food/agriculture

Jeff H. sent in a link to a graphic at Civil Eats that lets you see the rise in U.S. daily caloric availability between 1970 and 2008, and where the additional calories are coming from. They are based on USDA data on food available for human consumption, minus what is wasted through being thrown out, spoiling before making it to the store, etc., to approximate average daily calorie consumption. It’s a rough measure, and clearly actual consumption will vary widely, but the overall changes provide some insights into the changing U.S. diet.

Note: I sometimes used the word “consumption,” “consumed,” etc., in the post since availability is an approximation of it, but as a reader pointed out, I should have been more careful, so I’ve fixed it throughout the post.

In 1970, we consumed had available an average of 2,168 calories per day, and the single largest source was meat/eggs/nuts:

By 2008, we had 2,673 calories available on average. The big jumps were in added fat — there are 231 more calories a day available per person, and it’s now the single largest source of calories — and grains. I was surprised to see how small the increase in added sugars was…and calories available from vegetables and dairy actually went down:

Overall, that’s an increase in available calories of 23.3% during this 38-year time frame.

You can go to the Economic Research Service website and create charts or tables of caloric availability for specific food groups. For instance, the chart on changes in sweeteners shows the jump in use of high-fructose corn syrup, and an accompanying decrease in dextrose:

There’s a lot less whole milk than there used to be:

But we’ve grown to love mozzarella and make a lot more of it:

Or instead of looking at trends over time, you can get the breakdown for one particular year. Here are the sources of our added fats for 2008:

Non-alcoholic drinks (excluding milk):

I warn you, this is one of those things where it seems like you’ll just look for a second, and the next thing you know you’ve spent 45 minutes making customized charts of every possible category of food.

Also, we do not like lima beans:

UPDATE: Reader Chorda provides some context that I think is helpful:

The added fat looks impressive, but because fat has 9 calories per gram that increase ends up only being 25.6 grams of fat over the 1970 amount, or 0.903013 ounce. Yes, less than an ounce of fat can add 231 calories. On the other hand, the additional grains and sugar combined would be 62.51 grams of carbohydrates, or 2.20497 ounces dry weight and 250 new calories from carbohydrate sources.

Just over three ounces of food can make a difference of 481 calories. Eating that extra 3.1 ounces every day for a week is 3,367 calories. One pound of fat is equal to 3,500 calories.

Take two tablespoons of oil. Combine with three tablespoons flour and one tablespoon sugar. That is the largest difference between 1970 and 2008. Could you even get a single pancake out of that?

Cross-posted at Ms.

Growing up in America, we learn that sweets and junk food are “guilty pleasures.” Women, especially, are supposed to refrain from such indulgences.  And, if they cannot — if they, for example, desire more than that modest slice of cake served to each birthday guest — then they should feel not only guilt, but shame.  For overindulging is grotesque and it, accordingly, should be hidden and kept secret.

This is the cultural background to Lee Price‘s realist paintings of women (mostly her) eating sweets and junk food.  She draws two contrasts.  First, she makes very public something we are supposed to do only in private.  Not only do the paintings literally display the transgression, the birds eye view and frequent nudity exaggerates the sheer display of the indulgence.  And, second, she takes something that is supposedly disgusting and shameful and presents it in a medium associated with (high) art, challenging the association of indulgence with poor character and a lack of refinement.  Fascinating.

Visit Lee Price’s website.
Via BoingBoing.

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.

Today marks what would have been César Chávez’s 84th birthday.  Chávez was born in 1927 to Mexican American farmers in Arizona.   Here he is, right, at age six with his sister:

When he was about 11, his family lost their farm in the Great Depression and they turned to migrant farm work.   In 1962 he and Dolores Huerta founded the National Farm Workers Association (later the United Farm Workers).  His success in organizing farm workers, raising awareness of the conditions of their work, and raising support for their cause is one of the most inspiring stories of collective action in American history.  Read more about Chávez here.

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.

Oliver Noble edited a fun look at the history of product placement in American film, featured at Political Remix Video.   Among other tidbits, in this 6-and-a-half minute video, he reveals that:

• the first known product placement was in 1919;
• Hershey’s paid a million dollars to make Reeses Pieces a plot point in E.T. (image source);
• movies sometimes switch up the product placed for different audiences;
• and the record for the most product placements in a single film goes to Michael Bay’s Transformers with 47.

Fun stuff:

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.

