Q Short Paper 4: Supermarket Pastoral Exercise Purpose This assignment is similar to Short Paper 1 and Short Paper 3, assignments for which you were asked to analyze a food blog and a frame from a graphic memoir respectively. For Short Paper 4, we will continue to focus on analysis. One thing unites these papers: You are being asked to analyze some sort of human artifact. However, pragmatic, prosaic, or novel, the texts you’ve been asked to analyze are artistic human creations. I hope you now see how an assignment like this one helps us assess your mastery of the course outcomes. If you need a refresher, here they are: Demonstrate an understanding of the consequences of human actions in social and environmental contexts, and an ability to consider the ethical and practical implications of those actions Demonstrate an ability to recognize the importance of creative human expression Demonstrate an ability to recognize and respect the rights of the individual and to appreciate the complexity and variety of divergent attitudes, values and beliefs in society Demonstrate an understanding of the cultural and historical heritage of contemporary society and the implications of this heritage To put it more specifically into Paper 4 terms, when we analyze the products that populate our daily lives, we dig deeply into the social, ethical, environmental, and cultural implications of our actions. When it comes to thinking about the messages that food packaging sends, we are certainly confronting human expression in a way that invites us to think about practical, industrial, and commercial arts. Assignment Write a 750-word analysis of the packaging of two brands of one type of food item from the grocery store where you regularly shop. For example, if you choose milk, pick two brands and analyze both cartons. Steps Go to grocery store and pick a product with packaging that you find especially compelling (it’s pretty, makes you want to buy it, rubs you the wrong way, seems particularly faddish, etc.). The product doesn’t matter. You can choose milk, eggs, salami, crackers, beer, canned vegetables, frozen meals—anything you want. (Obviously you don’t have to stand in the grocery store to write this. Take a picture or get enough specific information to find a reliable image online. Heck, buy it and see if the product fulfills the expectations set by the packaging.) Make sure your essay has clear and thorough descriptions of the packaging—both the pictures and words. This should be legible to someone who has never seen it, so think about how to organize your description. Do you read it from left to right? Top to bottom? Do you use words that let us know the image is in the bottom left hand corner? Can you capture what a block of text is doing without quoting the whole thing? Next, analyze the images and words. I would take Pollan’s approach. Think of packaging as a way of telling stories. What stories do your packages tell? How does the packaging go about telling that story? How do the stories compete? That is, how might the companies be using their stories to outmaneuver each other for market share? Perhaps they don’t have the same market in mind at all. How does this company’s story attempt to establish that their eggs, crackers, milk, or whatever is obviously the best option on the shelf? What does their story suggest about their view of consumers? After “reading the story,” what do you think the company assumes about their audience’s wants, needs, beliefs, concerns, etc.? Do you see any of the issues we have discussed this semester in those stories? Here’s a more generic way to think about analysis: Explain what the packages do, where the company’s interests seem to lie, how it’s trying to get the consumer to buy their product instead of the one next to it, etc. For example, how are the image(s) and words trying to draw or attract new and old consumers? Who is the audience? (Be specific. Don’t just provide generic demographic information like “rich people.”) What does the packaging suggest about who we (or companies) think buys certain types of food and how food companies exploit these assumptions? As usual, keep the analysis sandwich in mind. You need to establish your claim, show specific evidence, and interpret that evidence. Tips As I hinted above, this assignment is inspired by Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. He opens Chapter 9, “Big Organic,” with a meditation on the different ways products are packaged. More specifically, he’s looking at products sold at Whole Foods. He discusses the marketing of high-end food products at his local Whole Foods in terms of a contest between stories. He claims that “[it is] the evocative prose as much as anything else that makes this food really special” (134). He then goes on to read the packaging of what he calls “storied foods” (135). He eventually creates a genre for these stories: Supermarket Pastoral (137). While you do not have to confine yourself to writing about your packaging through the lens of the Supermarket Pastoral, the opening pages of Chapter 9 (especially pages 134-140) provide some excellent models of what you need to do for this assignment. Criteria for Evaluation You have a clear thesis statement that makes an arguable and significant claim and clearly establishes that you will be analyzing food packaging You support the claim made in your thesis and subordinate claims made in your body paragraphs with specific evidence from the two texts/artifacts/packages You clearly explain or demonstrate how the evidence from the text supports your claim (i.e., you are reproducing your way of understanding/reading the frame) You provide a clear and thorough description of the packaging you have chosen to work with; it should be clear and thorough enough that someone who is unfamiliar with the packaging can “see” it (this includes organizing your description logically) Your essay is 750 words You use MLA formatting and citations—and use them properly. That means you have a heading, title, and a Works Cited page You use varied language and sentence structures to produce lively and interesting prose You write at a college level: language, grammar, sentence structure, etc. This also includes basics such as properly inserting author names and the titles of the texts you are using Your writing is free of common composition errors, especially run-on sentences and fragments