food/agriculture

Dmitriy T.M. and Claire C. sent in a link to a photo of an NBC cafeteria menu in honor of Black History Month (that’d be February) that featured stereotypical African-American foods:

It’s not the first time.

Many argued that the menu was offensive because it reproduced stereotypes, but I think an interview (no longer available) with the chef who devised the menu complicated the story a bit.

Honestly, I think the main problem here is that Americans live in a racist society and so we have no idea how to celebrate Black History Month (how about with relaxer?).   The rest of the year, we make fun of black people for eating fried chicken. And yet, these are traditional Black southern dishes. So how exactly do we celebrate the holiday?   Do we pretend to valorize the same traditions that we make fun of during the rest of the year?  It makes no sense!  But it makes no sense because we’re still racist.  And we need a Black History Month because we’re still racist.  So, what to do!?

Perhaps the lesson to take from all of this is:  Undermining racism is hard work.   A month dedicated to Black history is a (flesh-colored) band aid, at best.  If we don’t do the other stuff (e.g., challenging the web of racist institutions that preserve class and race privilege), then no amount of fried chicken will make the difference.

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.

Martin M. pointed out some ironic happenings in Peru that illustrate the complexities of trying to deal with long-term stereotypes and prejudice. Back in November 2009, the Peruvian government officially apologized for discrimination against AfroPeruvians. So far so good–a step toward acknowledging that AfroPeruvians have suffered both economically and socially because of social attitudes and government policies.

But, of course, long-held stereotypes aren’t that easy to change. Peruvians of African descent have often been portrayed as backward, uncivilized, and possibly cannibalistic.

Just a few days after the government’s apology and declaration that poor treatment and negative stereotypes of this ethnic group needed to end, the newspaper El Comercio began advertising their new section on healthy eating with a TV commercial that draws on all the old stereotypes. The video is in Spanish, but I’m pretty sure you’ll get the gist of it, and I describe it below:

El comercio- Los canibales from Pao Ugaz on Vimeo.

What’s going on here? The mother is mad, not because her younger son ate someone, but because he ate someone who was too fat, and thus not good for them to eat. They need to eat less fattening people to improve their health. She warns him about his cholesterol. The caption says, “You eat healthy, you are healthy.”

According to Reportaje al Perú, the newspaper pulled the spot after receiving complaints and apologized for it.

As with any society with a history of widespread, blatantly racist stereotypes and discrimination, attempting to heal racial wounds will be a very long, painful, and difficult process. It’s one thing to officially apologize. It’s another to convince citizens that prejudice and discrimination are unacceptable and that everyone must play a part in ending them.

See also: El Correo ridicules Quechua speakers in government.

Katrin sent along links to visual portrayals of how much money goes, or could go, to various causes.  While sometimes it’s hard to comprehend what a billion, or 300 billion, dollars amounts to, these images give us perspective on just where our priorities lie.  The segments below are clipped from the visuals for the U.K. and the U.S. at Information is Beautiful.

The British example nicely illustrates how little social services like education, police, and welfare cost in the big scheme of things.

It also reveals how easy it would be to wave all of the African countries’ debt to Western countries. Just £128 spread out over the West.  Shoot, that’s the money for just a couple of corporate bailouts.

The U.S. example reveals how costly (just) the Iraq war has been.  All of our spending pales in comparison to that expenditure., with the exception of what we have spent bailing out the U.S. economy.

It also reveals that the U.S.’s regular defense budget is almot enough to feed and educate every child on earth for five years, and/or about the same as the revenues of Walmart and Nintendo combined.

If we diverted the money spent on porn, we could save the Amazon… almost five times over.  For that matter, if we gave our yoga money to the Amazon, that would just about do it.

Bill Gates could have paid for the Beijing Olympics and had money left over.

Dmitriy T.M. sent in an interactive breakdown of the US Budget for 2011.  In the figures below, the sizes of the squares represent the proportion of the budget, but the colors refer to changes from 2010 (dark and light pink = less funding, dark and light green = more).  These figures will give you an idea, but the graphic is interactive and there’s lots more to learn at the site.

See also our posts on how many starving children could be fed by celebrity’s engagement rings and where U.S. tax dollars go.

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 vending machine below is a great example of the folly of relying on individual will in the absence of supportive institutional change.  “Choose sensibly,” the vending machine, exhorts… as it tempts you with fresh fruit, but offers you nothing but snack foods that are high in calories and low in nutritional value:

This makes me think of the many iterations of public service campaigns that tell people to have a good attitude and work on their character.  Yes, those are lovely things, but if people are going to make good choices, the options need to be there.

Found at Doctor Grumpy in the House, an amusing blog in which a doctor complains about doctoring.

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.

