food/agriculture

Behold “a visualization of the contiguous United States, colored by distance to the nearest [of the about 13,000] domestic McDonald’s” developed by Stephen Von Worley at Weather Sealed:

Von Worley writes:

As expected, McDonald’s cluster at the population centers and hug the highway grid.  East of the Mississippi, there’s wall-to-wall coverage, except for a handful of meager gaps centered on the Adirondacks, inland Maine, the Everglades, and outlying West Virginia.

For maximum McSparseness, we look westward, towards the deepest, darkest holes in our map: the barren deserts of central Nevada, the arid hills of southeastern Oregon, the rugged wilderness of Idaho’s Salmon River Mountains, and the conspicuous well of blackness on the high plains of northwestern South Dakota.  There, in a patch of rolling grassland, loosely hemmed in by Bismarck, Dickinson, Pierre, and the greater Rapid City-Spearfish-Sturgis metropolitan area, we find our answer.

Between the tiny Dakotan hamlets of Meadow and Glad Valley lies the McFarthest Spot: 107 miles distant from the nearest McDonald’s, as the crow flies, and 145 miles by car!

Suffer a Big Mac Attack out there, and you’re hurtin’ for certain!

Via a blog I’ve been borrowing a lot from lately, Chart Porn.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

In a previous post, Gwen explained that sugar consumption rose in Britain during the late 1800s because more nutritious foods were scarce and saved for men.  Women and girls, then, consumed sugar because it offered energy, even if less nutrition.  This led to an association of sugar with women that remains to this day (think of who supposedly LOVES chocolate, binges on ice cream after a break up, etc.).

While having tea with my friend Marie in Ireland, I spotted her bag of sugar and snapped a photo for the blog:

Notice that not only do we see a giant, lipsticked kiss on the bag, but their slogan, “spread a little sweetness” (plus heart and arrow!), is a statement with a double meaning invoking both sugar and a quality associated with/required of women.

NEW! Sarah D. snapped this photo of a sugar packet, also in Ireland:

See also this post on efforts to market chocolate to men.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Nice examples of the evolution of the diet industry and the role of businesses in trying to market their products as dietary aids (found here and here):

The fine print:

Everyone knows sugar contains calories.  So it’s hard to think of sugar as a big help in weight control, yet that’s exactly what sugar can be.

When your blood sugar level is low, your appestat is turned up and you’re hungry.  (Probably tired, too.) Just a small amount of sugar, in a soft drink, candy, coffee, or tea, will turn your appestat down.  Then you’re not so apt to overeat, and overeating is really what makes you far.

In addition to helping with weight control, sugar does other good things.  For one, it gives you quick energy.  Sugar is all energy, and is taken into your blood stream faster than any other food.  So when sugar turns your appestat ‘off,’ you might say it ‘turns you on.’  Artificial sweeteners don’t affect your appestat and have no energy value.  Also, sugar tastes good, and so do foods made with sugar.  Stay with sugar.  Sugar’s got what it takes!

Only 18 calories per teaspoon…
and it’s all energy.

NEW (Dec. ’09)!

See also our recent post on marketing disguised as news.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

It’s always fun for me to have my own gastronomical assumptions revealed. Earlier we posted a cross-cultural example (soup for breakfast in South Korea) and historical examples (mmm aspic, 7-Up with milk, and prunes are for kids!).  On Shakesville, Deeky posted this photograph of ice cucumber-flavored Pepsi being sold in Japan:

UPDATE (June ’10)! In another flavor-shake-up, BoingBoing posted these Pringles from Singapore in Seaweed, Soft-Shell Crab, and Grilled Shrimp:

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Adam W., at Zoophobia, wrote a post calling out the Gotmilk.com website.  The website features six characters.  Here’s the front page:

Clicking on each character takes you to a page where you can play a game related to a benefit of drinking milk.  As Adam explains, through the characters the website reproduces the idea that “men do things with their bodies and women have things done to theirs; men produce things, women have things produced for them.”  He explains:

Slav, Igor and Sergie work their muscles to solve a puzzle.

Mr. Osseous works the assembly line saving a valuable product, and Chuck assembles cartons for shipment.

On the other hand, Miss Dowdy needs to be *given* a makeover by blasting from a cannon into a pool of milk filled by the truck driver and Mother Hen needs your help because she is “tense and irritable” from her PMS.

Also, Mr. Wyde A. Wake wants to be sleepy:

In sum:

While the male animals are productive laborers, the female animals are either ditsy blonds or cruel old hens not worthy of the same honor, but still customers who need milk.

That is, men produce and consume the milk, while women only consume it.  Which is, of course, where the real craziness comes in.  Adam again:

While the male animals perform all the labor in the games, the literal labor of female cows giving birth in order to begin lactating as well as the exploitation of their bodies’ labor in producing all of the milk is completely absent. It is as Joan Dunayer writes in Animal Equality: within the dairy industry, “Milking is done to her rather than by her.”

Thus the game doesn’t just erase female labor in an ideological sense (as a reproduction of gendered stereotypes), it also erases the literal labor of female animals, without with there would be no milk to get.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

The graphic below is interesting to me in light of the discourse about greenhouse gas emissions.  We often hear about emissions from cars and sometimes about emissions from industry.  I was surprised, then, to see that electricity and heat was such a large contributor to carbon dioxide emissions.  And I feel like land use change and agriculture hardly get discussed at all.

Graphic borrowed from ChartPorn, which also has an interactive graphic that breaks down emissions by country (via Simoleon Sense).

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Critics of multiculturalism argue that, far too often, multiculturalism ignores addressing head on the tension caused by racial and ethnic inequality, in favor of cute, simple tokens of diversity.

Jessica G. sent us this screen shot of the Juicy Juice website. It is suggesting that we can teach our children about “diversity… by preparing ethnic meals.”

In the bottom left corner, it reads:

Tacos can take you to the Mayan pyramids of Mexico! Baked Ziti to the Tower of Pisa in Italy! Help your child discover the world through a meal you make together.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think there is anything wrong with teaching a child about Mayan pyramids and the Tower of Pisa. It is, however, going too far to suggest that you can teach children about the promise and perils of “diversity” by instituting “dinner without borders.”

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

The “Got Milk” campaign is funded by the California Milk Processor Board, a marketing organization funded collectively by California dairies.  In a recent comment thread, Adam linked to the clip below in which ABC does a segment about the awesomeness of milk.  It’s a great example of the way that the news media in not independent of business.

UPDATE! Abby, in the comments thread, linked to another great example:

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.