Digital Reading to Understand Food and Gender Politics

Over the past 10 weeks I have been working through my four credit independent learning contract entitled “Digital Reading to Understand Food and Gender Politics”. Throughout, I digitally read and annotated four texts relevant to my topic, exploring not only my subject but allowing me to build proficiency skills in Hypothes.is. My texts, “From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food” by Arlene Voski Avakian and Barbara Haber, “The Ecofetish: Green Consumerism in Womens Magazines” by Alexandra Nutter Smith, and “Choosing” Wisley: Paralleling Food Sovereignty and Reproductive Justice” by Dr. Vaughn, were selected in June to highlight the intersections of food sovereignty and issues of gender politics, and the ILC itself was approved just days before the overturning of Roe V. Wade, a monumental case in the United States concerning gender politics. I also read “Skim, Dive, Surface” by Jenea Cohn to further my understanding of digital reading and online literacy, a text I will be continuing with into the next quarter and hopefully further that delves into the reasoning and history behind the progression of learning through physical, digital, and oral traditions.  

Due to its relevance with the overturning of Roe V. Wade, I decided to start with “Choosing” Wisley: Paralleling Food Sovereignty and Reproductive Justice” by Dr. Vaughn. This was a powerful piece that compared the “choices” we are offered in our food systems, in our grocery stores and our homes, with the “choices” that people, predominantly women, are offered in the American healthcare system concerning their reproductive health. This was the first text of many I would read this quarter that would highlight the common theme I found to be at the center of my ILC; we hold women responsible for the outcomes of our food system, a system in which they are expected to act subservient.  

A good example of this was the story of the welfare queen, a Black single mother told to be popping out children to bolster her government subsidy checks. Anyone with any knowledge of government assistance would know that not only was this story unfeasible, it’s actually laughable to think that single mothers in this country as receiving enough government money to have more children. This is a perfect example of the way food and reproductive health are so closely intertwined, a single mother is far more likely to be in need of food assistance than a family unit or someone without children, and by creating the welfare queen narrative they were shaming single mothers who made “choices” to do with their reproductive health, they were shaming those in need of food assistance who were running out of “choices”, and in true Reagan fashion, a splash of racism as the welfare queen myth specifically highlighted Black single mothers.  

Later in the text, Dr. Vaugh makes a statement about combining our two main subjects that opened a world of thought to me.  

“Placing reproductive justice understandings of body sovereignty in dialogue with food justice possibilities opens meaningful dialogue about the complexities of choice language, while also acknowledging its political salience in reproductive health and policy.” (P.40) 

How do we talk about health between mediums? How does the language surrounding our bodies change when we talk about food versus when we talk about abortion? What would happen if we reversed it, would it be better? Is one way better, have we yet to find the best way to dictate the rules of our own bodily autonomy to another person over a large scale?  

My next reading was arguably my favorite from the quarter. Entitled “From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food” by Arlene Voski Avakian and Barbara Haber, it took a deep dive into the creation and “life” if you can call it that, of Betty Crocker, probably the most notable marketing character in American corporate history. Created by General Mills in 1921 and taking to the radio in 1923, Betty Crocker was quick to become the guiding voice of housewives across the United States. Multiple times the essay eludes to the idea of housewives needing guidance, and feeling some anxiety or confusion in their position. Betty Crocker was created as the antidote to this, the perfect housewife serving as both a mentor to the real housewives of America after the First World War, and a marketing ploy for the General Mills Company. But who was Betty Crocker and what was her hold on American kitchens?  

As described in a 1957 business publication, “Ideally, the corporate character is a woman, between the ages of 32 and 40, attractive, but not competitively so, mature but youthful-looking, competent yet warm, understanding but not sentimental, interested in the consumer but not involved with her,” This is a statement full of contradictions, a perfect balance possible only because she was created first on paper and written into existence. There’s nothing wrong at face value with the creation of a blown up, overly exaggerated character, but she was written and marketed as a goal, and in the 1950’s her name was known by 99% of American housewives. It is apparent how much this demographic internalized and craved the idea of this perfect housewife figure, as every television show featuring Betty Crocker was met with lackluster results, seemingly due to the disconnect from the perfect housewife voiceover to the real life woman with real life flaws visible to the viewers.  

