Sociological Images

NPR reports that Beef Products Incorporated, the company that makes “finely textured beef” (a chemically-treated paste made from non-muscle cow parts used as a filler in ground beef), will be closing three of its production plants this month.  Dozens of food manufacturers, grocery store chains, restaurants, and school districts have announced they never did or will no longer use the product.  This after just two months of media coverage and activism around the product, kicked off by an ABC News report on March 7th.

The swiftness and sureness of this victory against this product is a testament to the value of the right language and one good image.  In case you haven’t caught on yet, finely textured beef is better known as ”pink slime.”  Between that nifty pejorative and the image below, which you probably saw, finely textured beef never had a chance.  This is  “mechanically separated chicken” (made with a similar but not identical process); it appears to have become synonymous with pink slime, correctly or no:

This is the power of framing.  The product at issue is not “slime,” it’s cow-part paste.  Of course, it’s not “beef” either, it’s cow-part paste.  Both are discursive frames; it’s a classic “he said, she said” social movement framing battle (along the lines of “life” vs. “choice”).  The outcome of the contest depended, in part, on which language captured the public’s imagination.  And… well… we saw how that went.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

A couple of years ago, Lisa posted about the ubiquity of McDonald’s in the U.S., highlighting a map that showed the distance from the nearest McDonald’s. As a follow-up to that, Data Pointed posted a map that illustrates the unevenness of its market dominance across the country. If we plot the markets dominated by the top 8 hamburger-based chains (in terms of sales), we see that though McDonald’s is the single largest burger chain in most of the U.S. (all the black territory), other chains outsell McDonald’s in many markets, with the Sonic-dominated Southern Plains the most obvious:

In fact, there are relatively few places where McDonald’s has an outright majority of the market share; in most areas, the combined sales of its 7 largest competitors are more than McDonald’s:

This illustrates the importance of the ubiquity shown in the map Lisa originally posted. McDonald’s might like to truly dominate every market; it ideally would probably like to have a monopoly on them. But it doesn’t have to in order to successful and to exert incredible market power. It doesn’t need to control every individual market in order to exert enormous influence on the fast food industry, from setting the standard for labor practices to influencing which varieties of potatoes farmers grow for the french fry market. The “be everywhere” model allows it to win the larger burger chain war, even if it loses some regional market battles.

NASA has posted a series of pairs of satellite images that show a range of changes around the world. They’re great for illustrating human-environment interactions; some of the changes are directly human-caused, while others, while others show the changing consequences of floods and fires as our settlement and agricultural patterns change.

For those of us living in Las Vegas, these images of the shrinking Lake Mead reservoir, which provides water and electricity, is not reassuring. The reservoir has gotten smaller due to multiple factors, including a long-term drought and more water being taken from the Colorado River upstream:

Deforestation in Niger, as land has increasingly been turned over to agriculture:

Here, we see increasing urban growth around Denver International Airport, which now takes up 53 square miles of what used to be farmland:

Algal blooms due to agricultural and household runoff into Lake Atitlan, Guatemala:

Changes to the Sonoran coastline in Mexico due to shrimp farming:

The dramatic shrinking of the Aral Sea, largely due to the amount of water taken out of rivers for irrigation:

The full set of 167 paired images is really striking, and if viewed in the “all images” layout, you can select among various topics, focusing on cities, water, human impacts, and so on.

The word commodification refers to the process by which something that is not bought and sold becomes something that is.  As capitalism has progressed, more and more parts of our lives have become commodified.  Restaurants are the commodification of preparing and cleaning up meals; day care and nannying is the commodification of child raising; nursing homes is the commodification of caring for elders.  We use to grow our own food, make our own clothes, and chop down trees to warm our houses.  Not so much anymore.

We sometimes post instances of commodification that tickle us.  Last year I posted about a company that will now put together and deliver a care package to a child at camp.  A parent just goes to the site, chooses the items they want included, and charge their credit card.  As I wrote in that post: “The ‘care’ in ‘care package’ has been, well, outsourced.”

