Food For Thought

In Freedman and Jurafsky’s article they talked about how food, language, and culture all correlate in the way that they are presented. In their article they use potato chip bags as an example and compare the 12 major kinds of potato chips. One of the big distinctions that is made in the article is how certain kinds of potato chip bags are marketed to certain social classes. Of the 12 potato chip bags there were 6 that were targeting middle class individuals and 6 targeting upper class individuals. In order to target a certain class the bags had a number of different ways to do so. First off is by the distinction of words. The potato chip bags targeting upper class individuals tends to use more words and more complex words where as the potato chip bags targeting the lower class individuals tends to use fewer words and more common words. A second way that potato chip bags distinguish between classes is through negative words. The potato chip bags targeting upper class individuals used 14 times the amount of negative terms than the lower class bags did.

            I personally found the part about authenticity the most interesting. One reason why I found this so interesting is because I see it on a daily basis. The article claims that in the past 20 years the use of authenticity has gone up 27 times. I basically found it interesting that there are 4 main ways of authenticity. After reading about the 4 I found myself thinking about all the different advertisements that I see on a daily basis and how they use these 4 ways of authenticity. Another place that I could see them applying their method of food advertising is for restaurants. Restaurants are definitely divided up for middle and upper class individuals. For example, a McDonalds commercial would advertise the importance of how many items are on their dollar menu whereas La Cirque would advertise the importance of quality and service. La Cirque would not mention prices because they are targeting upper class people and McDonalds would not mention service because people are not paying for that.