This once again brings us back to the earlier mentioned idea of a womans responsibility within a system she is subservient in, most easily demonstrated with the opening credits of her 1951 show. While Betty stands without a husband in view, two small children in tow, the voice overs message contradicts the visual. “Homemaking. A womans most rewarding way of life”. Home making, child rearing, whatever term you wish to apply to it I am not one to argue that it is hard, full time work. The issue with this statement and it’s time of release was that there were very few careers available to women, and General Mills push for Betty Crocker seemed less to guide women as they said, and more to subdue them, make them happy to live lives in limitation due to rulings of the opposite sex.  

My third text was “The Ecofetish: Green Consumerism in Womens Magazines” by Alexandra Nutter Smith, an article examining a case study done across four popular womans magazines that compared and contrasted the marketing tactics used in their Earth Day equivalent issues. The study was looking specifically for evidence of greenwashing that promoted the reader to order more consumables in the name of conservation. Very early in this reading we get back to the key theme, Smith starting strong sating; 

“…there is growing social acceptance of the idea that women have unique environmental agency and an obligation to ensure that their families are living in an environmentally responsible manner. Thus we are seeing a surge in green commercialism that primarily targets women, who are now expected to take responsibility for addressing environmental problems that are largely the result of patriarchal capitalist expansion.”  

Most of the articles studied demonstrate just this, an emphasis on the womans need to purchase in order to fulfill her responsibility to the environment, meanwhile the companies that produce said products will continue to degrade the environment, which we know to have a direct correlation to our bodies.   This article also highlighted the importance of personal narrative when pushing for climate based policy’s, showing how their most effective examples of greenwashing were those in which the woman felt to be directly effected by the contents of the ad.  

My final reading was a chapter from “Skim, Dive, Surface” by Jenea Cohn, a book on digital reading and annotation. The first half of the chapter focused on the way in which we absorb information, the ways in which our mind works differently when directed by our ears versus our eyes, paper versus screen, and highlights on the way that throughout time, we have always feared and often disliked the next step in literacy progression. There may have been good reason in many circumstances as when print it rose quickly, and many places of learning found themselves without enough physical space for the influx of information they were receiving, and at a complete loss of a way to filter for relevant information.  

The second half of the chapter focuses on this second idea, how we must filter through mountains of knowledge now readily at our disposal. If print rose fast, the internet rose faster and is still rising. This chapter demonstrates why we must embrace digital reading as the way of the future, the further we progress down the human timeline the more knowledge collective knowledge we have to store and organize. As a species that values and builds hierarchies on the collection and retention of knowledge, we have to have an organized system to share it. I will be continuing with this text into next quarter and developing my own concepts about food literacy using Cohens metaphor of “Skim, Dive Surface”.  

This quarter started as an exploration of food and gender politics through digital annotation and ended with a key theme that was visible through three texts and that could be taken into a much deeper exploration. I am thrilled to be taking the digital annotation work into the next quarter and I know there is so much more for to study in this genre.  

“The fixity of language in print itself also imbued print with the kind of trust that we might recognize today: if an idea is printed down and a particular word or idea is presented in a singular way, then that must be the definitive form of the idea intended by the author.” (Pg. 53)

This was the final week of readings for this quarter and it was rather bittersweet, while I am very excited to move into my next quarter ILC, I felt a connection to some of these texts that I felt like I haven’t gotten in any of my other Evergreen studies. Finishing this chapter of Skim, Dive, Surface was such a good way to round out this quarter and lead into the next one, as it explores the ways in which we have progress throughout time as learners, archivists, and holders of knowledge as a species.