I was equally tickled by a photograph, taken by sociologist Tristan Bridges (@tristanbphd), of pre-dyed Easter eggs:

This is a delicious example of commodification.  If you don’t have the time or inclination to dye eggs as part of your Easter celebration, the market will do it for you.  No matter that this is one of those things (e.g., a supposedly enjoyable holiday activity that promotes family togetherness) that is supposed to be immune to capitalist imperatives.

While we might raise our eyebrows at this example, newly commodified goods and services often elicit this reaction.  We usually get used to the idea and, later, have a hard time imagining life any other way.

For more on commodification, peruse our tag by that name.

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UPDATE: A commenter and historian named blueowleyes made fair points about my representation of history.  Sheepishly, I’ll add some of them here:

“We use to grow our own food, make our own clothes, and chop down trees to warm our houses.”  When was that time of super-subsistence?  As an historian, I don’t recognise it.  Maybe some people did these things, some of the time, some to a greater degree than others, some only partially, with materials produced elsewhere by others, with the aid of others’ services.  I might suggest that very few people probably ever chopped down their own trees to heat their houses.  To claim that ‘we’ did, is to assume that people needed heat, used wood heating, had access to timbre, lived in houses, didn’t pay or force others to do work they didn’t want to do in some idealized past.  We wouldn’t assume such things about the present, why assume them about the past?  The details matter as much in talking about the past, as they do in talking about the present.

I apologize, blueowleyes, because you’re right of course.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Matthew Yglesias posted an image from an infographic released by the Census Bureau showing differences in the U.S. population between 1940 and 2010. This section of the graphic focuses on changes in the industries in which the U.S. workforce is employed. For instance, in 1940 23.4% of Americans worked in manufacturing, down to 10.4% in 2010:

Education, health, and social services have emerged as a major employment sector. On the other hand, while agriculture is a minor  sector today (in terms of % of people employed), in 1940 nearly 1 in 5 people worked in agriculture. As Yglesias says,

…this drives home the fact that the initial exclusion of agricultural workers from Social Security [as part of the New Deal in the 1930s] was a really major compromise.

We’ve had a number of submissions of examples of gendering food, so I thought I’d post a few that illustrate connections between food and masculinity. Edd T. saw this commercial from New Zealand that presents wine as an insufficiently manly drink which all men should reject as a matter of course:

Even beer isn’t without risk, though; a man must choose carefully. Roger B. sent in several Miller Lite commercials that connect masculinity to drinking the right beer. Men in these ads are ridiculed for wearing tight jeans and singing the wrong songs at karaoke:

As Roger points out, “the female bartender is implied to have a masculinity that the man in the commercial doesn’t possess (due to her knowledge of beer and, presumably, her policing of masculinity), and…this is treated as part of the joke (as if a woman possessing more masculine traits were inherently absurd).”

So what can men eat and drink? Well, apparently fried chicken is so masculine it can even compensate for a pink sweater, according to this Australian KFC ad sent in by Katrin:

And anything that includes lots and lots and lots of food is inherently for men. Tyler R. saw a notice for a buffet on a BC Ferries vessel that travels between Victoria and Vancouver, British Columbia. Women apparently need to know about the ingredients and dishes. Men just need to know food is available, in unlimited quantities:

David M. sent in a sign advertising food at Crema Cafe, in Stirling, Scotland that similarly associates extremely large portions with men. Indeed, their breakfasts are “probably too big for girls!!”

Last week I posted about the stereotype that Black people love watermelons, explaining that it originated with efforts to justify slavery.  Black people were simple, slavery proponents argued, so a delicious watermelon was enough to make them happy.

This stereotype, long past its strategic usefulness, nonetheless persists.  Barack Obama’s election to the U.S. presidency, for example, inspired a rash of watermelon-themed commentary, including this one:

(source)

In light of this history, as well as the ongoing racism, the product below — a Valentine’s Day candy that pairs two Disney princesses — is rather, let’s say, insensitive.  The White Cinderella Aurora character decorates the vanilla flavored side; the Black Tiana character decorates the watermelon flavored side.  Just… wow.

Thanks to Caroline H. for forwarding this along.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.