The works we have examined this
semester have each examined different part of the commodity web, even though
most tend to favor the production side of the chain, some, like Soluri’s Banana Cultures, were able to show each
part of the commodity history quite well.
However, even Soluri had some difficulty making the dynamic between the
consumer and the middlemen lucid. In
general, foundational works on the history of consumption, such as Sold American make some generous
assumptions about the relationship between consumers and middlemen, often
giving marketers an extraordinary amount of power.
In Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures, Norton provides the best
understanding so far of how and why people consumer the goods they do. She discards biological determinism and
articulates a constructed approach, one that give primacy to close contact and
intimate social relations. While the
eras Norton is attempting to cover limits the amount she can devote to these
hyperlocal social groups, she does show how significant these interactions are
to the adoption of consumption habits.
However, since Norton’s work is mostly in the early modern period, she
does not discuss marketing in any sense of how we would use the term.
Indeed, not only marketing, but
also brands are a rather vague notion in much of what he have read. Soluri, of course, handles this the
best, by showing how notions of premium fruits developed and the importance of
demand when it comes to the crops grown.
Although Soluri gives the most attention to demand, like everyone in Andean Cocaine, Soluri’s consumers are a
bit abstract. Laura Nater’s essay
in From Silver to Cocaine is
probably the best we have seen so far on the history of brands. Although it is a bit subtle, she
clearly thinks that Cuban tobacco was the first real brand. While brands might seem, at first, a
bit outside of the realm of commodity studies, there is a close association in
terms of standardization. A brand
promises consistency in the product, and I would argue that brands, as we know them
today, evolved from nineteenth century food adulteration scandals. A brand offered a promise that its
packaging contains exactly what the label claimed. This is most clear in the case of the H. J. Heniz Company. Just as a brand promises consistence,
commodities are marketed based on a certain standard. Each bushel of number two yellow corn must contain at least
fifty-four pounds and less than five percent of the kernels can be damaged,
whereas number five yellow corn can contain as little as forty-six pounds in a
bushel and as many as fifteen percent of the kernels can be damaged. This is not much different from the marketers’
promise that Tide Ultra Stain Release cleans better than the regular Tide. If you believe the 2015 August issue of
consumer reports, the fancy Tide is more effective. I will stick with generic laundry detergent where the
retailer, rather than a consumer product conglomerate guarantees the constancy
and quality of the product.
Indeed, the differences between the standards for a drum of
fluoropolymer and for a hand of bananas is that in one case the customer are a
manufacturer and in the other case a citizen-consumer.
By examining a work takes an
empirical approach to marketing we will gain a better understanding of
push-pull dialectal. By studying
consumer habits food psychologists have learned that the reasons people eat
certain food have little to do with commonly held notions about food, such as
taste. In his 2005 book, Marketing
Nutrition, Brian Wansink takes a plethora of research on food psychology,
and presents it for the use off professionals, such as nutritionists,
marketers, academics, government bureaucrats, and researchers. Wansink’s goal is to make these specialists
aware of the psychology behind everyday decisions consumers make. Not only will this approach provide us
with a work that takes a closer look at middlemen, but this specialist method
will also give an inside perspective on the push side of consumption.
Marketing
Nutrition begins with a brief history of food habits, and efforts to change
them, during the Second World War.
Wansink then examines market segmentation from a nutritional perspective,
moves on to look at why people favor certain kinds of food. In places where Wansink requires a case
study, he defers to the soybean. A
legume that has an aura of health and, along with commodity corn, is the
foundation of industrial agriculture.
Marketing Nutrition also
scrutinizes government policy concerning obesity and food labeling, along with
campaigns to increase the consumption of fruits and vegetables. While I have not read this section yet,
I find it very telling that the various five a day type campaigns vary so much
across the world. Indeed, it seems that the particular number of recommended
servings of fruit and vegetables, and the size of those servings, have more to
do with what government thinks people can be persuaded to do rather than what
scientific evidence tells us about the amount of fruit and vegetables one
should consumer for optimum health.
Marketing
Nutrition offers a perspective that we have not seen so far, indeed, one
that we are unlikely to encounter in other commodity-structured works of
consumerist history. Most scholars
understanding of consumption is not based on anthropological approaches, and it
will expand our understanding to consider a psychological approach as
well. Marketing Nutrition is available as an ebook through the Washington
Research Library Consortium, which also has physical copies available. The International Standard Book Number
is 9780252074554, and copies for sale on amazon.com and alibris.com starting a
one dollar and ten cents, plus shipping.
Have a look at the video linked below,
featuring Wansink. It is more
coordinated with one of Wansink’s other books, Mindless Eating, yet it gives a bit of information about the
relation between perception and consumption.
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