Crawford-Brown’s research on “Western Union children” was also recently featured in a column in the Jamaica Observer.

While drawing comparisons between Hurricane Katrina and the recent earthquake in Haiti may be tempting, sociologist Kathleen Tierney tells CNN why doing so is not such a good idea.

Like Katrina, the earthquake has produced effects of catastrophic proportions. Both events rank among the largest catastrophes ever experienced in the Western Hemisphere.

They both have resulted in large loss of life and immense human suffering and make the coordination of emergency resources extremely difficult. Ordinary citizens are left to fend for themselves in the wreckage. And as we saw in Katrina and see now in Haiti, residents of disaster-stricken areas are the true first responders.

The aftermath of such catastrophes brings more prolonged suffering and massive recovery challenges. People pay attention as the media cover them, but they turn their attention elsewhere when the cameras leave, even though many of the real challenges that victims and affected regions face emerge later. Like the Gulf region, Haiti will struggle for years and perhaps decades to rebuild and recover.

But there, the comparisons end.

The contrasts have much to do with the events’ impacts on a national versus regional scale.

Katrina did not flatten our nation’s capital or prevent national leaders from communicating with one another. Impacts were catastrophic in areas where Katrina struck, creating significant logistics problems, but the infrastructure of the rest of the nation was untouched. Also important, it was possible to issue warnings for Katrina, which enabled the vast majority of those who were at risk to evacuate to safety. The victims of the earthquake had no such warning.

In contrast, the earthquake in Haiti destroyed much of its capital, Port-au-Prince, and affected approximately one-third of the population of the entire country. The proportion of the nation’s population that has been killed, injured or left homeless is enormous. The facilities that could have assisted victims, such as hospitals, clinics and the UN headquarters for the nation, were destroyed or are not operational. Aftershocks, which will continue for weeks, months and perhaps even years, will do additional damage and further compound both rescue and relief efforts.

In addition, both disasters affected the poor and vulnerable, but again scale comes into play:

On almost all indicators of well-being — health, education, literacy, income — Haiti ranks very low. The nation has a long history of rule by dictators, political coups and savage violence. The capacity of Haiti’s series of governments to provide services to its people has been abysmal for most of its history.

In many ways, residents of Haiti faced a daily disaster even before the earthquake. These differences matter, and they should be kept in mind by those seeking to see parallels between the two catastrophes.

The Los Angeles Times reports on the importance of the middle class for the city’s future, with special emphasis on middle class Latinos:

With this year’s census likely to show a Latino majority in both the city and county of Los Angeles, it’s obvious that our collective future is linked to the social health of that group of people. And if you think of Latinos only in the dysfunctional terms described in so many media reports, then a Third World L.A. seems like an inevitability.

While the experiences of poor and working-class Latino immigrants are often the focus of scholars and the media, other immigrants may go unnoticed:

You might not think about L.A.’s Latino middle class much. But USC sociologist Jody Agius Vallejo has eschewed more exotic topics to investigate its middling peculiarities.

Agius Vallejo’s research looks at the “pathways to success” that allow even people of humble immigrant origins to reach middle-class status. Her work rebuts the widespread perception that Mexican immigrants and their offspring are following what she calls a “trajectory of downward mobility into a permanent underclass.”

More on Agius Vallejo’s research:

Agius Vallejo interviewed 80 subjects who possessed at least three of these four characteristics: college educations, higher than average income, white-collar jobs and home ownership. Seventy percent of the people in her sample grew up in “disadvantaged” communities. Their parents had, on average, a sixth-grade education.

The members of this arriviste Mexican middle class might look like their white counterparts on paper, Agius Vallejo said. But in other ways they are different. Among other things, they have stronger social ties to poorer relatives.

Another of Agius Vallejo’s subjects is a lawyer who has recently visited jail (to bail out a cousin) and the social-security office (to help an uncle). Relatives turn to the lawyer in times of need because “she’s the one in the family with knowledge,” Agius Vallejo said. “She’s the one who’s made it to the middle class.”

Each person who achieves social mobility improves the overall well-being of the community. Social climbers show others behind them the way forward. “The future of the city really hinges on the mobility of immigrants,” Agius Vallejo told me.

The importance of the immigrant middle class extends beyond the city of Los Angeles, though:

A healthy middle class with Latin American roots is critical to the entire country’s future too. That’s what another USC professor, Dowell Myers, argues in his book “Immigrants and Boomers: Forging a New Social Contract for the Future of America.”

Myers, a demographer, says our aging country needs to invest in its younger, immigrant communities as an act of self-preservation. Immigrants’ incomes and rates of homeownership rise the longer they stay in this country, he writes, and provide potential members of the taxpaying middle class that will fund the retirement of the boomer generation.

A recent piece in the New York Times challenges the conventional wisdom that bad economic times are a hotbed for criminal activity:

[New York] Police Department statistics show that the number of major crimes is continuing to fall this year in nearly every category, upending the common wisdom that hard times bring more crime.

“The idea that everyone has ingrained into them — that as the economy goes south, crime has to get worse — is wrong,” said David M. Kennedy, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “It was never right to begin with.”

