I grew up with wild strawberries growing in my back yard. You could eat them, but they were sparse, the size of medium-sized blueberries, and tasted similarly to a green modern strawberry. I'm quite happy with the $0.98/LBs modern strawberries I can now buy at my local grocery store. (Less intrigued by the $4+/LBs organic ones they try to sell me.)
I watched a TEDx talk (I think) by some lady talking about the pre-human-intervention foods and how this one's toxic and that one's gross and so on. I've been unable to find the video since, though. If anyone knows the talk I'm talking about, I'd love a link.
> I watched a TEDx talk (I think) by some lady talking about the pre-human-intervention foods and how this one's toxic and that one's gross and so on. I've been unable to find the video since, though. If anyone knows the talk I'm talking about, I'd love a link.
If it's a TEDx talk then don't bother; there is no scrutiny regarding the talks they allow and most are quite embarrassing displays of science ignorance. I'm actually surprise TEDx hasn't damaged the TED brand more than it has.
Some of them are crap, and some are good. Yes, they lack quality controls, but that doesn't prevent quality. It just means I need to take claims with a grain of salt and independently verify them.
It's a shame you're getting downvoted so heavily, because you're absolutely correct. The overwhelming majority of TEDx talks I've watched or listened to have been pretty terrible. I actually knew someone who was a TEDx organizer, and she confided in me that their selection criteria basically comes down to, "does the proposed talk sound scientific and/or inspirational?"
I've rarely had a good store bought strawberry, and had great strawberries in the garden growing up. Not Wild Strawberries however. This variety had been in the family for years, but probably had been commercially bought plants from the 50s. As the TEDx talk you mention may note probably very very different from real wild strawberries.
Really commented because I felt very compelled to diss store bought strawberries.
Industrial processes are not necessarily bad. So, too, do many methods exist outside of them that end in a unique product. Know the process and science of your food, and how it relates to the greater system in which you live. The failures and successes of food culture, and its influential place in civilization, can be traced back to our understanding of them and which intentions we have to affect them.
Telling someone to eat fresh tomatoes instead of tomato BBQ sauce is simpler than getting many people to understand that diabetes comes from sugar and simpler that making them try to stick to keeping track of how much sugar they intake. Also, it isn't just sugar. In the presence of fiber sugar can be less damaging, so telling someone to eat a banana is simpler than telling someone to keep track of the amount of sugar they eat, and to make sure that they have some oatmeal when they have a snack.
Almost 90% of men are over the ideal weight (not to confused with "overweight" which is a complete misnomer due to the normalization of high body fat), and it is even worse for women. This is the largest source of preventative deaths in America and much of the world and it is primarily due to the rise of processed foods which remove things like fibre and other nutritious food-elements.
although the body of text does little to explore the full sub-title it is:
"The obsession with eating natural and artisanal is ahistorical. We should demand more high-quality industrial food."
in that sense i feel the author cannot be accused of saying "let them eat tomato bbq sauce", rather they are imploring industrial food manufacturers to provide food 'on par' with fresh produce - like tomatos.
I'm amazed at the number of people who reflexively hate chain restaurants. I don't believe it can possibly be about the taste of the food - there's a lot of variety among chains. It just looks like social posturing.
Hmmm. I dislike chain restaurants for the same reason I dislike all large enterprises. I don't think I've ever dealt with a large company that has satisfactory customer service, it represents huge accumulation of wealth into few hands, etc.
At least when I was growing up, a lot of the higher-end chains were only just starting out. Whole Foods Market and Trader Joe's were completely new when I was a child, so "chain restaurant" really was synonymous with crappy hamburger joints.
Restaurants like Applebee's, TGI Friday's, Chili's, and the like tend to have lots of menu items that are scarcely better than fast food. Their menus are full of over-salted, frozen, deep-fried things like fries, onion rings, mozzarella sticks, etc. that have no redeeming culinary value.
There may be some reasonable items at these places, but a lot of their food really is just dressed up versions of what you might find in a high school cafeteria.
The thing with chain restaurants is that you'll likely be receiving lower quality food than a local mom-and-pop shop. People who work at chain restaurants generally are there to make some money and then get on with their lives. They're less likely to be passionate about food and sharing that joy with customers. They're using corporate recipes and the cheapest ingredients from massive suppliers.
When I go to small local joints, I see owners who are in love with their business and really want to share their passion of food with customers. This care really shows in the quality of the food. They made the recipe themselves, so they know every nuance of it. They often get fresh local ingredients.
