Tag: Michelle Obama

What to Eat

 

Like everything else in our culture, food has gender associations. Steak is masculine, and salad is feminine. That’s a gross generalization, of course, but one that is valid enough for advertisers and marketers to recognize and exploit. The television commercials for Arby’s restaurants are an obvious example, wherein a narrator announces in his sonorous baritone that Arby’s has “the meats.” It’s not easy to imagine a female narrator making the same pronouncement.

Marketing campaigns and the tactics advertisers deploy in them are a window into a culture’s true underlying motivations, into its id, because advertisers understand the greater value for them and their clients of appealing to emotion over reason. They don’t create cultural stereotypes; they only exploit them. What follows is a short list, by no means comprehensive, of the preferred foods of men and women as advertisers see them.


For men – steak, hamburgers, pizza, beer, hot peppers, sausages, peanuts, fried chicken, barbecue, chili, chips, liquor, bacon, salami, shepherd’s pie, the keto diet (when employed as a scientific-sounding excuse for eating more meat).

Michelle Obama at Miriam’s Kitchen 3-6-09
Michelle Obama serving food on March 5, 2009 at Miriam’s Kitchen, a local non-profit organization that provides healthy, nutritious meals to the homeless in Washington, D.C.. White House photo by Joyce Boghosian.

For women – salads, cupcakes, chocolate, wine, baked chicken, vegetarian lasagna, quiche, souffle, casseroles, soups, cottage cheese.

What a lot of nonsense! It would be easy to blame advertisers for gender prejudices toward food if it weren’t for the reality that they only exploit and reinforce the prejudices already held by their target audiences. Having enough quality food to eat should be the first priority for people of any gender. Of the two stereotyped cuisines, however, the one supposedly preferred by men is overall unhealthier for the eaters and for the planet. Maybe leave the testosterone aside and make room on the plate for mushroom risotto, fruit salad, and an effort to help make the world a better place.
— Ed.

 

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Envy and Contempt

 

12 Then Jesus said to his host, “When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or sisters, your relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid. 13 But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, 14 and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”
— Luke 14:12-14, from the New International Version of the Bible.

It’s puzzling to watch poor and working class people watch rich people on television, such as on shows about house hunters looking at multi-million dollar properties. Many of these rich people are frivolous twits who obsess about things like granite countertops and bathroom saunas. Why don’t many of the poor folks watching these excesses feel anger and revulsion at money being thrown away on luxuries, things they themselves could never afford as they struggle to make ends meet from paycheck to paycheck? Instead they watch these programs with a kind of detached envy, commenting critically on the relative niceness of various unnecessary features.

 

As for the rich, they mostly have contempt for the poor people window watching on their lifestyles. They usually try to mask their contempt, of course, since it’s considered bad form among their peers to make a show of kicking the downtrodden. Mostly they ignore the poor, which is easy to do living in gated communities and surrounding oneself with all the accoutrements of wealth and security they can buy. It doesn’t occur to them to question the envy of their lifestyles by the poor, since it is based on the fabulous nature of material things they themselves exalt above all else. What troubles them is the contempt wafting toward them from some in the middle class.

Meals on Wheels food prep
Nancy Wilson, foreground, Meals on Wheels program manager, works along with other volunteers at the Great Falls Community Food Bank in Great Falls, Montana, preparing gravy on November 23, 2011 to be used the next day for the Thanksgiving meal. U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Katrina Heikkinen.

Historically, it has always been elements from the middle class which have led revolutions. The poor are too wrapped up in trying to survive and in slavish envy of those who have more, even when wealth is waved in their faces, but always out of reach. The middle class have the education to understand how the rich are playing them for suckers, and they have the leisure time to organize against them. They have only to inform the poor how the rich have used and manipulated them in order to gain strength from numbers. That’s easier said than done, however, and it’s a task made more difficult by the popularity among the poor of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous type entertainment in movies and television.

 

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President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama greet staff and volunteers prior to a Thanksgiving service project at the Capital Area Food Bank in Washington, D.C., on November 27, 2013. Official White House photo by Pete Souza.

This Thanksgiving and throughout the year, it is unlikely a high percentage of the rich and famous will be helping feed the poor and homeless. Giving and volunteering are largely activities engaged in by the middle class, and even the poor and working class. Strange then that the poor and working class should continue to ally themselves with the rich, to envy them their wealth and privilege and, when they vote, to often as not vote to the rich person’s tune.

It tries one’s patience and understanding to refrain from feeling contempt for a group of people who can witness the casual disregard of a leader who tosses rolls of paper towels at them after a horrific natural disaster, and who nevertheless still support that leader. Such a leader would never volunteer to feed the poor at a food bank or homeless shelter, at least not sincerely. For him, it would be nothing more than a photo opportunity he would be eager to get over with. But a division between the middle class and the working class and poor only benefits the rich, the oligarchy. Better to reach out and to serve, even when the people on the other end can often be ignorant, mean-spirited, and hateful.
— Ed.

 

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