Food, Identity, and Power 9/22/16

Agenda Putting blogs on sakai What’s missing on our map Homework

What’s not on the map? Begin thinking of what sites are not on the map that you would like to choose as your food site for research.

“Pure Connotation” “Jean Baudrilliard describes advertising as ‘pure connotation,’ further noting that advertising ‘contributes nothing to production or to the direct practical application of things, yet it plays an integral part in the system of objects not merely because it relates to consumption but also because it itself becomes an object to be consumed’ (1996,16)”. (150)

Glimpses into Culture “Commercials offer highly distorted representations of race, class, and gender in contemporary America-but they still provide poignant glimpses into cultural dreams and anxieties” (150).

Symbolic Intent “Advertising operates on a system of exchange, shifting focus from the specific properties of the object itself to its meaning in human terms, its symbolic content” 163

Food and meaning “food gives pleasure; it forges society; it can encode meaning” (150)

Food and environment “Food serves as one of our most initiate links to the environment…each bite connect us to the agricultural policies and practices inscribed on rural lands. Our bodies, literally shaped by food, ultimately stand as direct testimony to our consumption of the environment and serve to inform others about the nature of that relationship”. (151)

Health and Ads Choose food by numbers, not senses “pairing physical appearance with a reductionist approach to food and encouraging a belief that personal transformation can be easy and enjoyable” (154) Salads stand in for body ideal

Fast food Salads “Advertising for fast-food salads focuses attention on the body, but in ways that render concerns about health a matter of narcissism, while simultaneously exploiting anxieties and stereotypes about sexuality, body, image, ethnicity, and gender in representations that reinforce the regimes of bodily prosperity and control. Yet it is the bodies excluded altogether from this advertising, those of agricultural fieldworkers, that best reveal the paucity of its discourse” (152).

Cost of Food While Retzinger’s article included many good points about making “healthy” choices at fast food restaurants and the advertisements for these healthier products, it failed to note that typically, the healthy items (such as salads) are more expensive than, say, a less healthy item (cheeseburger, fries). Is this important to remember when thinking about healthy eating and the rhetoric behind it? Does the cost of a food product make it more or less appealing, despite how healthy or unhealthy it is?

Analyzing Commercial Activity In groups, find a food commercial that you think evidences Retzinger’s argument about representations of eating healthy. Post the commercial (to classwork 9/22), and briefly not the ways in which it represents ideas concerning sexuality, gender, body image, ethnicity, and/or societal anxieties.

Homework Retzinger Reading Post one discussion question to “homework due 9/22” 2nd blog due at start of class on Thurs.