Jessica Birthisel | Nov. 4, 2010
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| Photo by Jessica Birthisel |
| Anthropology professor Andrea Wiley talked about her research on the connections between advertising and milk consumption at Wednesday's Research Colloquium. Her new book is Re-imagining Milk. |
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Wiley, a professor in the IU Department of Anthropology whose book, Re-imagining Milk, comes out next week, spoke Wednesday as part of the School of Journalism Research Colloquium.
Taking a biocultural approach to anthropology, Wiley’s latest work considers the cultural and biological significance of milk in diets of different populations, with a particular focus on milk as food for children. Her research looks at how human biology handles milk consumption after infancy, especially in populations without a history of milk consumption. Culturally, her work explores how milk promotions have led to the widespread consumption of milk in both the United States and India.
The global trade in milk is at an all-time high, said Wiley, with India producing more milk than any other country in the world today. Consumption of milk in India is also in an upswing. U.S. consumption of milk, however, is flat. Globally, economic trends reveal that in countries where milk consumption has not been a traditional practice, consumption is increasing. For countries that have historically consumed milk, however, consumption is decreasing. She quoted a New York Times article from 2007 that suggested that along with fancy cars and expensive televisions, milk is now a global marker of new money.
“How did milk come to be packaged with other high-tech trappings of modern life?” she asked, a question that informs her research.
Technical modifications of modern milk are part of this equation, said Wiley, including the fortification of milk with vitamins D and A. Additionally, government sanctioning of milk consumption has also contributed to its popularity in modern diets. Both U.S. and Indian food pyramids endorse high-levels of milk and dairy consumption, an endorsement also evidenced in government-sponsored school milk programs.
In looking at a historical timeline of practices of fresh milk consumption, Wiley found that advertisements and milk promotions played a heavy role in normalizing the behavior in both the United States and India. Through examples, she showed several trends in the advertisements. First, milk ads in the United States targeted gradually older children, starting with babies, then targeting toddlers and school aged children. As children became more common in the ads, another symbolic image of milk was dropped.
“In ads, what disappears is the cow,” she said. “The source is lost and what you get is the product, the product in addition to images of robust children.”
Wiley said in the early 20th century, the rise of nutritional science and pediatric medicine resulted in ads that linked milk consumption with vitamins, calcium and overall health.“Milk really claims to have authority over children’s health,” she said. These ads suggest that children should “grow and grow faster” and that milk is the source of this growth.
Milk practices in India are shaped by other cultural and religious beliefs regarding cows, a revered animal often linked to maternal qualities. This national connection to the cow and milk creates what Wiley calls an “indigenous justification” for the consumption of milk.
In terms of advertising, however, Wiley found that most milk promotions in India focus on a modern, nutritionist frame just like the one used in the United States. Within the Indian milk promotion she found “an active attempt to divorce traditional motifs” from the ads, aimed at an educated middle class.
These ads also focus on child growth (one ad series directly addressed children, reading: “The country needs you. Grow faster.”) And even though India has indigenous Zebu cattle, the ads often feature Western Holstein cows. In more recent U.S. advertising, however, Wiley has found a different and contradicting trend: the suggestion that consumption of dairy products will lead to weight loss. This message is a dramatic switch from the ads earlier in the century that pushed milk because it would grow the human body.
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| Photo by Jessica Birthisel |
| Associate professor Radhika Parameswaran invited Wiley to speak at the colloquium. Parameswaran talked about her own introduction to milk as a child in India. |
“It’s really difficult to undo that meaning that predominated in the first part of the twentieth century,” she concluded.
Associate professor Radhika Parameswaran, who invited Wiley to speak in the series, asked what impact animal and food activism might have on America’s decreasing milk consumption.
“I think that effect is really trivial,” said Wiley, though she acknowledged that the proliferation of other forms of milk, such as soy and nut milks, in the country is a factor, a factor possibly related to activism. Whether people are turning to those products as a form of activism is difficult to assess, said Wiley.
Paremeswaran said as a child growing up in India, she saw milk as a symbol of America.“For me growing up, milk was something America had and we didn’t,” she said. And once her family secured milk, it was not acceptable to drink it out of steel cups. It had to be a clear glass so that she and her sister could see the milk inside, yet another “marker of modernity.”
The school’s research series continues at 4:30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 8, in the Ernie Pyle Hall lounge when Professor Emerita Chris Ogan will talk about “The EU Kids Online 25-Country Study: First Results.”
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