1. Environmental Economics
Lecture 4: History of Consumer Society

2. Consumer society in historical perspective
What is “consumer society?”
A society in which the buying and selling of goods and services is the most important social and economic activity.

3. Source:

5. Consumer society in historical perspective
Decline of agriculture
A move from local economies to national and global markets
New technologies:
Transportation
Storage
Biology

6. History of consumer society: Refrigeration and food
Refrigeration car circa 1870

7. History of consumer society: Eggs
Seasonal food – biology (light and temperature)
Preservation possible by coating “eggs with varnish or butter and then burying them in barrels of salt, bran, or oats.”
Refrigerators (in 1834 Jacob Perkins filed the first legal patent for refrigeration using vapor-compression)

8. Consumer society in historical perspective: Eggs
Why did American consumers not trust industrial refrigeration of eggs well into the 20th century?
Poor quality
Cultural lag:
Technology develops faster than culture, i.e. people do not embrace new technologies as fast as they develop
New middlemen – warehousemen who can control markets and lobbied politicians

9. History of consumer society: Industrialization of food production
“Refrigeration profoundly threatened the norms, practices and social relationships making up the moral economy of the perishable marketplace.”
How do we come to a consensus as a society about what is valuable?

10. Consumer society in a historical perspective: From egg to chicken
Change from free roaming hens to highly productive, biologically unstable hens confound in cages:
Turning of seasonality of reproduction
Example of the Treadmill of production theory.

12. Study Guide: Concepts from Environmental Sociology:
Ecological modernization
Treadmill of production
Environmental justice
Deep ecology
Ecological feminism
Critical animal studies

13. Project
Write a brief paragraph on your progress towards the class research project.
Have you decided on the topic? If so, what is it? If not, what potential topics are you considering?
Have you considered specific research sites? If so, list them.

14. Due at the beginning of class week
Bring examples of 3 resources related to your chosen topic. E.g.:
Books
Research articles
Websites
Field research sites (interviews)

15. Study Guide Questions
What is “consumer society?” Why is it important to understand its history for understanding environmental footprint of contemporary societies?
According to Freidberg’s article, why did American consumers not trust industrial refrigeration of eggs well into the 20th century?
According to Freidberg’s article, how did the introduction of the technology for refrigerating large warehouses change the entire food system?
What is a cultural lag?