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.