Triggering Passages:
“…mother’s departure from the bland diet that republican reformers took such pride in to the conspicuous consumption of excitants and rich and savory food…making clear the relationship between female domestic pride and skill, the eroticized diet, the young woman’s licentiousness, and the decadence of an era that has overturned the primitive and healthy diet for the modern saturnalia of foods” (Tompkins 2012, 80).
“raw sugar prices surged to a record 60 cents a pound, a nearly fivefold increase in a span of less than ten months. Consumers started to resist, cutting back on purchases of sugar and sugar-laden products. And then something called high-fructose corn syrup entered the fray” (Newman 2013, 39).
News Media Context:
Humans Almost Drove These 6 Animals to Extinction. But We Saved Them Instead.
In recent years, humans have managed to pull a weird parrot, a tiny fox, a rare tiger, an ancient tortoise, a threatened gorilla and a rather handsome mountain goat, among other creatures, from the jaws of extinction.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/animals-saved-from-extinction_us_58807961e4b02c1837e9cf7f
Discussion:
In this passage, and the story of the young lady who cannot seem to quit touching herself, Graham correlates the extravagant undisciplined lifestyle of the family to the incessant need to masturbate by the young woman. The male figure is seemingly left out of this unfortunate telling, and in fact of all the blame is shouldered by the mother and female child. Tompkins mentioned that this is directly linked to the shifting responsibilities of the household to the woman, as the woman is given more duties such as buying the food, she is expected to be frivolous in her spending. In this manner the husband must step in and teach or control spending, thereby controlling the families habits as well.
We can see in the absence of one commodity, there will always be one that is cheaper and more easily made. This substitute product is usually highly manipulated and usually less healthy than its counterpart. High fructose corn syrup could be considered the evil twin of natural sugar, but it can be easily controlled in commodity markets therefore is much more viable substitute than the more volatile market of sugar production.
In my individual project, of looking into the commodification of salmon, I have found that the anthropogenic forces on the earth are devastating the other species we co-habitat with. It is exciting to see that humans can reverse our own wrong doing, but we are only protecting those animals and those species that have zero utility to human economic livelihoods.
Works Citied
Mosbergen, Dominique. “Humans Almost Drove These 6 Animal to Extinction. But We Saved Them Instead”. Huffingtonpost. January 26 2017: Page (1). www.huffingtonpost.com. Web. January 29 2017.
Newman, Kara. The Secret Financial Life of Food: From Commodities Markets to Super Markets. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Print
Tompkins, Kyla W. Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century. New York and London: New York University Press, 2012. Print