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Food & Water Watch has an interesting interactive map that allows you to click on states and see how many factory farms it has per county, broken down into cattle (meaning beef, I assume), hogs, dairy, broilers, and layers (the last two are both chickens). You can look at number of facilities or number of animals. Here’s a screenshot of the number of cattle containment facilities in the U.S.:

Factory farms were identified using Census of Agriculture data and counting those that “best match the Environmental Protection Agency’s definition for a confined animal feeding operation…” based on the following guidelines:

There’s a very detailed description of the methodology available here and an explanation of the maps here.

Elizabeth C. sent in an English and Spanish version of a pamphlet for pregnant women from Kaiser. Here they are:

Translation (by member blogger Jeffrey):

A healthy pregnancy and care of your baby

You are going to have a baby!

We want to help you with your pregnancy, and therefore we invite you to the following classes:

1) Series of prenatal information. Information about labor, birth, and care for your baby, breast feeding, taking care of you after labor, and your recovery.

2) Take a look at the hospital.  Make an appointment with us to see the facilities. Please register for these classes by the fourth month of your pregnancy.

3) Tubal sterilization. Includes all that you need to know if you do not want to have more children. Take this course by the fifth or sixth month of your pregnancy.

Notice the difference?

The English version of this pamphlet lists a series of options for pregnant women (“our classes include”), including Lamaze classes and classes on tubal sterilization.

The Spanish version says here are the three things we’d like you to do (“we invite you to”): prenatal info, hospital tour, and tubal sterilization.

In sociology, we call this targeted anti-natalism. Targeted anti-natalism is an effort to reduce the reproduction of certain populations and not others.

UPDATE! Socorro Serrano, representing Kaiser, posted a reply in our comments thread:

Greetings everyone: The initial posting on this topic is incorrect. Any suggestion that there was an intention to coerce Spanish-speaking women to take a tubal sterilization class is patently not true.

As bloggers Elena, Jaya, and Nora Ann have pointed out – This class is listed on both the English and Spanish flyers. And whether we say in English “Our classes include,” or in Spanish “le invitamos a las siguientes clases (we invite you to the following classes),” our goal is to provide information for a “Healthy Pregnancy & Baby Care,” or “Un embarazo saludable y cuidado del bebé.”

Also, please note that the hospital tour and free English and Spanish-language classes cover the same curriculum, including childbirth preparation (parto) and breast-feeding (lactancia materna). There has been no interest from Spanish-dominant parents for Lamaze classes, but if this changes, we would be happy to add this to our schedule of offerings.

Providing health care to our members in the language they prefer and in a manner that is respectful and culturally responsive is a core value for Kaiser Permanente. That is why your input and that of the communities we serve is so very important to us.

I was recently at the grocery store with my boyfriend when he noticed that Tropicana orange juice (owned by Pepsi) had a new look. Here’s an image of the new carton, found at the NYT:

Burk hated the new design. Loathed. Expressed his horror at length. He thought it was ugly and looked like a generic orange juice brand. I agreed that it looked a little generic but didn’t have a lot of other thoughts about it. It didn’t have any impact on our shopping patterns regardless, since neither of us drink orange juice (but give me some Tang and I’m a happy, happy girl; my great-grandma used to make a simple powdered-sugar frosting and added Tang mix to it so it was Tang-flavored, so I have very happy memories of Tang. Excellent on yellow or lemon cake. Pink lemonade mix works too.).

Anyway, it turns out lots of people shared Burk’s reaction–they absolutely hated the new carton. And they cared enough to actually contact the company and complain. As a result of all the complaints, Tropicana will be going back to the original design:

What struck me about this was two things: First, the power of consumers. When we think about the food system (or clothing, or whatever), clearly meatpackers, grocery stores, big-box retailers like Wal-Mart, etc., have tremendous power, and consumers often feel powerless to affect a system that may not bring them the type or quality of food products they prefer to feed their families. And yet moments like this indicate that consumers can force companies to change. We saw something similar in the late 1990s: when lots of people got on the South Beach and Atkins diet, many restaurants started adding low-carb options to their menus to avoid losing customers (Subway particularly jumped on this bandwagon). If enough consumers make it clear that they will stop purchasing a company’s products, they can make those companies change. We aren’t powerful individually–Tropicana wouldn’t have cared if just I wrote in about a concern–but we can be powerful collectively.

The second thing that struck me, though, is what we get upset enough about to actually contact companies and demand change. Out of all the problems with our modern food system–the health of the food we buy, environmental impacts of production practices, conditions of agricultural workers, food contamination, etc.–most of the time we really don’t demand that companies do anything about it (unless there’s a crisis like the peanut butter contamination issue*). As a foodie, it’s a little depressing to think that people in general may be more concerned about the design of their orange juice carton than in thinking about what’s inside the carton.

