Category Archives: Sociology

Warmer temperatures and transporting and storing frozen food

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If outside temperatures are warmer, it takes more energy to cool food. This could be a problem:

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It’s easy to take the huge variety of foods available at the grocery store for granted. But it’s possible because of the technology—and huge amount of energy—that keeps dairy, meat, fruits, and vegetables cold, safe from rot, and free of bacteria growth. To find out how the heat is affecting the process of keeping things cool, I talked to Nicola Twilley, the author of Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. Our interview has been condensed and edited for clarity…

The estimate is that for every degree-Fahrenheit rise in ambient temperature, your refrigerator uses 2 to 2½ percent more energy. So it’s significant. It has to work significantly harder to cool things. So there is a real problem…

We can’t just store our food at a much warmer temperature. But there actually is a big push to raise the temperature that frozen food is stored at by a couple of degrees. Currently frozen food should be transported at minus 18 degrees Celsius, or zero degrees Fahrenheit. But for every degree that you go below minus 12 degrees Celsius, you’re using an extra 2 or 3 percent energy.

The company that owns Birds Eye [the frozen foods giant] has studied this and found that if their foods were stored at minus 15 degrees centigrade, rather than minus 18, it wouldn’t affect the food safety or the texture or taste or nutrition level. And it would likely reduce energy consumption by about 10 percent, which is a lot. All the big frozen-food warehouses and shipping companies are behind this right now.

It sounds like transporting frozen food at slightly warmer temperatures could work.

But there are bigger issues at play here. How much frozen food should there be and how far should it be shipped? How about refrigerated food? Americans are pretty used to all sorts of cold and frozen food options that come from who knows where.

Talk about needing more local food has been going on for a while. Some had concerns about oil use; what does it take to transport food thousands of miles to please consumers elsewhere in the globe? Or it might be about agriculture more broadly: do people eat what is available each season instead of depending on food grown elsewhere that makes certain food available all year round?

I would guess many American consumers still have little idea where their food – fresh or frozen – comes from. It is just available. I can go roughly two and a half miles from where I live and visit five different sizable grocery stores. Expand that radius to five miles and it adds numerous stores. What if I had fewer shopping options, whether in terms of locations or fewer food items when shopping in each store?

It is interesting to hear that companies might be willing to make changes as it could save money and be more sustainable. What other parts of the system, whether at the policy level or for those who transport goods or on the consumer side, would address the issue of energy use for frozen and cold food?

Record high rents in NYC

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Remember lower rents in New York City during COVID-19? A new report about high rents suggests any price drops in the city are long gone:

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The cost of renting a one-bedroom apartment in New York City reached an all-time high for the second month in a row in August, according to Zumper’s latest National Rent Report.

Residents are paying a median amount of $4,500 for a one-bedroom apartment in the city, up 12.8 percent compared to a year earlier and 3.4 percent compared to July. Those renting out two-bedroom apartments are not doing much better. According to Zumper, the median two-bedroom rent reached a record high of $5,100 in August, up 13.3 percent year-over-year and 3.7 percent month-over-month…

But the rent increases in New York mark a resurgence for the city’s market, after rent dropped to a four-year low in January 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, the median one-bedroom rent was $2,350. Since then, rent has nearly doubled—confirming New York’s rental market to be the most expensive in the nation.

Three quick thoughts in response:

  1. Who can afford such prices?
  2. Is this just supply and demand where the number of housing units is not keeping up with all the people who want to live in NYC? How do public and private actors continue to contribute to such an expensive housing market?
  3. For better or worse, these are the sorts of numbers that people remember when they think about housing prices. Most housing markets in the United States are not Manhattan or San Francisco or Seattle. But people generally know these places are expensive and those costs produce all sorts of reactions. Could a national policy to addressing housing costs, such as hinted at recently by one presidential candidate, address the issue in New York City and in other places?

The bipartisan coalition that keeps funneling money to highways and roads

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Americans like highways and driving. The construction and maintenance of roads is often supported across the political spectrum:

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Even in deep-blue states, a bipartisan coalition keeps the highway funding spigot open, said Amy Lee, a postdoc at the University of California, Los Angeles who wrote her dissertation about California’s failure to constrain highway growth. “The construction-materials companies tend to be very big on the right, and organized labor tends to be very powerful on the left,” she said, and these forces form a pro-highway juggernaut. In January, a coalition of construction companies and labor groups sent a letter to California’s top elected leaders defending “funding for infrastructure projects that may potentially increase vehicle miles traveled”—i.e., highway expansions. (The Laborers’ International Union of North America did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this article.) As with electric vehicles, highway construction seems to be a topic in which environmental and union interests diverge.