Now this is just a generalization, there are plenty of passionate workers in chain restaurants, and plenty of apathetic local restaurants. It might just be a local thing too. I just had a revelation once I moved from the chain restaurants of midwest suburbia to the local shops and food carts here in Portland. It was a night and day difference of quality and general experience.
Variety doesn't equal quality. Chain restaurants have common characteristics that make the food bad:
- it has to be cheap
- cooked by a largely untrained worker in a couple of minutes, who does not really care about what is served to you
- the taste has to be such that most people will not dislike it
Every time I've tried a chain restaurant the quality was mediocre at best except for foods that fit well within those constraints (e.g. potato fries, and even those weren't great). If you can recommend a chain restaurant that has good food I'd love to hear it.
I agree. Technology has always made our lives better, and I cannot find a reason why technology applied to food would not be the same.
It is also true, though, that modern ultra-processed foods are often the ones that are not healthy. Potato chips, sugar-laden pastries, not to speak of the now almost unseen trans-saturated fat.
Look at Soylent though. Not sure about its tastiness, but it's supposed to be all you need to eat.
it's a truism that just because something is new, or just because something is old - does not mean it is better or worse for that reason alone. perhaps with the notable exception of archaeological or other historical artifacts.
yes in that case, the uniqueness is the valuable thing. if an artifact is one of many, like a chinese terracotta solider - it is less valuable than something more unique.
The problem is there is no incentive for industrial food to find out how to truly make things healthier, it's primarily about taste and marketability. So whatever the latest scientific study says is just fodder to be reduced to a small change and a bullet point (witness gluten-free), while the lab scientists continue to pour effort into synthesizing better and better tastes and addictive qualities to the food. We can demand healthier foods yes, but it's nigh impossible to ensure that the best nutritional and scientific knowledge makes it from the lab all the way through the food design process to the products that end up on the shelves.
Plus, even if we did, nutrition is not a simple thing that we have all figured out. So even assuming the best of intentions from everyone involved, it's still a big leap that chopping everything up into its constituent parts, then reformulating it to be as tasty as possible (while still meeting nutritional standards of course!) is going to result in a healthy diet.
In this light, eating whole foods is not about declaring the superiority of "natural" foods, it's just a hedge against the ignorance and mis-aligned incentives that exist in the industrial foods industry.
>In this light, eating whole foods is not about declaring the superiority of "natural" foods, it's just a hedge against the ignorance and mis-aligned incentives that exist in the industrial foods industry.
Yes, but the whole point of the article is that what we consider today to be whole, unprocessed, natural foods are in fact:
* Selectively bred for digestibility and taste
* Only affordable thanks to agriculture becoming a mass-production industry
Much of "the best nutritional and scientific knowledge" is hardly science and mostly magical thinking. Nutrition studies are probably the most misleading "scientific" papers out there. When John Ioannidis demonstrated in 2005 that most medical research findings are false, he singled out two particularly grievous offenders: genetics and nutrition. Yes, we know a few things about what's healthy and what's not, but precious few.
Most of nutritional "findings" are based on sketchy statistics run on inaccurate data obtained from really bad experiments. If anything, what little evidence there is suggests that there may not even be such a thing as "healthy" or "unhealthy" food, but food that may be more or less healthy for a specific individual. And what is more certain (from large scale statistics) is that the effect food has on our health (within a reasonable margin) is quite small in most healthy people without some genetic anomalies. What makes it seem large is simply magical thinking (or placebo, if the two are different).
Which raises the far more interesting question of why is it that otherwise scientifically minded people treat nutrition as a science rather than the "science" it really is? The psychologist and anthropologist Jonathan Haidt believes that this is a psychological manifestation of a drive for "purity" (one of several common moral drives he's classified in many societies) as it expresses itself among some people, especially liberals. He says conservatives channel purity to sex and liberals to food. He says people in all cultures believe that some behaviours contaminate us; conservatives tend to think those behaviors are sex related, and liberals think they're food related. Which is why accounts of people "feeling more energetic" after changing their diet read just like conversion stories -- they are simply two manifestations of the same phenomenon. And just like what religion people convert to doesn't matter, the accounts of being "more energetic" and "feeling better" are the same no matter what diet people switch to (of course, sometimes you read other accounts, but such is the nature of placebo -- it's complicated). As long as there is the slightest excuse to justify a particular choice of diet -- and in the case of science fans that can be a "science" paper -- psychology kicks in.
Really? So would you like to explain the widespread trend of increasing adult onset diabetes, and do you consider having diabetes to be healthy or unhealthy?
