Duped: The Media & Pop Culture Influence Our Food Choices

Politics & Sports

The arena is packed to the brim with rabid fans. They strain and shuffle to see the tiny figures down below and they erupt in cheers and whistles as flashbulbs blink from all over the building. Some are even tearing up it would seem. This isn’t a sporting even though; it’s Barack Obama accepting the nomination for president at the 2012 Democratic National Convention.  It could also describe quite a few political rallies and celebrations that took place for either side these last few months leading up to the election.

The video yesterday showed that politics is woven into sports, but from the other angle, politics almost is a sport. Both politics and sports offer money, power, and prestige to participants; both involve massively divided fan (or supporter) bases, and both are talked about—a lot.

My thinking is that this is in no way a good thing for us in this country. For sports, for good or ill, they don’t work without division and competition. Alternately, nations need the competition to end at some point if any work is expected to get done. Arik Parnass pointed something out in an article for his university newspaper: “You might cheer loudly for a monster dunk at the Verizon Center, but would you scream about a well-delivered presentation at work? You might clap or pat your coworker on the back, but anything else would be considered taboo. You would be forgiven for honking your horn at three in the morning after a playoff win, but would locals trying to sleep be so forgiving if it was due to the stock market reaching a monthly high?” I don’t mean to say that sports should illicit reactions and politics shouldn’t, just that the reactions shouldn’t be so focused on the division between competitors. This sounds like a naïve “why can’t we all just get along” story and I guess it is, but wouldn’t it be productive to stop pretending politics is just a game to be sensationalized on cable news?

 

Edit: The article I quoted: http://www.thehoya.com/sports/politics-sadly-viewed-as-a-sport-1.2951647

You Don't Know Where It Came From

Driving into Muncie the other day I caught half of a radio interview discussing food production. A representative (unfortunately I didn’t catch his name or title, but I’ll post it if I can find the interview online) for a conventional food company was debating the merits of his company’s product compared to organic options and farmer’s markets.

The idea of organic food and glocalization seem tied together. I know that’s not necessarily always true, but Food Inc. carried the idea that knowing where the food came from was a crucial bit of knowledge that we lack when shopping at a grocery store seeing picturesque farms printing on the packaging. All of this is why I was so surprised to hear the food rep defend his product by saying “[with organic food] you don’t know where it came from!”

He then proceeded to argue that if there is an e-coli outbreak within the produce of his company, the food is all numbered and traceable, and warnings can be issued about the outbreak to the exact stores where that food was delivered. Gee. Thanks. That doesn’t exactly make me feel better.

That’s not to say that it’s impossible for contamination to occur on an organic farm like Joel Salatin’s Polyface farm featured in Food Inc., but considering the lack of transparency shown by the food companies in that same film the rep’s argument is nullified.

Still, I wonder if I’m romanticizing organic food. Humanity will probably never work out a 100% perfect solution, but between the two extremes the better choice is clear.

Superheroine

I recently read an article for a TCOM class about superhero culture and gender roles. The focus was on NBC’s Heroes, which ran from 2006 to 2010. At first glance, the show looks like it might have been doing something positive with its diverse cast. There are two female superheroes in Season 1 and characters from several nationalities and ethnic backgrounds, to an almost Law & Order degree of variety, which is hardly a bad thing.

The trouble comes up in the way the female characters are portrayed; things quickly devolve into the usual damsel-in-distress tropes in the guise of socially responsible television. The women get the label of hero, but the roles they’re given don’t live up to it.

To start, our two superheroines are very obviously painted for the hetero male gaze. In her first scene, Niki Sanders strips for a webcam, which is supposed to show her desperation for money, but there’s no downplaying the sexiness on the part of the showrunners. So we’ve got a stripper, next up of course is a cheerleader! The character of Claire Bennett is a downright devious creation on the part of the writers. You see, Claire’s superpower… is the ability to heal herself.

I didn’t think anything of it at first either, but she’s a female superhero whose power is completely passive. Despite her superhero status, her lot in life is still to be rescued by men, over and over again. That’s the devious thing about Claire. Being able to regenerate herself, the villains can do worse and worse things to her, but she can still be saved in the end!

This even comes through in the tagline of the show: save the cheerleader, save the world.

Corporate Culture Infiltrates Counter Culture? Or the Other Way Around?

I’m taking a low-level Political Science course this semester and the other day the professor started off the class by playing a song by protest singer Phil Ochs. I wasn’t familiar with Ochs and the professor described him as “Bob Dylan if he didn’t sell out.” Then we’re assigned the Thomas Frank article for #bsupop dealing with sellouts and the New Left and I couldn’t tell which class I was reading for anymore.

I’m a huge Bob Dylan fan, but I’d never so much as heard of Phil Ochs, which is a shame. If Bob Dylan hadn’t “sold out” then I wouldn’t have come to enjoy his music. I might have heard the name once in a Political Science class and that would be that.

Looking at the blend of mainstream and counter cultures, I tended to default to the idea that the ad agencies and “corporate types” were the shady ones who infiltrated the counter culture and commercialized it, selling it back to people who have taken on that counterculture as a style, not a way of life. Frank says that that revitalized American business along the way.

I’m starting to think differently about it now. Maybe that infiltration comes from both sides until mainstream and counter culture is blended, each “side” believing they’re the ones who have come out ahead.  Take Lady Gaga, she could be a “sellout” in the sense that she brings in immense amounts of money through her work as a performer, but she’s also stuck to her original “be yourself” message and put her money where her mouth is in terms of being… well… weird. Sellout or not, this has enabled her to send her message all over the world. Along the same lines, Apple Inc. likes to paint themselves as liberators and their competitors as lemmings droning on to their deaths (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYP1Tjgt1Ao), but they do make great computers that could be used as tools for some sort of informational liberation… at a high price, of course.

Apples and Oranges, Classical and Jazz

Imagine my excitement when I saw that we'd be reading an article by Malcolm Gladwell of Outliers and The Tipping Point fame for our class, the same author who kept boredom at bay for me many a time in many an airport. I hold Malcolm Gladwell in the highest esteem and wouldn't hesitate to call him a genius, which is an overused word to be sure. That being said, I was disappointed in his The New Yorker article "Small Change".

"The revolution will not be tweeted!" Gladwell claims, playing with the great Gil Scott-Heron line. To summarize, Gladwell rails against the "weak ties" of social media by comparing their potential to the African-American civil rights movement that had no such technology to hold it together. Here's the problem with Gladwell's article: he spends the whole article talking about how good brocoli is for you. Does that mean no one should eat any other food but brocoli?

The worst part about being disappointed in Gladwell's article: I actually agree with him. Twitter is not going to replace "proper" activism and weak ties don't trump strong ones. I don't think anyone is trying to put down the civil rights movement by saying Twitterized activism is somehow better. It's a tool to help spread awareness and that is never a bad thing. It doesn't solve the problem by itself (like KONY 2012 and similar mimimal investment causes as someone mentioned), but it isn't meant to. Social media is complementary to traditional activism. It hasn't erased it! Just as Sullivan said in his article on blogging, jazz is not a replacement for classical!

Is a person of today's drive to activism sated by social media, allowing people to think they've done all they can without having left their computers? Gladwell seemed to support that claim. I believe I have evidence to the contrary, which appeared almost exactly a year after Gladwell's October 2010 article: Occupy Wall Street. Whether or not one agrees with the Occupy ideology, it is undeniable that they performed a traditional form of activism that was augmented by social media. Activism isn't dead and it continues online and off.