Transportation departments don’t want to hear no on highways. In 2022 Oklahoma’s department of transportation preemptively bought 23 web domains, like oklahomansagainstturnpikes.com and stoptheeasternloop.com, that could theoretically be used to rally opposition to the state’s $5 billion highway plan. Speaking up against pavement within a department can be difficult and risky. Last year, Jeanie Ward-Waller, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology–trained engineer who served as the deputy director of planning and modal programs for California’s Caltrans, was demoted after questioning her agency’s plans to widen I-80 between Sacramento and Davis. In an editorial published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Ward-Waller wrote, “My concerns were repeatedly brushed off by my bosses, who seemed more concerned about getting the next widening project underway than following the law.”

At the federal level, even asking questions about the collective climate impact of highway building appears verboten. In 2022 Stephanie Pollack, the acting head of the Federal Highway Administration, called on state DOTs to measure the carbon emissions attributable to their highway systems. Republicans were incensed; 21 states filed a suit, and Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell advised governors to simply ignore her.

Democrats have supported highway expansions too. The White House called the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law “a critical step towards reaching President Biden’s goal of a net-zero emissions economy by 2050,” but subsequent analysis by Transportation for America found that state DOTs used nearly a quarter of the $270 billion they received through the law to expand highways, a move sure to increase emissions. (After the infrastructure bill was passed, the head of Louisiana’s transportation department said that “some of the winners I think from this project funding will be things like the Inter-City Connector,” referring to the Shreveport project.)

With so many forces pushing for roadway expansions, opposing them requires political bravery.

At this point in American history, highways might seem “inevitable” or “natural.” For decades, highways have helped bring all sorts of features of American society, including big box stores, road trips, and suburban subdivisions.

As noted above, this system requires resources. And both major political parties tend to support it. They might fight particular projects (also highlighted in the article) but they generally find the money needed for fixing roads and creating new ones.

To reverse course then requires a major political change. Resources could be funneled elsewhere. The topic could become a regular campaign issue. It could join with popular support. How might it be pitched? Here are two areas where I could guess these political appeals might work:

  1. The individual costs of driving are high. Paying for gas, insurance, maintenance, storing a vehicle, and more add up. Are all people interested in paying this year after year after year?
  2. A desire among some (not all) for denser living areas that can support less driving. Even American cities can be sprawling but it seems there is some interest for communities that are more walkable and accessible by other means.

There are other arguments to make, of course. The two I listed get at different opportunities people might want. Pivoting from a transportation method that tends to privilege individual choices to travel wherever they want whenever they want might require providing different opportunities.

New mosque on 248th Avenue in Naperville almost complete after a long process

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There is an update on a case of zoning conflict in Naperville regarding a proposed mosque (see a 2019 journal article here and two blog posts here and here):

An aerial view of the property circa 2011 when originally purchased by the Islamic Center of Naperville.

Nearly two years after breaking ground, the first phase of the Islamic Center of Naperville’s mosque complex on 248th Avenue is nearly complete.

Phase one work — the construction of a 28,400-square-foot mosque — is set to finish in October, according to Islamic Center President Anees Rahman. As of mid-August, Rahman estimated the mosque was about 90% to 95% complete…

It took 15 meetings held over nine months for the proposed complex to receive a positive recommendation in October 2021 from the city’s Planning and Zoning Commission. The Naperville City Council unanimously OK’d the venture a month later — with a slate of restrictions.

Those included conditions aimed at addressing traffic, parking, fire safety and noise concerns raised by neighboring residents. As part of the approved plans, ICN agreed it would not proceed past phase two — a 41,749-square-foot school — until improvements to 248th Avenue are complete…

With traffic projections estimating the road will average 18,000 vehicles daily by 2050, the city is planning to widen 248th Avenue to five lanes between 95th and 103rd streets and to add storm sewers, curbs, gutters, street lighting, sidewalks and noise walls.

This sounds like a good outcome for the group and its members as the building will open soon. This provides space for worship and fellowship.

At the same time, this was a long process with a lot of public involvement. The property was originally owned by a church who did not build a church building on it. When it was sold to the Islamic Center of Naperville and they put forward plans, neighbors and others responded.

Given what I found in two studies (see more about the second one involving the New York City area) regarding local zoning conflict and religious buildings, proposals from Muslim groups receive more scrutiny. This particular building is almost complete but what are the consequences of longer processes and more questions compared to what others face?

What past me might have thought about starting Year 16 as college faculty today

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Today marks the start of my 16th year teaching sociology. What would I have thought of this particular marker in the past? Some retrospective speculation:

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-Fall 2020: How many more years of teaching during COVID might there be? This was a semester of teaching masked students sitting six feet apart plus having some students joining class via Zoom. Getting to the next Fall semester, let alone several years down the road, was far from my mind.

-Fall 2009: Starting as an assistant professor, there is much to learn. What did I need to do in the classroom each day? How could I write and publish? How did my institution operate? I was hopeful about future years but the day-to-day concerns of preparing classes took a lot of time.