* For you “Battlestar Galactica” fans: last night I had a very involved dream in which I realized that the peanut butter contamination problem had been a cylon plot to kill us.

Fellow Contexts blogger Flaneuse over at Graphic Sociology posted this map showing increases in milk production by region:

As we see, overall production has been more or less stable in most regions but has increased dramatically in the Pacific and Mountain regions.

This data hides another pattern, however: changes in average dairy herd size. Dairy operations in the West and Pacific regions tend to be significantly larger than dairy farms in the more traditional dairy states in the Great Lakes region and the Northeast. I went to the 2007 Census of Agriculture site and grabbed some data to do a few quick calculations. I chose two states in the western U.S. and two in the traditional Dairy Belt, just for illustrative purposes:

All calculations use data available in Table 17 in the Census reports for the total U.S. and each individual state, which you can easily access at the link above if you want to check my numbers. I rounded everything off to the next highest whole number except for the two percentages in the lower right-hand cells, where doing so would greatly over-represent the percent of farms of that size.

In general, dairy farms with more than 500 milking cows are considered very large in the industry. Those with over 2500 cows are really extremely large, though there are dairies with more than 10,000 milking cows (including the Vander Eyk dairy, which supplies organic milk to be sold under the Horizon brand, as well as conventional, non-organic milk to other companies). But I digress.

Anyway, clearly we see that farms in California and Idaho (and the other Pacific/Mountain states) are larger, on average, than dairy farms in the traditional dairy states. The increase in milk production in the western U.S. is due predominantly to increases in the number (and herd sizes) of very large industrial dairies.

The growth of these large dairies depends on very cheap rates for water used to irrigate agricultural land. Those dairies have to grow lots of alfalfa and other feed crops to feed so many cows, since they certainly can’t afford enough land to have thousands of cows on pasture. And big dairies produce enormous amounts of manure that have to be carted off somewhere each day, meaning they often have big manure lagoons where they store it (as well as spraying as much as possible on fields). The lagoons are lovely, if you haven’t ever been really close to one, or perhaps nearly fallen into one while conducting research for your thesis. Not that I know anyone who has had such an experience. Point being, the competitive success of large western dairies is dependent on favorable political conditions (such as decisions to keep agricultural water rates lower than other water usage rates), and they have significant environmental consequences when we consider the use of water for irrigation in states that are often relatively arid and potential pollution from manure runoff.

I have some issues with Flaneuse’s implication that the growth of western dairies is a fairly natural result of population growth because milk is a localized commodity. I don’t know that you can really call milk a localized product these days–California milk is for sale in every state, and CA has aggressively marketed the state’s dairy industry with their “Happy cows” campaign. I can also buy milk from dairies in Minnesota here in Vegas, if I look a bit. So while I’m sure population growth has a role, I think it’s important to look at the political factors–particularly environmental laws as they apply to agriculture and local opposition to large dairies–that encourage the growth of huge industrial dairies in some regions more than others.

Also keep in mind, the production of milk when measured in pounds doesn’t just indicate there are more dairies or more dairy cows…it can also be the result of getting more pounds of milk per year per cow through the use of technologies such as bovine growth hormone (rBGH). I’m not up on rates of use of rBGH by region right at the moment, but I do know its use is nearly universal in industrial dairies; if smaller dairies in the midwest are less likely to use rBGH for various reasons (including concerns about customer opposition), that would also have an impact on where milk production is increasing most rapidly.

That was a lot of rambling to have just added one little image to what was in the original post at Graphic Sociology, but soc of ag is my specialty area and I geek out about it sometimes. You have no idea how much I reined myself in to tell you just this much about the dairy industry!

[Note: If you’re really super interested in this and don’t mind reading academic articles, I suggest an article by Jess Gilbert and Raymond Akor (1988) “Increasing Structural Divergence in U.S. Dairying: California and Wisconsin since 1950,” Rural Sociology 53(1): 56-72. They lay out some of the effects of politics, water subsidies, technological change, etc., and how they’ve favored a particular type of dairy system in the West. Also check out the Program on Agricultural Technology Studies at the University of Wisconsin, which has links to lots of easy-to-understand reports about trends in the dairy industry.]