The second half of this chapter moves away from the idea of how we absorbed and reflect upon knowledge based on the way we consume it, and focuses more on the ways in which we collect and sift through the mountains of knowledge that we have acquired over time. My takeaways were that this chapter demonstrates why we must embrace digital reading as the way of the future, the further we progress down the human timeline the more knowledge collective knowledge we have to store and organize. As a species that values and builds hierarchies on the collection and retention of knowledge, we have to have an organized system to share it.

One of the headings that struck me was entitled “A Fear of Losing Authority: Will Reading Technologies Prevent Us from Understanding What Information Is Authoritative”. The section itself was about the struggle of assuring credibility among a flood of information, and how the introduction of the press and household book ownership contributed to the idea that the information in books was fixed factually. While I would have to go back and look at my notes from Winter and Spring, I did a brief reading on the Guttenberg Parenthesis that feels like it may be even more relevant to my work now. And while this is a noteworthy concept, I actually found myself thinking of this mentioned heading further in the chapter.

“Once education became compulsory for children in the nineteenth-century Western world, the chief obligation for schools was to discipline and manage the swarms of children who needed to be in classroom spaces. Ideas were dangerous and classrooms were spaces to help students manage dangerous information and to cultivate obedience toward instructors and institutions of authority.” (Pg. 61)

Breaking down this passage is revealing. Schools were overwhelmed in many ways it seemed, not only were they seeing an influx of students, but they were also at an influx of knowledge and had to assign the best way to organize and store it. Their top priority had to be creating a system that could hold more learners than they had ever been, as well as managing their learning and behavior. The suggestion that ideas are dangerous is not a new one, but I was surprised to see it so brazenly typed out (that is one of the things I love about this book, the writing catches you off guard in a way that invokes so many questions).

But it is truly the last part of the passage that brought up so much for me. “classrooms were spaces to help students manage dangerous information and to cultivate obedience toward instructors and institutions of authority” Alone this seems to have more to do with questions of our education system, but when you consider removing the barriers of written text literature, and instead replacing it with online reading and digital annotation such as what we do with Hypothes.is, it all falls into place a little more. If we wish to change our education system from one that teaches us who the authority is and how we should treat it, we need to learn in a way that allows us access to more than what is assigned to us, and to share our ideas regardless of those who fear their danger.

Next week will be spent working on a summary of the reading from this quarter, writing my evals, and completing my ILC proposal for next quarter.

“How could they possibly think that words that have been written down can do more than remind those who already know what the writing is about?” (Nehamas & Woodruff, 1997, p. 551) 

This week and the start of Skim, Dive, Surface by Jenea Cohn marks the beginning of the end of this ILC, as I move into my final reading and start to summarize my thoughts for Evaluation Week. Skim, Dive, Surface examines the way that reading, learning, and general communication has changed throughout history to evolve into what we are now, a print-based learning society.

The first chapter, entitled The Chained Book: A historical overview of reading technology in higher education opens with an analysis of Henery Boughton’s 1878 painting The Waining Honeymoon. It depicts a young man and a wong woman sitting next to each other, though a few feet apart, on an outdoor bench. The young man looks contentedly absorbed in his book while his assumed new bride looks on at him. Zooming in on her eyes, Cohn describes her look as longing and lonely, but I also see a layer of jealousy and contempt, there is a level of anger for the technology that has taken her lovers attention from her. Behind them you can see two diverging paths, a metaphor for the ways in which they would live their lives, separated in the same painting.

Cohn uses this to pivot into a comparison of the present day, the pictures of families separated by phones and laptop screens, buses full of people with their headphones in. She does this not to shame the reader, or anyone in fact, for using these technologies, but instead to demonstrate that this fear as you may call it, is not new to our society, and that as long as communication technology has been evolving we have been at risk of losing the “learning from listening” aspect.

Oral learning is a theme that follows further into the chapter, discussing Walter Ongs three major eras, first orality, print literacy, and second orality. To cite directly “However, he says in an era of secondary orality, the impulse to communicate orally comes not from a particular need to communicate to a larger audience, but rather, out of a reaction to the inward thinking that print reading encourages” (1982 p. 134).