-Fall 2008: Focused on finishing up my dissertation research. Lots of research and writing to do.

-Fall 2004: The beginning of graduate school in sociology. We heard about how many of us would make it and what we needed to do to succeed. Could I do what someone needed to do to be a sociologist for a long time?

-Fall 2003: Senior year of college begins and graduation looms on the horizon. Does going to graduate school and pursuing academic work sound appealing? You can get paid to teach, think, and spend years on a college campus? Time to get those applications written and sent in.

-Fall 2002: Graduation is a ways away and I am taking a semester off from college and working. Lots of options to consider for the future.

-Fall 2000: College is underway and while teaching holds some appeal, it is exciting to take classes in a range of topics that interest me. A semester later, I will take my first sociology course and soon select that to study.

-Any school year starting before this: little to no thoughts of becoming a college faculty member.

I am sometimes asked when I knew I wanted to be a faculty member and/or pursue sociology as an academic. The short answer: it developed over time.

On the other hand, it is hard to imagine what else life could be like in late August after being a sociologist this long. I have enjoyed teaching, writing and researching, working with students, and serving in my institution. As with each new school year, it is exciting to launch another round of learning and questions and development. That excitement may wax and wane through the academic calendar but today is a good day: the 2024-25 academic year is now underway.

The emergence of “bachelor pads” and “man caves”

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What are stereotypically male domestic spaces like? Two terms get at this – “bachelor pads” and “man caves” – and they both emerged in the decades after World War Two:

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In 1959, the Chicago Tribune first coined the word “bachelor pad,” marking the emergence of a newly modern male homemaker. Where once family heirlooms and mounted animal heads had reigned supreme, a new visual language for masculine status had emerged. The bachelor pad was sophisticated, seductive. It was, in the words of Hugh Hefner, a place for drinking cocktails, “putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.”…

From the very beginning, man caves have been defined in terms of their resistance to femininity. The phrase was first used in the Toronto Star in 1992, when Joanne Lovering conjured up a “cave of solitude secured against wife intrusion,” marked by “musty smells and a few strategic cobwebs.”

That year, John Gray’s Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus popularized the man cave as a metaphor for the privacy and solitude that all men crave. “Men have had an identity problem since the women’s movement,” Sam Martin, author of Manspace: A Primal Guide to Marking Your Territory told the Denver Post in 2007. “Our premise is that women have control of the look and the feel of the house and that left guys wanting more.”

Interesting look at how these terms emerge and then are part of Reddit conversations today about male spaces.

Three additional thoughts:

  1. Does the rise of the smartphone and electronic devices change the scale and feel of male spaces? If all one needs is a phone or a gaming console or an internet connection to access all sorts of things, does this change the need for other items?
  2. These named spaces seem to go along with consumerism: buying stuff to fill a space and show off. Might there be a shift back to minimalism and away from owning more if people prefer to spend on experiences? (Of course, owning less could mean paying more for higher-cost items.)
  3. Particularly as marketers and companies looked for ways to appeal to male consumers, what terms for male spaces did not catch on?

What terms will emerge next to define male spaces?

American communities with population loss and East St. Louis

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I was recently doing some research involving East St. Louis, Illinois, specifically considering the 1917 race massacre as part of a longer history of racialized property in Illinois. While doing this work, I noticed the population of the community. Here are the numbers (from Wikipedia):

As an industrial suburb across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, the community grew from a very small community to over 82,000 residents in 1950. Then came population decreases, leading to a population of under 18,000 today.

In the United States, population growth is good. It signals success and status. East St. Louis had this for the first eighty years or so of its history. But population loss is then bad. It hints that there are problems, that the community is losing status. A number of American cities and communities have experienced this since the middle of the twentieth century, often in the Northeast and Midwest and connected to the loss of manufacturing jobs. Think Detroit or Cleveland or Baltimore.

For a suburb to lose this many people also cuts across a narrative of suburban success. The endlessly growing suburbs does not apply to all communities. In inner-ring suburbs, communities with growing numbers of Black residents, and suburbs facing other concerns, the population could drop over time. Suburbs elsewhere might be growing but not in all suburbs.

How many suburbs have similar stories to East St. Louis and how do these narratives get told alongside the typical stories of suburban growth?

Harris: “We will end America’s housing shortage.”

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Presidential candidate Kamala Harris said this about housing in her speech at the Democratic National Convention this past week:

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That’s why we will create what I call an opportunity economy. An opportunity economy where everyone has a chance to compete and a chance to succeed. Whether you live in a rural area, small town, or big city. As President, I will bring together: Labor and workers, Small business owners and entrepreneurs, And American companies. To create jobs. Grow our economy. And lower the cost of everyday needs. Like
health care. Housing. And groceries. We will: Provide access to capital for small business owners, entrepreneurs, and founders. We will end America’s housing shortage. And protect Social Security
and Medicare.

