food/agriculture

While Americans began celebrating Valentine’s Day in the early 1700s, it wasn’t until the 1840s that it became a commercial holiday complete with mass-produced Valentine’s-themed goods.

Greeting cards, candy, flowers, and jewelry are Valentine’s-Day-Approved gifts and are among the most frequently gifted items (along with stuffed animals and perfume/cologne):

Contrary to stereotypes, the majority of men say they would love to receive flowers for Valentine’s Day:

Alas, 21% of them have never been so blessed:

This may upset primarily the young:

But, of course, they have the greatest chance of one day having their dreams come true.

What I’m saying is:  “Go ahead! Buy your man some daisies!”

For more on Valentine’s Day, visit this fun graphic (via Chart Porn).

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.

The California Milk Processor Board, the group responsible for the Got Milk? and Happy Cows ad campaigns, produced “Medusa,” a commercial about a princess whose “ugly hair” destroys her chances for love…until, of course, a  man comes along who knows how to tame her hair, make her beautiful, and “conquer her love,” allowing her to finally get married:

I get that her hair is made up of snakes, but as a person with incredibly curly, unpredictable, shall we say boisterous hair, I can’t help but notice that the beauty ideal espoused here clearly calls for sleek, straight, controlled hair.

Sarah Haskins takes on the fairy tale trope in commercials aimed at women, including my favorite, a milk ad in which the princess’s PMS mood swings cause a tidal wave of her tears that threatens her entire realm:

Lisa and I have posted before about the way that food products are often marketed by conflating them with women’s bodies and reinforcing that the desirable female body is thin, but with the right type of curves. Non-food items are marketed this way too — for example, in one ad, Sunsilk Shampoo’s packaging underwent “a little nip, a little tuck” and came out a bit curvier.

In another perfect example of this, Mary R., Megan D., and Carey Faulkner, who is a Visiting Assistant Professor of sociology at Franklin & Marshall College, let us know about a new container from Pepsi. The new Diet Pepsi “skinny” can is, according to the company, “sassier” and a “celebration of beautiful, confident women.” The can will debut this month, in conjunction with New York’s fashion week. Reinforcing the conflation of thinness, beauty, and fashion, their chief marketing officer, Jill Beraud, said, “Our slim, attractive new can is the perfect complement to today’s most stylish looks”:

Just so we don’t miss the point, the Pepsico press release refers to the can as “attractive” three times, twice with the phrase “slim, attractive.” Because ladies, never, ever forget: thin = beautiful. Always.

Pepsi has also partnered with a number of designers for the advertising campaign, including everything from a window display by Simon Doonan to a t-shirt “inspired” by Diet Pepsi by Charlotte Ronson to giving away Diet Pepsi in the skinny can at a number of fashion boutiques in several major cities.

Don’t worry, though — CNN reports that if you prefer your soda “short and fat,” the regular cans will remain on shelves.

Commodification is the process by which something that is not bought and sold becomes bought and sold.   At one time, Americans grew, or raised and butchered, much of their own food.  Later, meat, grains, and vegetables became commodified.  Instead of working in the fields and with their animals, people would “go to work,” earn a new thing called a “wage,” and trade it for meat, grains, and vegetables.  With those raw ingredients, they would prepare a meal.

More recently in American history, the very preparation of food has commodified as well.   When I go to a restaurant, I am exchanging my wage for the planting, harvesting, processing, delivering, preparing, and disposal/clean up of my meal.   In this way, then, more and more components of our daily nutritional intake have become commodified.

The graph below traces the increasing commodification of “dinner.”  When it comes to family dinners, Americans are increasingly turning to restaurants, which commodify the preparation of food and the post-meal chores.  Sometime around 1988, the family dinner as a commodity became more common than family dinners at home.

Image borrowed from Claude Fischer’s Made in America.