To reiterate, we no longer present information orally out of need, but out of wanting to spread ideas and discuss what we learn from text. I want to question here if there is a difference in the way we conversate if we are or are not taking written notes? I’m not sure if this is a directly correlated question but it does feel related.

I was also particularly interested in the idea of electracy. It is a word and a concept I had never heard of before and I think it summarizes a key aspect of my ILC work. “The concept of electracy can be defined as the new sets of skills and strategies necessary for a communicator to convey their meaning effectively with digital technologies.” (p.39) As we move further into the age of digital humanities, electracy may be the element of mastery needed for effective learning.

I will be taking a week off for Thanksgiving Break, and returning in Week 9 to finish this chapter and begin my wrap-up thoughts for this ILC. I am writing the continuation of this book into my Winter ’23 ILC.

“The potential of environmental communication in womens magazines to be a site of politically motivated behavior seems to have been wholly subsumed by the ecofetish.” (Alexandra Nutter Smith 2010)

This week I finished reading Alexandra Nutter Smiths’ “The Ecofetish” a 2010 analytical article that examined the presence of greenwashed marketing and ecofetishism in four different magazines marketed towards women. The magazines in question were Vanity Fair, Glamor, Marie Claire, and Self, and the article specifically examined 2009 articles from each surrounding Earth Day to see what kind of information and marketing was being presented to women.

In week 5 I focused heavily on the introductory sections that gave some context to the exploratory questions and ideas of the article and some past findings. This week I finished the article and got into the heavier analysis section. The last time I was on this reading I write about using voter engagement rhetoric for climate policy engagement and action, based on the idea that voter engagement rhetorics are based on the idea of personal narrative. This time I picked up on a similar idea, which is that personal narrative is already being used by large corporations for the opposite purpose, by shifting the blame of the climate crisis onto consumers, specifically women, they are creating a personal narrative that stirs emotions and creates a sense of personal responsibility. I am now even more curious about the roots of voter engagement and civic engagement rhetoric and its applications t the creation of personal narrative.

I also picked up on some very Betty Crocker-like themes, first with the description of the average reader “Readers of all four magazines are likely to be in their mid-to late thirties, to be college educated, and to have a yearly household income around or slightly above seventy thousand dollars” which feels eerily similar to to the way General Mills listed the qualities of America’s favorite housewife. Another was the way in which the personal shopping choices of the woman were made to be moral choices she was making for herself and her household, as well as an answer to many of the worlds environmental issues.

The analysis found that, out of the four magazines, only Vanity Fair had published an article relevant to Earth Day that wouldn’t be classified as ecofetished. Articles published were often glorified shopping lists, further encouraging consumerism, but with a steeper price point. In fact, It’s noted in reference to a guest editor for Glamour

“Referring to the significant price tag attached to some of the items, the tagline proclaims,’Good-for-the-planet stuff is a fine reason to spend more,’ again associating a readiness to spend money with environmental concern “

I also really enjoyed the author’s comment “In other words, the prestige of buying expensive and trendy green products does not require a political investment (i.e., substantive knowledge or commitment to a cause). Rather, green purchasing can simply be part of a prestige cycle.” In context to the idea that we do not need to consume differently as these magazines are pushing us to do, it is that we need to consume less. But I believe that without that personal narrative aspect we will not achieve a level of commitment from society as a whole to make this change.

Next week I will be starting Skim, Dive, Surface: Teaching Digital Reading by Jenea Cohn, which I anticipate to be my last reading of the quarter due to the length of the chapters. I am not entirely sure how far I will get but as I plan to continue the digital reading aspect for a good while, I am hoping to carry this book forward with me. I will also in the next week be proposing my ILC for next quarter so I will post some pre-information about that when it’s ready!

