In a recent lawsuit, Welch’s fruit snacks had been sued for false advertising. Melanie Warner, author of Pandora's Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal, points out how food companies deceive consumers with false implications of their product’s origin; ”Rather than tout their technological prowess, modern food companies seek to highlight the pastoral origins of their products.”(61). Welch’s fruit snack, like many other industrial foods, advertises its product to have a wholesome source. The snack features its “pastoral origins” by displaying many fresh fruits on its package and having beneath its brand name the phrase: “Family Farm Owned”. These labels make consumers think the product was made on green pastors, rather than dreary assembly lines. The fruit snacks also proudly displays in bold green lettering that it has 100% vitamin C and 25% vitamin A and B. The suggestion of farm origins implies to consumers that these vitamins come from the “real fruit” used in the snack. In reality, the Fruit snack’s beneficial vitamins are introduced to the product after its creation. Welch’s fruit snacks alone do not have any notable health benefits, so similarly to the process cereal goes through to obtain their so called health benefits, “manufacturers compensate by adding in synthetic vitamins.” (Warner, 63).
The fruit snacks are about as nutritious as candy even with these artificially added vitamins, yet are perceived by the public as a healthy snack. Welch’s fruit snacks goal is not to be healthy, but to be a tasty product that people will enjoy and also believe to be healthy. In the article, The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food, a success in the industrial food industry, Bob Drane, is quoted on how to food industry thinks in order to sell product: “Discover what consumers want to buy and give it to them with both barrels….How do marketers often translate these ‘rules’? Our limbic brains love sugar, fat, salt…So formulate products to deliver these…” (25).
The main concern of Welch’s is to create a product people will love, not a healthy product. Welch’s fruit snacks is mainly made from corn ingredients and sugar. They formulated their product by using sugar and sweet substances to construct a snack people’s brains would love so that they could make a profit. After creating a perfect snack, like all Industrial foods, they then use a deceptive marketing ploy that borderlines lies to further encourage people to buy their products. The key word being borderline. The lawsuit was unsuccessful due to the fact that there is technically fruit in the fruit snacks.
According to this article, a North Carolina apple town is dangerously low on its supply of apple pickers. Today, the vast majority of US crops are picked by hand. These hands mostly belong to Hispanic migrant workers. Due to recent legislation in regards to immigrants, it has become more difficult for these apple farms to recruit apple pickers. In Tracie McMillan’s, The American way of Eating, the author experiences the lives of migrant workers firsthand. From her experience she enlightens us as to why farm work is dominated by immigrant workers. The farm work she takes part in is extremely taxing and has even been known to claim worker's lives. American citizens often do not seek such demanding employment. The low pay and high work load only makes the most desperate seek this line of work. The lack of American farm workers is evident in McMillan’s book. When she, a white American citizen, gets work as a fruit picker she gets odd looks and many of the immigrant workers question why she is there.
The job hardships, government crackdown on illegal immigration as well as recent H-2A program enacted to help legal migrant workers has made finding workers significantly more expensive and difficult for farmers. This related back when McMillian talks about how there has to be “certain trade-offs made in progress” (30). By creating the H-2A program in an effort to improve legal migrant labor working conditions, the trade-off was to increase the cost to hire these migrant workers. As a result, these North Carolina apple farmers can barely afford what few workers they can find. This trade off would have caused larger farms to seek new ways to harvest their crops. The article says that these apple farmers are losing thousands with the labor shortage. Such a significant loss in income would make a bigger farm turn to mechanization. McMiIllan talks about how large growers resort to machines when workers seek more pay. To big farms, this is a far cheaper and doable option than increasing worker pay. However, not all farms can afford this switch as evident by this news article. These small apple farms in North Carolina can not sustain such machinery nor can they spend the money to take better care of migrant workers. They rely on cheap labor that they aren’t accountable for. Unfortunately for them, they can no longer find or afford this cheap labor.
This article discusses the efforts of a Kentucky non-profit called the Food Literacy Project. The non-profit is trying to educate people of urban, poor areas about alternative food. The organization is geared towards educating poor children about organic foods using a 1995 Chevrolet truck. A man, named Larry Moore, drives town to town showcasing the fresh produce growing in the back of his pickup truck in an effort to spread awareness of alternative food choices. In addition to the truck, the non-profit is noted to also work with local farmers and volunteers to educate as many people as possible. The article suspects food deserts to be prime reason people don't have "access to fresh and healthy food” after mentioning the targeted neighborhoods of the non-profit need to improve their health. In an article by Tracie McMillian, she talks about how there are far more factors to the food obesity problems besides a “single fatal flaw”(2). In this case, the article makes out food deserts to be this flaw and fails to mention any other reason for poor nutrition among the poor being reached by the Food Literacy Project.
