Live and Active Cultures: Gender, Ethnicity, and “Greek” Yogurt in America

Abstract

Using a transnational and comparative cultural studies approach, this essay investigates how yogurt, perceived as a strange and foreign food in the early to mid-twentieth-century United States, became localized through intersectional processes of feminization and de-exoticization. In the transition from the 1970s to the 1980s, the dairy industry adopted a postfeminist ethos, which co-opted the hippie and feminist self-care movements that had made yogurt a staple health food outside the purview of the medical-industrial complex and on the margins of the market economy. Increasingly, yogurt was marketed to the prototypical (white middle class) dieting female, expected to discipline her body by consuming pre-proportioned approximations of dessert. The rising popularity of “Greek yogurt” in the early twenty-first century has modified this cultural neutralization by foregrounding a nonthreatening “white” ethnicity—while furthering the feminization of yogurt consumption and obscuring connections to the food cultures of the Middle East.

The Impact of Brand Awareness and Country of Origin in the Advertising Effectiveness of Greek Food Products in the United Kingdom: The Case of Greek Yogurt

“…Greek yogurt has become extremely popular, particularly due to its special composition: compared to other competitive products, it contains almost twice the number of proteins and fewer carbohydrates, while maintaining a pleasant taste and velvety texture [ 87 ]. It is therefore no coincidence that Greek yogurt is one of the most recognizable products worldwide [ 88 ], with large domestic dairy businesses investing huge sums to strengthen both their production capacity and their internationalization.…”

Where tradition meets science: microbial diversity and bioactive compounds in Armenian fermented milk products

“…Famous midcentury Armenian Chef, Omar Khyam described a ritual in which emigrating Armenians dipped handkerchiefs into matsun and let it dry to be reconstituted later in their new homes [27]. This process, similar to the process of making a dried matsun product called choratan, highlights how important the consumption of matsun was in the past Eastern diaspora to a symbol of European and American health foods [31]. Despite the commercial gains, yogurt, while widely consumed worldwide, is not eaten in the same quantities as matsun in the Caucasus where it is a common table accompaniment to any meal and forms the basis of other foods like breads, cakes, soups, and drinks.…”

“…Colombo would soon compete with their own flavored line. Because of the efforts of the yogurt industry in this time to market yogurt as tasty and healthy it grew into a multimillion-dollar business[31].Yogurt went from a niche food targeted to the Middle…”