consumption

I came across a series of photos that reminded me of Menzel and D’Aluisio’s book, Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, that looked at how globalization, migration and rising affluence affect the diets of communities around the globe.  See also photo galleries 1, 2, and 3 in Time Magazine.

From photographer, Mark Menjivar, You Are What You Eat is a series of photographs looking at the interiors of refrigerators in homes across the United States. Nothing was added or taken away.

What type of insight do we gain by looking at our refrigerators?

Those scamps at Patrón have come up with the following ad from their ” Some Perfection Is Debatable” campaign:

The following items apparently all represent perfection (debatably):

1. X-Ray Glasses: Dresses, locker rooms, bathroom stalls…the possibilities are limited only by your desire to look at the naked bodies of unconsenting women!

2. PMS Patch: Finally, a treatment for women whose behavior is intolerable because their hormonal levels are closest to men’s.

3. Shopping Harness: Presumably this would prevent shopping for girly stuff like purses and tampons.  Buying video games and flat-screen TVs would be unaffected by the Harness.  (When I pointed this out in class, a student told me “Women shop. Men purchase.”)

4. Silent Clone: At last, a woman who will only engage in sexual and domestic chores, without all of that troublesome talking!

5. Anti-Cuddling Device: Because after a rigorous, masculine bout of penile-vaginal intercourse, the last thing you want to do is something as gay as cuddling, am I right?

In addition to the obvious points the ad attempts to make about the inferiority of the feminine, it might be useful in a discussion about the smirking, elbow-in-the-ribs assumptions that are often a part of the enforcement of masculinity.

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.

Nate Silver, over at FiveThirtyEight.com, points out that whereas sales of beer have generally been relatively unaffected by economic conditions, the current financial situation led to a rather dramatic decrease in beer sales in late 2008:

I don’t have any sociological point here. I just think it’s interesting, and since I thought so, I thought I’d make you look at it too. Nate Silver (who I have a bit of a geek crush on) hazards a few theories (in particular, perhaps people are substituting cheaper beers for more expensive ones, meaning they’re drinking as much or more, but spending less); it’s worth checking his post out.

As I said, absolutely no point to this post other than “Huh. Look at that.”

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.

I spent the last few days in Savannah, Georgia at the winter meeting of Sociologists for Women in Society. I’m from Maine and didn’t travel much in the U.S. as a child. It wasn’t until I was 27 that I ventured south of Washington, D.C. The history of slavery is something that I’ve always wanted to learn more about.

After spending a day at the Civil Rights Museum and touring the historic First African Baptist Church, I was stunned to find these items for sale in nearly every tourist souvenir shop.

These make me uncomfortable. They’re caricatures of Black women without any kind of historical context. Like Gwen in this post, I have less of a hard time with old, historic artifacts (like the antiques pictured below that I found at a flea market). But, I do think they belong in a museum alongside other historic artifacts and information.

But, newly made, currently produced reproductions of Black women slaves, as salt shakers and magnets? How is that alright? To me this is almost as creepy as if they were selling Klu Klux Klan robe magnets. Is it that as a Northerner I’m more uncomfortable around issues of slavery, than, say, a Southerner would be? I feel a similiar way when I see confederate flags outside of their historical context– and there were plenty those for sale in tourist stores as well. I’d love to hear thoughts on this use of racist “history” for marketing and tourism in a city like Savannah that is filled with history of slave trade and segregation.

Thanks to Captain Crab for letting me know about this fun 20-minute video by Annie Leonard called The Story of Stuff.  It it, using animation, she explains how “[f]rom its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad.”  Basically it’s about the externalized costs that allow us to get things for $1.99 at our local big-box store:

Found at The Story of Stuff.

NOTE: As several commenters have pointed out, this video is definitely a simplification–it is, after all, a very brief overview of an extremely complex process. The video still provides a fairly accurate portrayal of some concerns expressed by critics of globalization, despite the simplifications.

One commenter in particular argues that the statistics used in the video are flawed or even entirely made up. I really have no way to judge that one way or the other, not being an expert on this. At the website for The Story of Stuff, there are citations for all of the numbers used, so if you’re really interested in that, you might want to look more fully into where the data came from. Again, I can’t take a real stance here one way or the other because this isn’t my area of expertise; the data might be flawed, but the commenter doesn’t provide other data to contradict it. It might make for an interesting discussion on the use of data and why people with different views on globalization might use different numbers. You take students through it and ask “What’s useful here? What statistics might be inaccurate? Why might they be presented that way? Why is it possible to come up with statistics that say completely different things about the same issue?”

Click here for a discussion of how one Professor uses it in a Rhetoric and Writing class.

Hyundai, like all the other automakers, experienced a sharp drop in sales. According to the Examiner Las Vegas, Hyundai sales are down 40%. In an effort to attract buyers, the company now offers what they call the Assurance Program. Here’s a commercial that explains the program:

It’s a pretty interesting program. A company is basically saying, “If you aren’t buying a new car because you worry that your financial situation is unstable and the economy sucks and it would not be a fiscally responsible decision for you, don’t worry–we’ll let you back out if you really need to.”

This brings up what appears to me to be an economic paradox. On the one hand, for the economy to improve, consumers need to buy things so businesses, factories, and other employers can put people to work. So from that perspective, this program is good: it might give consumers the confidence to go ahead and buy a car. But as an individual, it seems like in an economic downturn it’s probably in your individual interest to cut back on spending and save money in case of job loss–unless you are wealthy enough and have enough savings to really not be concerned about the downturn. From that viewpoint, buying a car, particularly a new one, is probably a poor decision, unless it is absolutely necessary. Even with the Assurance Program, you still have made a number of months’ worth of payments, plus a down payment, and have nothing to show for it.

This might be useful for a discussion of self-interest and the possible conflicts between what is good for the group (and the individual members of it) in the long term and what is best for the individuals in a more immediate sense. Should we, as consumers, reduce our financial risk by saving as much money as we can, limiting consumption and spending as a result? Or should we increase our personal risk by participating in behavior that very well may lead to better conditions, but not immediately, and possibly not for us if we end up with fewer financial reserves to fall back on in case of a job loss? How do you convince people to do something that might be good for the group when it might not appear to be in their self-interest on a personal level? And does it matter that companies are asking individuals to take possible financial risks so the company can make a profit?

On a non-sociological note, holy crap the automakers are desperate.