Nicolé L.-G. sent along a story on Jezebel about a new policy that Whole Foods is offering to its employees.  Whole Foods has heretofore offered a 20% discount to all employees but, from now on, employees who are willing to undergo surveillance of a selection of body measures (blood pressure, cholesterol tests, and BMI calculations) and refrain from nicotine use, can try to qualify for better discounts:

Whole Foods specifies that you are only allowed the discount that correlates with your “worst” measure.  So, even if you’re a non-smoker with 110/70 blood pressure and <150 or LDL <80 cholesterol, if you have a BMI of 30 or higher, you’re stuck at the “Bronze” level.

As has been discussed on this blog, and excellently at Shapely Prose, BMI does not translate directly into “health.”  But Nicolé did a great job offering some additional analysis of this policy.  She wrote:

…according to the popular media’s perception of weight management, eating healthy (whole) foods is one of the best ways to achieve health, so why make it easier (cheaper) for already “healthy” people to continue eating healthy and make it harder (more expensive) for “unhealthy” people to eat better quality food? I wonder how the employees with a healthy (thin) appearance would have felt if the increased discount was given to those with bad cholesterol, higher BMI’s and high blood pressure?!

Then there’s the idea that your employer will now be keeping track of your health information! It supports the idea that our bodies and weight (across genders) are being relegated to the role of either a commodity or liability for a company; useful for aiding or damaging the bottom-line. The way [CEO John] Mackay speaks of the collection of the “bio-marker” data as being cheap or expensive denotes a sense of ownership that the company then has over our physical autonomy that no company has a right to.

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.

Parker F. sent us a fun vintage ad that reminds us that chocolate wasn’t always seen as a woman’s indulgence.  The ad below, for Fry’s Chocolate Cream (found at the BBC) features a man delightfully, and conspiriatorally, popping a chocolate, with the copy “Go on– spoil yourself!”   The message (indulgence) is so familiar, but the subject (a man) less so.

I think, if the ad ran today, it’d likely feature a woman and, instead of reading “5 big pieces… for only 4¢,” it’d read “5 big pieces… for only 40 calories.”

Today, it seems that efforts to sell chocolate to men involve hypermasculinization, as in the recent Snickers advertisements featuring Mr. T., the linking of Easter candy with professional wrestling, and Yorkie’s “Not For Girls” candy bars.

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.

Nikki L. sent in images of an article titled “Are You Turning Your Boyfriend into a Girlie Man?” from the February 2010 issues of Cosmo. Nikki says,

The article discusses how many women are treating their boyfriends like their girlfriends, making them go shopping, do yoga, and eat vegan food. It says the gender roles are being blurred, and that’s a good thing up to a point. The article says that eventually your man will push you away and resent you for making him girlie. It gives a list of things your man shouldnt be doing, as it might damage his masculinity…

The first page:

Notice the subtitle in red and the text below it:

First, why would you want to act like your BF or husband is one of the girls anyway? Your pull to do girlie things with him stems from experiences with your female friends. “Women are intimate with their close friends, we share everything,” says JoAnn Magdoff, PhD…

Yes. Why on earth would you want to recreate that type of relationship with a guy? Who wants to be intimate, emotionally close, and share everything with their partner? Yuck!

Here are some things you do not want your boyfriend/husband to do:

Just to reiterate: men cannot care too much about their personal appearance. They cannot try to eat healthily, or be vegetarian/vegan. If they’re gonna cook, they better not try to keep from burning their hands by wearing items specifically designed for that task. Sissies!

The article also provides a list of “manly date ideas” you can do with your guy to avoid turning him into one of the girls:

That’s just…stupid! It’s stupid! Gah! It’s such a ridiculous division of the world into the stereotypically masculine and the stereotypically feminine with policing to remind us that men must never be feminine. Ever! And women, stop emasculating men!

Men like meat! And pizza! Girls like chef salads without eggs, bacon, or cheese in them. Men like dogs! Women like cats. Have you ever known a woman who liked dogs? As if! Men like walking in the park and the beach. Except in movies where walking on the beach is portrayed as all annoyingly mushy and romantic, something men do because women like that sort of thing.

I’m also pretty sure if his favorite video game turns out to be Bejeweled, that goes up on the list of things you never wanna see.

Anna sent us links to this 1967 British health awareness film, “A Cruel Kindness,” about children and obesity:

I was really struck by how little mention fresh fruits and vegetables get in the discussion of a balanced diet at the end of the first segment (about 3:45)–you just need a little of them to get the vitamins you need. Today, of course, much more emphasis would be placed on them, and fats would get much less.

Anna points out that the fault for childhood obesity is placed squarely on mothers, either for overindulging their children out of love or being too busy or lazy to get their kids enough exercise and healthy meals.

And oh, poor Valerie! She’s from a broken home. Destined to be handicapped for life, a social outcast who will grow up to be like Mrs. Brown, abandoned by her husband.

Of course, while our attitudes toward foods have changed to focus on more fruits and vegetables and fewer fats, other elements of the film would fit in with anti-obesity campaigns today with a little updating. We still often focus on individualistic causes of obesity over structural ones (what types of foods governments subsidize, for instance), implicitly blame mothers for not taking the time to cook wholesome meals at home, and treat fatness as a social death sentence. We usually try to sound nicer when doing it, though.

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