Arts and Humanities Commons^™

A Meat Paradox: Media's Role In Mitigating The Omnivore's Dilemma, Karyn Camille Lewis

Master's Theses

The purpose of this research is to identify and understand media’s role in meat consumption and a disassociation of meat and its animal of origin. This study questions consumer behavior based on media portrayals of meat products as well as how consumers perceive these portrayals, meat consumption patterns based on media and family influence, and the types and levels of satisfaction (ex: self-esteem or masculinity) consumers receive from meat products.

A quantitative research approach was proposed for this study. The primary research method was a survey among students, faculty and staff at The University of Southern Mississippi. A total of …

Waiting As Resistance: Lingering, Loafing, And Whiling Away, Harold Schweizer

Faculty Journal Articles

„Waiting as Resistance: Lingering, Loafing, and Whiling Away” is a critique of the economics of consumption, suggesting that the widespread denigration of waiting as lost time and its economic and psychological displacements in consumer goods amount to a denigration of human life itself. In the practice of lingering and its related temporalities, the author proposes, we regain an appreciation of the fundamental temporality of all things, that everything, we humans included, is constituted by time. Conceptually indebted to Theodor Adorno and substantiated with reference, chiefly to Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” and other poetic works, this argument throughout opposes the …

Food Ethics: Traceability In The Restaurant, Jake Monaghan

Senior Honors Projects

Food Ethics: Traceability in the Restaurant

Jake Monaghan Sponsor: William Krieger, Philosophy

In this paper I use my work experience in restaurant kitchens to identify and address a gap in the food ethics literature. Much of the work being done in food ethics focuses on the producers or the end consumers. Philosophers, however, have mostly overlooked a substantial part of the food system: restaurants. Due to the high volume nature of the work in restaurants, and their influence over eating trends, their nature leads to certain ethical commitments. I argue that restaurant owners and workers are in a unique position …

Explaining, Assessing, And Changing High Consumption, Harry Van Der Linden

Harry van der Linden

These writings reflect the renewed interest in the 1990s of scholars and the public in questioning the consumer society, an interest that the political crises engendered by 9/11 have overshadowed but not eliminated. In The Overspent American, Schor explains the emergence of strong doubts about high consumption by arguing that a “new consumerism” of escalating desires has evolved that is increasingly costly to the American high consumers themselves.

La Tecnología Y La Búsqueda De La Felicidad, Albert Borgmann

Philosophy Faculty Publications

The connection between technology and happiness is a challenge to philosophy. It can be met if we understand technology as the process of commodification that is guided by a characteristic pattern-the device paradigm, and if we distinguish between happiness as the consumption of pleasures and moral excellence as the devotion to focal things and practices. These clarifications and distinctions allow us relocate and redeem pleasure and to envision a life wherein pleasure and virtue are joined to yield genuine happiness.

Explaining, Assessing, And Changing High Consumption, Harry Van Der Linden

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

These writings reflect the renewed interest in the 1990s of scholars and the public in questioning the consumer society, an interest that the political crises engendered by 9/11 have overshadowed but not eliminated. In The Overspent American, Schor explains the emergence of strong doubts about high consumption by arguing that a “new consumerism” of escalating desires has evolved that is increasingly costly to the American high consumers themselves.

High Consumption And Global Justice, Harry Van Der Linden

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Justice requires that high consumption in affluent societies be slowed down for the sake of eradicating extreme poverty in the developing world and improving the condition of its very moderate consumers. High consumption places environmental and resource burdens and restrictions on the economic growth options of developing countries without bringing commensurate benefits. Moreover, high consumers enjoy products made in less developed countries by workers who have inadequate wages and often labor in unhealthy and unsafe conditions.

Contemporary high consumption is characterized by a continuous raising of the standards of satisfactory spending. This process is visible in many American consumption patterns: …