To make sense of this, let’s call in the sociologists….

Experts have long studied how shifts in crime might be attributed to economic indicators like consumer confidence, unemployment or a faltering housing market, particularly when it comes to property crime, burglary and robbery. The findings have been “rather equivocal,” said Steven F. Messner, a sociology professor at the State University of New York at Albany who has studied homicides in New York City.

While there is generally thought to be a lag between changing economic conditions and new crime patterns, he said, it is curious that there has been no pronounced jump in street crimes associated with the most recent recession, which took root last year.

“But it could take a while to work its way through the system and into people’s psychology,” he said. “I would say the jury is still out on the impact of this most recent economic collapse.”

Jesenia Pizarro, a criminologist at Michigan State, said that crime is indirectly related to the economy:

Most crime is committed by the poor and uneducated, she said, and a bad economy can aggravate poverty in ways that are not obvious.  “The bad economy leads to social processes that are then more directly related to crime,” she said, citing “less services for youth and young people who are less occupied and don’t have the guardianship they need” or cuts in education “that can lead to crime.”

Sociologists predict that half of all U.S. children will be on food stamps at some point in their childhood, according to the
Philadelphia Inquirer.

In a stark and surprising finding, about half the children in the United States will be on food stamps at some point during their childhood, a new study of 29 years of data shows.

One in three white children and 90 percent of all black children – ages 1 through 20 – will use the program, according to the research, published this month in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

“This means Americans’ economic distress is much higher than we had ever realized,” said Thomas A. Hirschl, a sociology professor at Cornell University and a coauthor of the study with Mark R. Rank, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis.

The survey finds that continued food-stamp usage signifies a kind of poverty that is “a threat to the overall health and well-being of American children, and, as such, represents a significant challenge to pediatricians in their daily practice.”

Although the data used in this study ends in 1997, and thus does not account for the current recession, these findings seem to correspond with a report published Monday by the U.S. Department of Agriculture:

The persistent poverty described in the survey dovetails with the findings of a U.S. Department of Agriculture study released Monday. It determined that 49 million Americans – 17 million of them children – were unable to consistently get enough food to eat in 2008. Nearly 15 percent of households were having trouble finding food, the highest number recorded since the agency began measuring hunger in 1995.

The study’s authors note that kids are often overlooked in U.S. social programs:

“The number-one poverty program in the United States is Social Security,” Hirschl said. “There is no such system for children.”

But how trustworthy is the prediction that 50% of all U.S. kids will use food stamps at some point in their childhood?

Because there was so much data, the authors were able to use a very long window of observation, which helped them extrapolate into the future about food-stamp usage, said John Iceland, a sociology professor at Pennsylvania State University. Iceland, who is familiar with the methodology used in the Hirschl-Rank paper, described it as “very solid work.”

“It’s like determining the likelihood of developing heart disease from health data,” Rank said.

The Michigan study is well-known and widely used by social scientists, and it has proven to be accurate over the years, Iceland said.

The finding that 50 percent of children will be on food stamps in their lifetime is conservative, Hirschl said.

That’s because only about 60 percent of households eligible for food stamps actually get them, a finding backed up by the newly released Department of Agriculture study. Stigma and ignorance of the program hold people back, he said.

The Boston Globe also picked up on Devah Pager and colleagues’ findings about the persistence of racial discrimination in hiring:

The study was run by sociologists at Princeton who recruited and trained white, black, and Latino “well-spoken, clean-cut young men” to apply for real entry-level jobs throughout New York City with fictitious, but essentially identical, resumes. The results were stark: “Blacks were only half as likely to receive a callback or job offer relative to equally qualified whites; moreover, black and Latino applicants with clean backgrounds fared no better than a white applicant just released from prison.” Even worse, the minority candidates were often channeled to positions inferior to those advertised, while the white candidates were often channeled to superior positions.

Sociologists have found that it’s not just individuals who pay a high price for payday lending practices. Whole neighborhoods pay, too, in more than just monetary ways.

As reported by Reuters:

As Congress debates financial regulatory reform and the Obama Administration advocates for greater consumer financial protection, a new study finds a need for Congressional action on fringe banking practices used heavily by financially vulnerable families. The study released today details the toll on communities with a high concentration of payday lending business and finds a clear association between the presence of payday lenders and neighborhood crime rates. The study recommends that Congress take action to cap payday lender interest rates at 36 percent, enacting for the entire country protections Congress put in place for U.S. military families.  The new study, entitled “Does Fringe Banking ExacerbateNeighborhood Crime Rates? Social Disorganization and the Ecology of PaydayLending,” was conducted by The George Washington University professors Charis E. Kubrin and Gregory D. Squires, along with Dr. Steven M. Graves of California State University, Northridge.

Further…

These broader community costs include higher rates of violent crime.  The study found that the association between payday lending and violent crime remains statistically significant even after a range of factors traditionally associated with crime are controlled for statistically.

The sociological commentary…

“As a criminologist, I can attest to the fact that there is woefully limited research on the impact of the behavior of financial institutions on neighborhood crime.  As our research demonstrates, these connections can no longer be ignored by criminologists and law enforcement officials across the country,” said Charis Kubrin.