I am interested in hearing more about this plan for housing for two reasons:

  1. I think many Americans perceive this as a need. People need more housing, particularly cheaper good housing. They want the opportunity to invest in a residence and a community. They want the opportunity for that ownership to be an asset down the road. They do not want housing to take up too much of their budget.
  2. I have tried to keep track of this issue during recent presidential elections and it does not appear to an issue that candidates lead with. There could be multiple reasons for this: it is difficult to addressing housing at a national level when it is often a local issue and it may not be a “winning” issue with voters compared to other topics. However, I have often thought that a candidate that could promote a reasonable and doable strategy that could help people would do well to do so.

Could the two candidates offer more about housing in the coming weeks?

Weird repeat occurrences in the Chicago suburbs: guns in cars at Naperville Topgolf, trucks hitting Long Grove covered bridge

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Follow the news in the Chicago suburbs and it seems two stories come up pretty reliably.

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First, the Topgolf facility in Naperville now has had 22 gun arrests in the last two years:

For the third time in less than two weeks, police have made a firearm-related arrest in the Naperville Topgolf parking lot…

Coffey’s arrest brings the number of firearm-related arrests made outside the Naperville Topgolf since August 2023 to 22…

Officers were in the business’ parking lot in squad cars when one of them observed Coffey exiting a white Mercedes SUV while smoking what they believed to be cannabis, Krakow said. Officers exited their squads and approached on foot. Their investigation into the cannabis led to a search of Coffey’s vehicle.

Police’s search yielded a 9mm handgun that was recovered from a backpack, Krakow said.

How many more times will this happen? Naperville is a wealthy and high status suburb.

Second, a covered bridge in Long Grove keeps getting hit by trucks. It just happened again earlier this week:

Once again, a box truck became stuck under Long Grove’s iconic covered bridge early Monday morning, with the vehicle taking the brunt of the damage.

“The vast majority of the times this happens, it damages the vehicle,” Long Grove Assistant Village Manager Dana McCarthy said. “The bridge is made of heavy duty steel.”…

Though the bridge has certainly been hit well over 50 times since it reopened in 2020 after an extensive renovation, the village itself doesn’t keep count of the instances.

If this happened a few times, it could be a pattern in suburbs where these things tend not to happen. “Strange but true” stories from the suburbs that happen a few times.

But now people are paying attention – both of these occurrences are now “common” – and they keep happening. The media widely reports on the police work at Topgolf yet more arrests are made? There are plenty of warnings around the bridge about the height but trucks keep trying to drive through?

I assume the phenomena will end at some point but it is hard to know when.

    Big political changes in the suburbs, DuPage County edition

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    The suburbs are the place where elections are won and lost these days yet voting patterns in the suburbs are dynamic. For example, here is an overview of what has happened in DuPage County, Illinois, in recent decades:

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    “It is easy to forget this county, DuPage, was once one of the reddest counties in America not long ago,” Conroy said during Tuesday morning’s Illinois delegate breakfast.

    She noted that DuPage was where “Republican presidents raised millions of dollars, produced a U.S. speaker of the House” and led both chambers in Springfield. “But 12 years ago, that tide began to turn,” said Conroy, who in 2012 became the first Democrat to win an Illinois House seat in a district entirely in DuPage.

    In 2022, Conroy again made history as the first female elected to head the DuPage County Board and the first Democrat to hold that title in several decades. That same year, Democrats solidified a 12-6 majority on the county board. In 2018, Republicans held all but one seat on the county board.

    Conroy said Democratic women also now make up an overwhelming majority of state representatives and senators representing DuPage in Springfield.

    This is a change echoed in the other collar counties of the Chicago area: a shift from Republican bases to Democratic majorities. This is all part of the emerging complex suburbia.

    At the same time, this is not the first time there was a major political shift in DuPage County. Local historical Leone Schmidt detailed political life in early decades in the county in the 1989 book When the Democrats Ruled DuPage. She describes the book this way:

    It covers the impassioned and sophisticated political activities, the interplay of parties and personalities, and the heyday and fall of the Democrats as a force in Du Page County.

    Democrats kicked off local political life and helped the county become its own entity. But, within a few decades, Republicans came to dominate local offices. Historian Stephen J. Buck says in the 2019 article “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The origins of the Republican Party in DuPage County, Illinois”:

    By 1860, the Democrats were the minority party in the county, and the Republicans successfully imposed the importance of party loyalty, regardless of local issues, on county politics.

    The county has experienced at least two major shifts in political leadership and voting patterns. As politicians and parties fight for votes in DuPage County and other suburbs, there could be future shifts. What can look like solid majorities through multiple decades can change – they have before.