“The environmental humanities, by contrast, envision ecological crises fundamentally as questions of socioeconomic inequality, cultural difference, and divergent histories, values, and ethical frameworks” (Ursula K. Heise 2021)

This week was a little different than the others, as I had the pleasure of assisting and presenting at Dr. Sarah Williams’s Hypothes.is workshop on Tuesday and Wednesday, as well as getting to participate in her class seminar and hear the end of her Tuesday lecture. My work this week was also assigned to her students in Forest, Farm, Shellfish Garden: Experiential Learning and were focused on the rise of a new field of study; the Environmental Humanities.

Environmental Humanities is the interdisciplinary, cross-genre study of the natural environment, focused on collaborative discussions for solutions and crossing the divide between the sciences and the humanities. Much of the research and readings I have done, not just in this class but over my last year with Dr. Williams, has fallen under this umbrella, and I am especially curious as I am starting to familiarize myself with the world of academia.

The two texts that I read alongside the class were The Cambridge Environmental Humanities Introduction and The Routledge Introduction to the Environmental Humanities both of which detail the authors’ views of the purpose of expanding to this specification, and the ways in which the environmental humanities can better us as a species if we chose to follow it’s theories.

I particularly connected with this quote from The Routledge Introduction to the Environmental Humanities

“But as the sociologist Kari Norgaard, the philosopher Dale Jamieson, and the climatologist Mike Hulme, among others, have shown, simple insistence on the scientific facts remains politically ineffective when it is disconnected from the political, social, cultural, affective, and rhetorical forms that the climate problem takes in different communities”

As I noted in my annotation, I have a few years of political organizing experience, a profession I fully intend to return to after college, and this really reminds me of voter engagement rhetoric. When you’re working in elections you have two main goals, getting voters to like your candidate, and getting voters to vote for your candidate. Obviously, there are goals underneath this umbrella that meet the everyday campaign life expectations but all with the overarching goal of getting a voter to put effort and time into something they don’t have to do.

Climate change action and policy advocacy will have to be driven by similar methods that are used to encourage voters. Narrative and storytelling are key aspects of campaigning, making people feel connected to a candidate will motivate them to complete the task that the candidate asks of them. The environmental humanities acknowledge the much needed human emotion aspect of climate policy as current election organizing strategies do.

I also got to develop a small presentation of my ILC work so far this quarter which ran about 10 minutes. I was so excited to get a chance to present about the work that I’ve been doing, especially to people who have some context as to what I am working on. I presented some work that I did in Spring talking about a Stuart Hall quote in one of our earlier readings. I used a map to show my personal history with Lancashire County and how close to it I was born, and my personal experiences with not truly understanding the roots and colonial history of what I had leaned to be a British staple, tea. I got some good engagements with Sarahs students after and I am really hoping to get to do some more work with them in the future, and hopefully write it into my ILC for Winter.

Next week I am planning on finishing The Ecofetish and starting to dig into further understanding digital annotation with Skim, Dive, Surface.

“Through traditional feminine roles as mothers and nurturers, women have been theorized as somehow closer to the natural, nonhuman world.” – (Alexandra Nutter Smith 2010)

This week I have chosen to read “The Ecofetish: Green Consumerism in Women’s Magazines” by Alexandra Nutter Smith. This article was mentioned in Dr. Vaughns “Choosing Wisley” and the topic of eco-feminism felt incredibly relevant to the subject of my work this quarter so I wanted to make sure I made time for at least one of the mentioned articles. This one struck my interest, it is about the marketing of faux sustainable and greenwashed products to women, specifically in women’s magazines. Betty Crocker was a write-in columnist, the lines of communication we use are vitally relevant to the cultures of our kitchens.

This essay further highlights a theme that I have seen reflected in the first two papers, the unfair burden placed on women to be responsible for the maintenance and results of a system in which they are expected to play a subservient role in. Specifically, it highlights two aspects.

The first is the responsibility of women to make most of the buying decisions for a household because they are doing most of the home shopping. The essay recognizes that most women are working outside of the home full time on top of these duties and that we are still complying with a male-pleasing social structure because of this division of labor. Yet women are not seen as the “providers” of the family, despite shouldering the majority of the responsibility they are still seen are the helpers, the support staff.

