Week 3
Week 3, day 1
Freidburg Chapter 1. Refrigeration: The cold revolution and chapter 2. Beef: Mobile meat
In class discussion questions:
We also discussed policy brief ideas in class as the proposal is due next Thursday. Be thinking about this.
Week 3, day 2
Fora guest lecture by Kuan.
Minot: Contract farming in developing countries
Cronon: Pricing grain futures
Here are Kuan's slides from the discussion
Freidburg Chapter 1. Refrigeration: The cold revolution and chapter 2. Beef: Mobile meat
In class discussion questions:
1.
How is freshness related to modernity? What does
it mean to be fresh? Why do we want it? What does freshness depend on?
2.
What is the role of advertising in converting
the tastes of consumers to adapt to technologies that allow both frozen meat
and meat from long distances?
3.
How do these technologies shift local and global
food production?
4.
Why were consumers suspicious of technologies
that allowed for the preservation of meat?
5.
How is meat implicated in national identity or
security? How were these influenced by these technologies?
6.
How have these technologies changed the way we
eat, and what we eat?
7.
What is commodity fetishism? How did this plat a
role in expanding people’s ideas of where beef could come from?
8.
What was the impact of The Jungle on consumer tastes and with regards to the technologies
discussed here? Why did Upton Sinclair write this book?
We also discussed policy brief ideas in class as the proposal is due next Thursday. Be thinking about this.
Week 3, day 2
Fora guest lecture by Kuan.
Minot: Contract farming in developing countries
Cronon: Pricing grain futures
Here are Kuan's slides from the discussion
1. freshness is related to modernity because it is directly tied to the growth of the urban environment and the availability of refrigerated meats. refrigerated and treated meats were and remain considered "fresh", that is to say, 'better', than freshly butchered or discolored meats. I find it odd that people expect a bright red piece of beef in order to consider it "fresh" but its been treated to look that way, yet would consider an freshly butchered piece as not as fresh. Perhaps the urban detachment from food source began early.
ReplyDelete2. Advertisers directly changed urban attitudes on what fresh was and wasn't by commenting on seasonal buying habits, ...(not finished)
2. (cont)... targeted homemakers in particular and changed their idea of ice and cold related products from one of extravagance to to one of sound economic practice.
ReplyDelete3. Refrigeration shifted the local and global food productions by allowing foods to be produced, saved, and transported from any distance to maintain freshness rather than needing food to be produced locally because long distance transport would result in spoilage.Refrigeration also allowed for longer storage, ie. stockpiling. Ease of storage and transport of quality goods meant lower prices for larger scale food producers that local food producers could only compete with by unionizing and essentially also becoming large-scale food producers. Distribution was also easier for larger food corporations as they had the transportation and the networks to distribute foods beyond a local area rapidly.
4. Habit had a lot to do with the suspicions: purchasing food daily for consumption, attitudes on the health benefits of cold or iced products. But specifically noted in the chapter, the French believed that due to refrigeration, some merchants could hoard goods and manipulate markets that way and the second reason was if merchants cold-stored perishables then how would the public know which foods were actually fresh or not.
5. Meat, beef in particular, was and somewhat remains tied to the idea of wealth and health. It was implicated as a possible threat to national security during WWI when rationing meant that the public was encouraged to eat anything but meat. Before that, the Germans had lauded meat as flesh-forming, necessary for the strength of people. national identity was built on the notion of healthy and fit form public fed meat and that a reduction of meats could mean a health crisis.
6. Technologies have changed how we eat since the turn of the century in several ways (....)
6. (cont)... On average the general public eats far more meats than it did previous to 1900. "Refrigeration wipes out seasons and distances," meaning that the variety of what was consumed changed as well. "Fresh food" came to mean older, long distance food kept from rotting versus off the vine or newly butchered.
ReplyDelete7. Commodity fetishism is Marx's definition of using the public's opinions and tastes as opportunities for direct marketing and using the relationship between the public and marketers as a commodity exchange market. It was used by meat marketers to convince the public that
fresh beef could come from far away and that their main relationship to meat was as consumers.
8. The book had little impact. Despite the fact the public reacted with revulsion to the conditions described in the Jungle, the meat packers still managed to convince the public that their meat could come from far away. Sinclair wrote it to highlight the terrible working conditions of the "big beef" butcher shops.