Welcome

Welcome to my blog.

This blog is best read from beginning to end rather than from the newest post to the oldest post.

To begin at the beginning, visit this link.

The purpose of this blog is to educate and inform about food choices and what can either be construed as the evils or the brilliance of the fast food industry's marketers.

The following terminology may aid you as you navigate through these posts. Each of these definitions comes from the textbook Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture by Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright.

Happy reading!



Consumer Society: Societies that developed out of the rise of modernity, capitalism, and the wake of the industrial revolution (266).

Interpellation: "The process by which ideological systems call out to or "hail" social subjects and tell them their place in the system. In popular culture, interpellation refers to the ways that cultural products address their consumers and recruit them into a particular ideological position" (446).

Encoding: The production of (intended) meaning in cultural products (439).

Decoding: The process of interpreting and giving meaning to cultural products (437).

C.R.A.P. Principles: Four principles of sound design: Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity.

Anti-Ads: Ads that critique popular culture by addressing comodity fetishism, consumerism, and other aspects of consumer societies (300).

Culture Jamming: A term coined by the band Negativland. According to Kalle Lasn, it is, "at root, just a metaphor for stopping the flow of spectacle long enough to adjust your set" (301).

The Gaze: Used to describe the relationship of looking in which the subject is caught in the dynamics of desire through trajectories of looking and being looked at among objects and other people (442).

Marketing of Coolness: A shift in advertising where marketers attempt to attach the "ever-elusive quality of coolness" to their product(s) (293).