ALLISON, BENTLEY, WRIGHT
Bentley:
Questions to think on:
1) How have beliefs about what to feed children changed over time in America? What non-food factors changed American children’s eating habits?
2) Why did breast-feeding decline in the US? What role does Bentley believe canned fruits and vegetables played in this decline? How was this related to Americans’ faith in science and technology?
3) What role did the discovery of vitamins play in the marketing of industrially produced food for children? What role do this and similar discoveries play today? Does the addition of vitamins really make industrially processed food healthy? What do the food manufacturers tell us?
4) According to Bentley, how did the introduction of canned food change breastfeeding practices? Why?
5) What kinds of qualities did the Gerber brand come to embody? How did it acquire these attributes?
6) Why do you think women in the early 2oth century would have valued the “freedom” and “mobility” that pre-prepared foods promised? What larger “outside meanings” or social changes of the period would encourage this?
Wright:
Words to know:
matrilineal
Questions to think on:
1) How is breastmilk part of Navajo spiritual life? What role do it and other bodily fluids play in creating proper people with proper behavior? How is bottlefeeding linked to aberrant behavior?
2) Why do some Navajo believe that feeding artificial formula makes children into “cow people”? What do they mean by that?
3) What psychological benefits do the Navajo believe breastfeeding has? How does it link people together?
4) How do the Navajo believe breastfeeding contributes to the reproduction and maintenance of Navajo culture?
Allison:
Words to know:
arbitrary
ideology
ISA
SA
Questions to think on:
1`) According to Allison’s reading of Althusser, what’s the difference between a repressive state apparatus (SA) and an ideological state apparatus (ISA)? Which do you think there are more of in contemporary market democracies?
2) What does an ISA do? How does it naturalize power and inequality?
3) Allison says “ideology is potent because it becomes not only ours but us.” What does she mean, and how does she illustrate this principle using obentos?
4)What are the structuring principles for an obento, and how do they contrast with American principles for organizing and presenting food?
5) What does Allison mean when she says obento are a “second order myth”? What is the second meaning that takes over from the first, pragmatic meaning?
6) Why does Allison say that obentos are a device to “socialize children and mothers into the gendered subjectivities they are expected to assume in a political order desired and directed by the state”? Do you agree that schools aim to teach children the places they will assume in the larger social order?
7) What does the construction and consumption of obentos teach children about what it means to be Japanese?
8) How do obentos teach parents and children to submit to the authority of “group life”? Of the state?
9) If, as Allison says, “women are what they are through the products they produce,” what do the industrially produced foods we sampled in class make American women into?
QUESTIONS TO WRITE ON:
1) How do ways of feeding children shape ideas and practices of gender? Using data from at least two of this week’s readings, describe how parents’ performance of gender is shaped by ideologies of child feeding.
2) Compare the foods you evaluated in our “kids food tasting” with the obento boxes that Allison describes. How might the foods you tasted be part of an “ideological state apparatus”? Do you think the foods we evaluated play a role in disciplining parental behavior or shaping parental identity?
3) What kinds of beliefs about science, health or the body are brought up in the articles we read for this week? Do you think that any of those beliefs are reflected in the claims for the foods we evaluated in class, or any other children’s foods you know of? (Hint: think about claims related to vitamin-enriched foods, or the new use of whole grains in children’s cereals….)
4) Using two foods NOT evaluated in class, describe how parents are encouraged to construct and display their sentiments about their children through the purchase, preparation, or giving of particular foods. Are they generally encouraged to express their feelings through the use of homemade or industrially prepared foods? What kinds of foods, and why do you think those foods are particularly encouraged? And how does this compare to the way that Japanese, Navajo, or early 20th century American parents were encouraged to display their sentiments?
5) Anne Allison tells us “ideology is so potent because it becomes not only ours but us.” Explain what Allison means, and illustrate it using at least two examples from our readings and one from your own knowledge or experience.