UPDATE: In the comments, Ludvig von Mises offers this alternative explanation:

Another way to look at this would be as a form of increasing wealth. The nobility of old, after all, also did not butcher, harvest, and prepare their own meals, and neither did the wealthiest members of the new rich. Over time, the ability to afford such a thing on a more regular basis has gradually expanded to more and more people.

Matter of fact, there is very little in the way of such luxury that has been enjoyed by the elites of the past that is not available to the majority of workers today. “Commodification” is not, as you suggest, the creation of any kind of new product, but merely of making extremely expensive products affordable to a much larger fraction of the population.

“The characteristic feature of modern capitalism is mass production of goods destined for consumption by the masses.”

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.

Cross-posted at Jezebel.

We have posted previously about how desserts, particularly chocolate ones, are often advertised to women as indulgences they can use to overcome romantic disappointments, or even as substitute sources of love. L. Ellis sent in an example of this, an ad found in Bon Appetit for Sugar in the Raw that tells women to make brownies to deal with breakup:

Indeed, you can calculate how much dessert you’re going to need by how much time you invested in the guy (“Count the years you dated. If it exceeds 5, double the recipe.”). The ad is also a great example of the contradictory messages women get to be thin but also indulge — today you can “devour that pan of chocolaty goodness,” full of butter and sugar, while you cry over your lost love, but it’s a short-lived reprieve. Inevitably, you now being single and all, the “diet starts tomorrow.”

Alys sent in a photograph of the packaging at her local McDonald’s. It included pictures, not of Chicken Clubs and Big Macs, but of the raw ingredients that these foods are (theoretically) made of… with the notable exception of realistic images of animals. The materials, Alys writes, were…

…adorned with pictures of healthy whole foods, such as a tomato or a head of lettuce. That in itself is interesting — they are clearly attempting to cash in on the whole-foods-are-good-for-you mentality despite the fact that there is hardly anything more processed than fast food — but what I found particularly fascinating was the animals, or rather the lack thereof. My chicken club sandwich package featured not a live chicken, but two little origami chickens. Similarly, the bag the food came in had a tin chicken knick-knack thing. My husband’s hamburger package was even more ambiguous. It’s a little hard to read in the picture, but “two all beef patties” is represented not with a cow, or a picture of the patties, or even an origami cow, but with a spatula. Clearly MacDonalds realizes that while Americans want to be reminded that the ketchup on their sandwich originally came from a tomato — and that means it’s healthy! — they do not want to look into eyes of the live animal that sacrificed its life to provide the main focus of the meal.

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.

The term “food desert” was coined to draw attention to the fact that some people live far from a source of healthy, affordable food.  For these people, compared to those with easier access, consistently eating fresh fruit and vegetables and avoiding convenience store and restaurant food is more difficult.  Food deserts are more often found in poor neighborhoods, which is part of why the poor are more likely than people of other socioeconomic classes to be overweight and obese.

Over 2 percent of U.S. households, 2.3 million, live at least one mile from a grocery store and do not have a car (USDA).  The map below depicts the percent of such households by county.  In the darkest counties, over 10 percent of the households are isolated in a food desert:

See also Satter’s Hierarchy of Food Needs and the Last Sideshow Fat Man.

Via Slate.

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.

All social movements try to frame issues in ways that benefit their cause. Controlling the discourse is an important step towards getting the outcome they want.  Previously, we’ve posted about the way that activists against the genetic modification of food have nicknamed these foods, “frankenfoods.” Recently, Steven Foster, a student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, sent us a pair of images questioning this rhetoric by comparing the imagery with the animals in question.

Frankenfish cartoon:

Images of genetically- and non-genetically-modified salmon:

While we don’t know whether anti-“frankenfood” activists are right about their concerns and it’s certainly true that these animals are genetically modified; it’s also clear that the visuals distort the facts (that is, the modified animals are not nearly as distorted as the cartoon implies).  Thinking through how the tactics by which social movement actors try to influence discourse is a fun and useful application of the sociological imagination.

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.