In a comment to Lisa’s post on being a dog or cat person, a. brown pointed out Alpo’s new Get that Dog Some Alpo campaign, in which dogs who enjoy stereotypically high-maintenance feminine activities (pedicures, massages, fancy food, expensive accessories) need to be turned back into “real,” authentic dogs by eating meat, in the form of Alpo. I’ll leave comments about whether or not Alpo has what can realistically be defined as meat in it to others. Here are some screenshots from the site. Notice the language is always “he” or “his” if a gender is specified:

Here are two questions from a quiz you can take to find out if your dog is a Fido or a Fifi:

I’ll just say, for the record, there’s no way that a vegan doggie spa just let someone in to feed Alpo to customers’ dogs without their permission. Absolutely and entirely no way. Their customers would freak out. Also, they would have a horrid, horrid mess to clean up about a half hour later.

What I find interesting here is the association between masculinity and authenticity, while femininity is associated with the upper class, superficiality, and high-maintenance luxury. So “real” dogs like sports and sex (and meat), while dogs who are pampered are somehow less authentic dogs (and presumably don’t care about sex or sports).

And I don’t know where my dogs fit in! They aren’t super-pampered, so at first I thought they’re “real dogs,” but then I realized they’re both neutered, so they don’t care about sex. Are they Fifis or Fidos? [Note: I went through and randomly selected answers in the quiz without even reading the questions and the response was that my dogs are “Vegas” dogs; given that’s where we live, I guess it’ll do.]

Anyway, you might use this to talk about the associations between a certain working-class masculinity and authenticity, in opposition to the way femininity is often connected to artifice and fakeness.

Thanks for the tip, a. brown!

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

Hortense at Jezebel writes:

The ad depicts a horde of completely insane women, screaming with excitement… if, as the ad claims, these packs are “goodies for grown-ups,” then why are women the only ones going crazy over the cookies in this ad? The men in this ad react to the woman with a mix of “WTF” and “oh my god, you’re crazy” which only serves to make the women look even more pathetic and ridiculous.

This commercial tells a similar story: women totally lose it in the face of low calorie sweets.

NEW (Nov. ’09)! And, of course, there is holiday shopping (found at Ad Freak):

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wer7b29mreA[/youtube]

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

In agriculture, monoculture is the practice of relying extensively on one crop with little biodiversity.  In the 1840s, a famine in Ireland was caused by a disease that hit potatoes, the crop on which Irish people largely relied.  At Understanding Evolution, an article reads:

The Irish potato clones were certainly low on genetic variation, so when the environment changed and a potato disease swept through the country in the 1840s, the potatoes (and the people who depended upon them) were devastated.

The article includes this illustration of how monocultures are vulnerable:

The Irish potato famine reveals how choices about how to feed populations, combined with biological realities, can have dramatic impacts on the world.  In the three years that the famine lasted, one out of every eight Irish people died of starvation.  Nearly a million emigrated to the United States, only to face poverty and discrimination, in part because of their large numbers.

The article continues:

Despite the warnings of evolution and history, much agriculture continues to depend on genetically uniform crops. The widespread planting of a single corn variety contributed to the loss of over a billion dollars worth of corn in 1970, when the U.S. crop was overwhelmed by a fungus. And in the 1980s, dependence upon a single type of grapevine root forced California grape growers to replant approximately two million acres of vines when a new race of the pest insect, grape phylloxera (Daktulosphaira vitifoliae, shown at right) attacked in the 1980s.

Gwen adds: The Irish potato famine is also an example of a reality about famines that we rarely discuss. In most famines there is food available in the country, but the government or local elites do not believe that those who are starving have any claim to that food. In the years of the Irish potato famine, British landowners continued to export wheat out of Ireland. The wheat crop wasn’t affected by the potato blight. But wheat was a commercial crop the British grew for profit. Potatoes were for Irish peasants to eat. We might think it would be obvious that when people are starving you’d make other food sources available to them, but that’s not what happened. In the social hierarchy of the time, many British elites didn’t believe that starving Irish people had a claim to their cash crop, and so they continued to ship wheat out of the country to other nations even while millions were dying or emigrating. Similarly, in the Ethiopian famines of the 1980s, the country wasn’t devoid of food; it’s just that poor rural people weren’t seen as having a right to food, and so available food was not redistributed to them. Many people in the country ate just fine while their fellow citizens starved.

So famine is often as much about politics and social hierarchies as it is about biology.

Christoph B. sent in these Goldstar Beer ads, found at BuzzFeed, that show the differences between men and women:

I know that I, for one, immediately start thinking about marriage every time I meet a guy. My new male neighbor waved at me the other day, and I ran out and bought a wedding dress, just in case.

The other thing here is the assumption that a) the viewer is definitely a man and b) of the two options, the “man’s” life is always preferable. I suppose in the second two ads that might be reasonable–although I never experience all that many problems using public restrooms, but whatever–but why is it automatically better to have sex with no emotional attachments or expectations of ever interacting again? I doubt that all men enjoy such encounters, any more than all women are thinking of marriage every time they have sex with someone.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.