food/agriculture

Hellman’s Mayonnaise, a brand owned by the multinational corporation Unilever, currently has an “eat local” campaign in Canada. As part of it, they put out this video (found at BrandFreak) highlighting how much food Canada imports:

Hellmann’s – It’s Time for Real from CRUSH on Vimeo.

What I find odd here is that Unilever owns a large number of food brands (as well as non-food ones), including Hellman’s, Wishbone, Ben & Jerry’s, Bertolli, Lipton, Knorr, and Slim-Fast (check here for some images of organic brands owned by Unilever). The Lipton web page notes that Lipton is “…making a big splash in the global beverages market…” The main Unilever food page announces,

We have the heritage and knowledge to move effortlessly between cuisines and countries.

So on the one hand, according to wikipedia,

The company promotes sustainability and started a sustainable agriculture programme in 1998.[7] In May 2007 it became the first tea company to commit to sourcing all its tea in a sustainable manner, employing the Rainforest Alliance, an international environmental NGO, to certify its tea estates in East Africa, as well as third-party suppliers in Africa and other parts of the world. It declared its aim to have all Lipton Yellow Label and PG Tips tea bags sold in Western Europe certified by 2010, followed by all Lipton tea bags globally by 2015.

Covalence, an ethical reputation ranking agency, placed Unilever at the top of its ranking based on positive versus negative news coverage for 2007.

Those are admirable goals by any standard, and food/globalization activists often push for that type of responsible corporate citizenship.

On the other hand…Unilever owns 400+ brands, many of which are dependent upon global sourcing and distribution; they in no way contribute to or encourage local eating, and if people really began eating locally, Unilever’s market share would suffer dramatically. And there are questions about how well it lives up to its sustainability goals.

We’ve seen these contradictions from Unilever before: the company owns both Axe and Dove, brands that are often marketed in ways that conflict with one another.

One way to look at this is that Unilever is making efforts to encourage sustainability and other policies that many critics would appreciate, within a global marketplace that constrains their efforts. The more cynical view is that such contradictory messages in effect allow corporations to “have it all.” Don’t care about sustainability, working conditions, and so on? Chances are you’re buying Unilever brands by default. But if you do care about such issues, you can feel good about buying at least some Unilever brands–those that have a marketing strategy designed to appeal to you. And doing so in no way threatens Unilever’s overall profitability.

So, readers, whatcha think?

Sociologists who study social movements note that the tactics available to activists are shaped by the activism that has proceeded them. We call this a “repertoire of contention,” or a set of tools available to any activist that most people in a society would recognize as “protest.” In most industrialized countries today, this repertoire includes things such as sit-ins, boycotts, strikes, and marches.

Repertoires of contention are shared and they pass from one social movement to another.   The sit-in, for example, was invented by civil rights U.S. labor activists, but all types of activists use sit-ins today (perhaps most memorably by the civil rights movement). Sidney Tarrow calls this kind of tactic “modular.” It can be borrowed from one kind of activism and applied to many different causes.  Similarly, protest tactics can in one country can be borrowed and applied in another, so long as the conditions for activism are similar.

I was reminded of this theory of modular protest tactics when fds and Mordicai K. sent us this link to photographs from a protest by the Alliance for Animal Rights in Russia. Like the protests PETA in the U.S. and Animals Awake in the Netherlands, this Russian protest personifies animals as (mostly) women and then displays them brutally murdered.  I think the trio (Russia, the Netherlands, and the U.S.), together, is an interesting example of the way that a social movement tactic can travel transnationally.

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.

I love how this ad from the 1950s acknowledges how exhausting and mind-numbing housekeeping and childcare can be!

The ad also illustrates the post-WWII efforts to cultivate a market for new food technologies (easy and instant foods that were developed for the war).  This ad for Campbell’s soup describes the phenomenon in more detail.

For another vintage Jell-O ad that takes an entirely different approach, see here.

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

According to this slide show at Slate (linked from The Color Line), the Frito Bandito was introduced as a mascot for Fritos in 1967.

A “cunning, clever-and sneaky” thief who loved the “cronchy” corn chips, he was targeted by the Mexican American Anti-Defamation Committee (MAADC).

Here’s the Frito Bandito in action:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbYj7ZyqjYY[/youtube]

The Slate notes read:

So, Frito Lay ordered a makeover. An ad firm was told to tidy up the Bandito, fix his teeth, and change his expression from sinister sneer to rascally grin. His guns were holstered, too, a response to the assassination of Robert Kennedy… But the MAADC was unmoved and prompted several television affiliates to ban the Bandito. In 1971, a House subcommittee made him the star of hearings about ethnic defamation on the airwaves. It wasn’t long before Frito Lay pulled the campaign.

The campaign against Frito Bandito is a nice example of how collective action can make a difference. I imagine, also, that the time period (the late ’60s/early ’70s) had something to do with MADDC’s quick success also.

See more racial and ethnic stereotypes in marketing and in these posts: the Chinese (here, here, and here), American Indians (here and here), Black Americans (here and here), and the Irish.

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

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.

This vintage ad for 7-Up is a great illustration of how our ideas about what sounds tasty is culturally and historically contingent.

For other great examples, see these posts on soup for breakfast, spam, poop coffee, the rise and fall of aspic, and prunes (they’re for kids!).

From Found in Mom’s Basement.

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

Ideal bodies vary across cultures and time.   In the U.S. today, childhood obesity is considered a significant social problem and is widely covered in the news, on talk shows, and the like.  When food was more scarce, however, having a fat child was a sign of health and well-being.  This ad, from 1898, is for a tonic that will fatten up your child.  How times change.

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

Today we think of prunes as something old people eat.  But, as this ad from 1958 reveals, the California Prune Advisory Board hoped to make prunes a favorite with moms and kids.

Text:

Win their hearts with prune tarts

Just yummy, Mummy!  A delicious, healthy way to satisfy that yearning for sweets.  Wonderful California prunes are fairly bursting with energy, iron, vitamins and minerals.

To make delicious, decorative prune tarts just use your favorite prune whip recipe.  Pour into tart shells and top with whole prunes, stuffed with almonds.

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

Jason S. sent in this (pretty hilarious) three-minute “ad” for Zima.  While modern motherhood takes many different forms, the ad is a great illustration of one stereotype of the modern mother:

So, according to the ad, moms…

1. …are middle class. She and her husband can afford a nice, new minivan.

2. …provide their children with active social and educational lives. Since they live in the suburbs, she spends a lot of time shuttling them from place to place.

3. …are frazzled. Likely a full time wage worker and the primary care taker for the children, the condition of the inside of the minivan suggests that she does not have time to clean or organize her family’s life.

4. …feed their kids fast food (french fries) because, being overwhelmed, she doesn’t have time to feed them what she’d thinks they should eat.

5. …have husbands who still take on the masculine jobs but, being white collar workers, no longer have the skill to effectively perform them.

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