The second was on the way that greenwashed products and lifestyles were marketed to women in these women’s magazines. Once again the responsibility was being pushed onto women, conservation solutions that should have been done by the corporations creating the problems (or better yet not make them) were marketed into products and advertised in these women’s magazines.

I’m excited to finish this article next week, and get started on my next text which will get me better prepared for the Week 6 workshop I will be helping with!

“One of the best ways a woman can express her personality is through the foods she serves. Mixes are not designed to destroy that creative instinct—but for the busy home-maker, they are the base. The basic product is supplied—the frosting, filling or topping is left to her.” (Ellen Pennell [Ann Pillsbury], “Food Secrets from the Experts,” Forecast, February 1948)

This week I was reading “‘I Guarantee’ Betty Crocker and Women in the Kitchen ” by Laura Shapiro, which is one essay from a collection of essays called “From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies”. This is among my favorites of the texts I have read on food studies up until this point in my education, I found it compelling, informative, and thought provoking. I could probably do my annotations over again and have completely different thoughts and questions but I am very satisfied with what I have taken from it thus far.

This essay focused on Betty Crocker, the fictional character created by the General Mills Company in 1921 as a marketing scheme, and is arguably one of the most successful of her kind, the text says:

“By the early 1950s, General Mills surveys showed that 99 percent of American
housewives were familiar with Betty Crocker’s name, more than two-thirds correctly identified her with General Mills and its products, and some 20 percent spontaneously said “Betty Crocker” when asked to name the home economist they found ‘most helpful”. (Shapiro 2005, P.33)

The success of Betty Crocker was partially the success of the marketers and General Mills, and partially due to the recent end of World War I. What I am most curious about is the relationship between Betty Crocker, who she was and what she represented, and the American housewife, who was the provider of food to the American family. A quote from “The Current State of Live Trademarks,” March 22, 1957 “Ideally, the corporate character is a woman, between the ages of 32 and 40, attractive, but not competitively so, mature but youthful-looking, competent yet warm, understanding but not sentimental, interested in the consumer but not involved with her.”

Betty Crocker was not created to be a friend to the American Housewife, but more a teacher or a role model. Betty Crocker was perfect, and it was easy for her to be so as a static picture on the side of a box, or voiceless words in the newspaper. But if these were the standards laid out for the woman leading American housewives, what does that say of the contradictory standards laid upon the real housewives? Was every woman supposed to be mature yet youthful looking? Attractive but not competitively so? Warm and understanding but not sentimental? Upon first read it seems absurd that they would so blatantly describe their ideals for this woman, but when laid next to the perhaps less spoken (although Andrew Tates still looms) standards for women today and they are eerily familiar.

Betty Crocker was a powerful woman in the corporate marketing world. Her name and picture were on cookbooks, box mixes, and cookware. Her words were in the paper and on the radio, it is even described in the text the ways in which she held a position of power over her male cohost, but it is notable that the time in which Betty Crocker was faced with her biggest failure was when she was launched on T.V. It seems that Betty Crocker in the flesh was not as appealing to the U.S public. General Mills ran her on many shows with a variety of formats, guests, and ideas all with little to no success, it seems that the magic of the perfect housewife, the “living trademark” did not translate to TV. In essence, Betty Crocker needed to be perfect to be Betty Crocker.

The chapter ends on a surprising note, discussing not Betty Crocker but Julia Child. I have a Julia Child cookbook, and the comparison they give between Betty Crocker’s promises of perfect and timely cakes, versus Julia Childs’s no promise, anyone can cook attitude was refreshing. I will most likely start on another essay from this collection next week as I enjoyed this one so much, and I will also be looking for more writings by this author.