Via Colorlines I discovered an Applied Research Center report titled The Color of Food.  The report found that Blacks, Latinos, and Asians were overrepresented in food service work:

The report also discovered a wage gap between White workers and non-White workers at every level of food production:

Race intersected with gender, such that women earned less than men of their same race for each group studied:

The authors go on to break down the data further by each part of the commodity food chain — production, processing, distribution and service — and by racial group.  For example, they show that the average wage of Latinos and Asians differs by ethnic background (always a good reminder that racial categories obscure variability):

Lots more at The Color of Food.

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 and around the apartment complex where we live in Nanning, China, there are no less than five coffee shops.  They are part of what make our neighborhood so much, well, like a neighborhood.  Several of them have free wi-fi and they all have finely crafted, good quality kafei (coffee).

But my wife and I have learned the hard way that if we want coffee in the morning, we either have to go to McDonald’s or make it ourselves.  While your average US Starbucks employee arrives at work before the sun peeks its head above the horizon, baristas in China report to work around 10 am.  And while some Starbucks and rare other coffee shops in the US are open until ten or even midnight (at the latest), their Chinese counterparts stay open until two in the morning every night.

Needless to say we found these business hours confounding, and poked around to find out why anyone would want to drink such strong coffee (and, do not doubt, this coffee is stout!) so late at night.

As it turns out, China’s coffee history dates back to the early 19th century, but in all those years, coffee never “caught on.”  And it is not really a mystery as to why.  China’s tea culture has a centuries-long monopoly on China’s liquid ingestion.  Coffee?  Well, its OK, if you like that sort of thing.

But if for 200 years the Chinese have resisted coffee, why now are coffee shops finding enough success that there is room for five in one small neighborhood?  The answer is in the picture of my wife below.   Chinese cafes are dimly-lit, quiet, and “romantic” (or at least that is the goal of the decor) rendezvous points.  A new high school couple might take their xiuxi (afternoon rest – the Chinese version of a siesta), flirting with each other while sipping on lattes.  After a night out on the town, young couples flood the cafes, taking lots of pictures, drinking beer and maybe a couple of iced macchiatos.

The marketing scheme is actually quite impressive.  If you can’t win them over with quality, lovingly brewed, pristinely presented coffee, make the coffee shop a romantic oasis.  Draw them in with the promise of passion and mystery and win them over with brilliantly executed coffee.

The pictures are just a bonus.

Evan Schneider is a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary. He teaches English at an education college in Nanning, China.  While in China he enjoys learning to cook Chinese food and discovering the differences between the way that Chinese and American people think about food.  He blogs about it at Cooking Chinese.

An infographic accompanying an article at the New York Times reveals how “advanced economies” compare on various measures of equality, well-being, educational attainment, and more.  To illustrate this, for each measure countries that rank well are coded tan, countries that rank poorly and very poorly are coded orange and red respectively, and countries that are in the middle are grey.  The countries are then ranked from best to worst overall, with Australia coming in #1 and the United States coming in last.  You might be surprised how some of these countries measure up.

Thanks to Dmitriy T.M. for the link.

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.

Harkening back to a day when grocery and ‘convenience’ stores did not exist, one was intimately aware of where one’s food was coming from. This is because leading a life of subsistence meant growing one’s own food. It meant raising animals and growing crops and then processing them into food.

As foodstuffs began to be commodified, that is, rendered a marketable good to be exchanged for capital — and largely controlled by transnational corporations — we began to lose understanding to where our food comes from. Arguably, the dearth of this understanding is illustrated by the fact that increasingly children believe that fruit and vegetables are something that comes from the grocery store rather than from the farm or the earth.

The effects of this phenomenon, known as distancing, have social, political and economic ramifications. Typically grocery store produce is devoid of any clues as to the conditions under which it was produced, save for the country of origin. This serves to make invisible the labour taken to cultivate the produce and instead presents the consumer with the end product. The conditions under which bananas are produced, for example, are particularly problematic given their use of toxic pesticides and lack of environmental and worker protection measures.

Accordingly, I was particularly struck when I noticed this produce sign at a local grocery store.

Here the source of the bananas is specified in a way that might help combat distancing.  But, in fact, knowing that these bananas are from the “tropics” does more to obfuscate than illuminate.  The tropics refers to no place in particular – technically referring to parts of South America, Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific.  Instead of a concrete agricultural source, then, pointing to the tropics simply creates a false sense of understanding, one that plays on consumers’ desires for (and stereotypes about) all things lush and tropical, leaving the consumers’ ignorance intact.

Kristina Vidug is pursuing a masters of arts degree in sociology at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. Her research is on post-industrial risk management with a focus on women’s avoidance of synthetic chemicals in the domestic sphere. You can follow her “adventures in thesising” on her blog, jeez (kristina) louise.