Post 3

   After reading Freedman and Jurafsky’s article, it is easy to see the connections they make between food, language, and culture, and how they go about doing so. By analyzing one of America’s best-known snacks, potato chips, the two men are able to study of how thinly sliced salty potatoes have connections to people of different socioeconomic status and people who have different concerns or values when it comes to picking a certain brand of a food.

   The men choose twelve different brands of potato chips, divided into two groups of expensive by price per ounce, and inexpensive. After the brands have been sorted, they are analyzed based on different criteria such as language, and overall healthiness of the chips. Freedman and Jurafsky found that the expensive potato chips were more likely to not only have more words on their bags, but they were also more likely to have words of a higher reading level on their bags. The two concluded that this was because less expensive bags are geared toward those belonging to a lower socioeconomic status who are more concerned with saving money, while the more expensive brands were more geared toward those who belong to a higher socioeconomic status and can afford to buy the necessities, along with snack foods. They also concluded that less expensive bags would have less words at lower reading levels because research shows that those belonging to a lower socioeconomic class are usually not as educated as those belonging to a higher one. 

   Freedman and Jurafsky do a good job connecting the potato chips to language by describing how language helps the different brands connect with different groups based on socioeconomic and education levels. Less words at a lower reading level were more appealing to those of lower economic and educational levels, while more words that go further in depth about the product were more likely to appeal to customers of a higher class status and higher educational levels. They also do a good job connecting food to culture, again referring to the economic status. Those of a higher economic status tend to be more health conscious and care about the food being healthier than less expensive, while those of a lower economic status are more concerned with eating food and pay less attention to carbohydrates, trans fats, etc.

   I found the entire study to be really interesting. At first I thought how odd it was to do a study on potato chips and how different brands are advertised, but the reasoning behind each of the categories and explanations were really interesting and kept me wanting to read further to see what results were obtained. Beyond potato chips, reading about this analysis made me think of the different foods where their method of food advertising analysis could be applied. I thought of popcorn, since there are many different brands of popcorn, many that follow in the paths of the chips. There are popcorn brands that are more healthy in the way the popcorn is popped and what oil it is popped in, the salt content, etc. If the same study were done with different popcorn brands, I would expect to see similar results as the chips, since there are expensive and non expensive brands of popcorn, and some bags have many words on them while others do not. I would be interested to see how that study would turn out and what would be similar or different between the two. After getting the results, if they were drastically different from the results of the chip study, I would want to know why that is and what would have caused such changes.