The article is very clearly biased. The organization is clearly aimed toward an African American populace, yet makes no reference of race throughout the entire article. According to Julie Guthamn's paper, the alternative food movement is one that is heavily influenced by race. When the article mentions food deserts, it fails to mention how “food deserts are primarily populated by African Americans” (432). Also, the pictures of the article show a white Larry Moore displaying his truck to African American children. In addition to this, the only individual interviewed for the article who was not part of the non-profit was named DeAndre. This is most commonly an African American name. The white author of this article interviews mostly white activists and is very clearly pro-alternative food. The author, rather than intentionally ignoring the racial differences, is likely one of the many whites who does “not [see] whiteness as a racial category” (434). Similarly to the students of Julie Guthman’s paper, the author and non-profit employees see alternative food as what is best for everyone. The volunteers of the Food Literacy Project want everyone to have a “hands-on approach” when it comes to their food and believe their movement to be universally beneficial. The author and Food Literacy Project employees don’t seem to realize their “projects seem to be coded white” (442) and push their ideals of alternative foods without realizing its racial implications.
This article reveals how the dating app, Tinder, is used and why it has recently gained so much popularity. Tinder allows users to find local singles in search of love, hook-ups or friendship with a single swipe. The main users of this app are college aged individuals. The article credits Tinder’s success to being the ”‘McDonaldization’ of attraction”. In George Ritzer’s The McDonaldization of Society, the author defines McDonaldization as the process in which fast food principles are integrated into society. Ritzer goes on to name the four main attributes of McDonaldization: Efficiency, Calculability, Predictability and Control. Tinder follows all these aspects of McDonaldization.
The app is efficient because it, as the article puts it, offers “(shortcuts) to the selection process”. The app easily and quickly allows users to find a match with the simple command of swiping right. The app just as easily allows users to reject others by swiping to the left. Tinder has calculability because it allows users to quantify how many matches they have. In the article, an interviewed student revealed she had “40 plus matches”. The user’s clear pride in having “40 plus matches” implied she used Tinder to seek a large quantity of matches rather than find one match of high quality. This further ties into calculability because it supports that Tinder follows how McDonaldized systems “emphasize quantitative rather than qualitative aspects” (14). The article points out how the app is predictable because “users will only be matched… if they mutually like each other”. McDonaldization’s predictability element is based off the claim people “prefer a world in which there are few surprises” (14). Allowing users to interact only with those that they choose to comforts them since it “offers no surprises” (14). Finally, the app has control because the article describes it to limit user’s matches to other “users in the same geographical area”. This limitation restricts user’s match options to a controlled radius.
In addition to following these elements of McDonaldization, Tinder’s overall success can further be credited to the fact that the app is entirely run by technology. Since the app allows users to form relationships through a phone, the users are assured that their “products and services are consistent” (103). This “utilization of nonhuman technology” (102) falls under the fourth dimension of McDonaldization and greatly increases the app's efficiency and ability to control its users. The app's success with following the general rules of McDonaldization as well as being entirely run by technology is what has allowed it to become incredibly popular and is what will keep it popular for years to come.
This article discusses a possible way to regulate pollutants. Climate change will have a dramatic negative affect on our agriculture within the next 34 years. According to Mark Hertsgaard’s How to Feed the World After Climate Change, by the year 2050 the world population will increase to 9.3 billion people while our ability to grow crops to sustain this population will become significantly harder, if at all possible. Because of this inevitable threat, the UN has come up with a minor solution know as climate-smart agriculture, or CSA. The goal of CSA is to increase productivity while decreasing greenhouse gases by creating a carbon market. This market would give companies a limit as to how much carbon dioxide they can omit. There are many opposed to this solution, claiming it to be ineffective against issues that matter and only putting a greater strain on small farmers. However, it is also seen as the first step in heading towards an actual solution. This article relays both good news and bad news. On one hand, it’s good that that a major government is addressing the very real issues resulting from climate change. On the other hand, their solution is considered a “meaningless label” that will achieve no major accomplishments. The world is in dire need of a real solution. We are approaching what Hertsgaard referred to as “Generation Hot” (3). Our climate will soon be the “hottest most volatile climate human civilization has ever known” (3), and yet many people, as the article points out, consider climate change to be make-believe rather than reality. This CSA solution is not nearly enough to combat human’s over-consumption of environmentally devastating products. According to Rethinking the Meat Guzzler by Mark Bittman, the production of meat alone generates a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases in addition to gobbling up a large amount of resources to create a small amount of meat. For real change to help our plant, governments need to stop subsidizing so much meat and industrial farm crop production and people need to change their dietary demands. According to Meat Eater’s Guide to Climate Change and Health, doing something as small as reducing a person’s meat intake by one meal per week would cause a huge reduction in the creation of greenhouse gases. This UN attempt at a solution is not enough to stop the imminent destruction of our current way of food production. The fate of our earth and species relies on mankind’s willingness to change their dietary expectations.