“Ideally, the corporate character is a woman, between the ages of 32 and 40, attractive, but not competitively so, mature but youthful-looking, competent yet warm, understanding but not sentimental, interested in the consumer but not involved with her,” Tide, March 22, 1957

Now the new quarter is in full swing I am making really good progress through my texts. I have officially finished “Choosing Wisley” by Dr. Rachel Vaughn, in the coming weeks I will publish a short reflection of the essay where I will go into more detail about my learnings and their applications in current affairs but I do want to take a moment to highlight the key points of moralized consumerism, corporate blame, and the greenwashing of nutrition

What is at the heart of pollution and the rising climate crisis? Big businesses may try and point us in the direction of plastic straws and grocery bags, too many cars on the road, and too many people eating meat or food grown with pesticides. And while no one can reasonably argue that all of these are issues of moderation, they shoulder the blame for the Climate Crisis onto the individual consumer rather than take responsibility for the fact that a majority of greenhouse gas emissions can be traced back to a handful of mega-corporations.

Another note is on greenwashing and the way that as a society we have shifted to a “good food bad food” model, placing food with words like “organic” and “all-natural” on a pedestal, encouraging consumers to only opt for these brands and options, and once again transferring the blame back to the individual. It also completly overlooked the scocioeconomics, foods that have been given these greenwashed titles are notably more expensive than their generic counterparts and just not an accessable option for many people.

This week I also started “‘I Guarantee’ Betty Crocker and Woman in the Kitchen” by Laura Shapiro, which details the fascinating history of Betty Crocker, the completly fictcious character created by the General Mills brand. It s one essay that is a part of a mauch larger collection of essays about food and gender studies, aptly titled “From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies”. This chapter goes in depth about the history of Betty Crocker, her creation after World War II and her many evolutions through print, radio and TV. I will have a better update next week when I have finished but I am already really enjoying it and I think it will have some really good connections to my first reading.

“Insights provided as to low-income consumers could nonetheless prove invaluable to activists open to a variety of intersecting sociopolitical barriers to food preparation. That is, if the point of challenging the value of homemade meals and food system problems is not just about getting people to eat the “right” foods but changing conditions systemically.” Vaughn 2017

This week was primarily focused on “‘Choosing’ Wisley: Paralleling Food Sovereignty and Reproductive Justice” by Rachel A. Vaughn. I have a few pages left and next week I will be moving on to my new text, “From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food” by Arlene Voski Avakian and Barbara Haber.

The themes in the second half of this essay focus heavily on what the Vaughn astutely calls “moralized consumerism”. Starting with an evaluation of the proposed alternatives of our standard consumer options and their real-world implications (notes on greenwashing and the economic barriers that come with an “organic” diet) and practicality, the essay then leads into a discussion of the responsibility that is placed on women, specifically wives and mothers, to play a very specific and subservient role in the food system.

Vaughn cites many texts in this section that seem quite relevant and I will be adding them to my list of texts for extra exploration should I finish my originally planned texts. These include Amanda Marcotts’s “Let’s Stop Idealizing the Home-Cooked Family Dinner”, followed by Joel Saltines 2014 critique of the piece. Another one was Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbra Kingslvers, which is a book I actually already own but have not read.

I am looking forward to week three and finishing this essay!

“The willingness to see feminism as a lifestyle choice rather than a
political commitment reflects the class nature of the movement” -Bell Hooks 1984

Back to school! The start of the new quarter was anything but calm, but I am excited to be engaging in digital annotation again, and so far my reading in “‘Choosing’ Wisley: Paralleling Food Sovereignty and Reproductive Justice” has been not only compelling but incredible topical. I submitted my final ILC language (which I will have available to view on this site) on June 22nd, just two days before the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the most notable court case concerning reproductive justice in all of U.S History.

This text revolves around the intersections of food and gender politics and its geosocial implications, highlighting the way that separating food sovereignty and reproductive justice further sets back progress on both issues. Author Rachel A. Vaughn highlights specific examples of this, such as the attacks on the SNAP/EBT programming and the “welfare queen” campaign. Not only does this highlight the government’s knowledge that there is an obvious dissonance between government and food access, but it was also clearly a strategy to demonize the programs,s to justify their defunding.

I am hoping to finish most of this essay in the next week or so, and I will be looking forward to sharing new highlights as the quarter goes on.