First, I don't need to provide an explanation to demonstrate that other explanations are completely unfounded. If you don't have sufficient data to justify your statistical explanation or if your statistical reasoning is fundamentally flawed, then your explanation is unfounded whether or not I can provide an alternative one. Your statement is like an ancient Greek man saying to another: "Really? So if you don't believe in Zeus, what else could explain lightning?" If we don't know then we don't know. That someone comes up with one bogus explanation doesn't mean it's valid -- or even a good working hypothesis -- until someone else comes up with another bogus one. It is the magical mind that expects an explanation -- any explanation -- to any phenomenon. Science readily accepts that we just don't (yet) have an explanation for many things.
Second, there's a world of difference between saying something is related to nutrition in general, saying it relates to some global nutritional variable such as calorie intake, and saying something relates to a more specific nutritional variable such as intake of animal fat. While making each of these statements may be dubious due to the inherent difficulty of doing any sort of nutritional research (it must be observational and longitudinal, and there are too many confounding variables), at each of these three levels of nutritional explanation, there are so many more variables being added, so that to prove the third one you'll probably need many more samples than there are people on this planet. The dimensionality is just too big to tackle with statistics.
Imagine that the real explanation could be something like: amount of animal fat consumed between the ages 0 and 13, and unrelated to anything consumed later. Or it could also be that the same causes of diabetes also reduce the chance of, say, brain cancer, and so what we're seeing is actually a good thing. There are just too many variables, especially that we know food interacts in very complex ways with anything from hormones to gut flora.
What we can say with certainty is that life expectancy has been increasing steadily (not at a steady pace, of course) since the industrial revolution, and that it is very similar among all industrialized countries. The variations are hardly more than a couple of percentage points in spite of sometimes very different diets, different levels of pollution, different amounts of sunlight, different occupations, different leisure activities etc. So countries are so different, yet life expectancy is almost the same everywhere (in the industrial world, of course). Another thing we know for sure is that life expectancy in the developing world is much, much lower.
Of course, rather than clinical studies -- or "clinical", as nutritional studies are observational and wildly confounded -- one could try to study nutrition through biological metabolism, but we're probably decades away from having a really good grasp of human metabolism.
This is another very interesting article from Jacobin, but I'm not sure who the author is arguing against. I've never heard of any "culinary luddites" avoiding food products because they come from an industrial farm.
There's ALWAYS another reason. It could be because the consumer believes that raising chickens without any sunlight or space to walk around is cruel. Or because the industrial farm pays its migrant laborers under minimum wage. Or because the brand under which the product is sold has a parent company that spends millions lobbying for anti-consumer laws. Or because the final product is so loaded with preservatives that its not as healthy as its fresh alternative. Or perhaps someone favors local produce because transportation to the market emits less carbon than the imported variety.
Sure, there might be some irrational people who don't like industrial farm products because they're industrial farm products. But they're a tiny, insignificant percentage of the "slow food" advocates.
i think she is saying that irrespective of consumers reason for avoiding industrial produce - the author is challenging industrial producers to do better.
casting a wide lens over consumers past and present, she uses her understanding of history to critique present day tastes as ahistorical and challenges consumers and producers alike to evaluate food on a case by case basis - rather than behaving a certain way because of assumptions that are just too general.
> Or because the final product is so loaded with preservatives that its not as healthy as its fresh alternative. ... Sure, there might be some irrational people who don't like industrial farm products because they're industrial farm products.
I think you just hit the nail on the head and then moved on without noticing. People want things to be "natural" because that's "healthy", but they aren't natural and natural doesn't mean healthy.
In my experience, these people are very, very far from being a tiny, insignificant percentage Maybe you hang out with engineers instead of hippies, but I can assure you that there's no shortage of baseless anti-technology culinary Luddites. Try asking the average American (or European how they feel about GMO crops. Sure, scientists overwhelmingly say they're safe to eat, but the majority of Americans disagree[1], often very vehemently.
(I will admit that my situation, is certainly biased towards over-estimating the number of "all-natural" proponents, but the data show it's not just the people I hang out with--it's pervasive.)
I think this is exactly it. I'm always annoyed when I hear people talking about how healthy something is because it's natural, purely because it's natural. There are plenty of natural things that can outright kill you if you eat them, that doesn't make them any less natural. It's an excuse to not have to think critically about the problem.
I'll be the first to admit I don't always eat very well, but doing something as extreme as some of the fad diets that have popped up is (in some cases) like deciding to walk everywhere myself because I'm concerned about some unsafe driving habits I have. There is a middle ground with positive aspects and less negative consequences, it just takes some thought and effort.
>It's an excuse to not have to think critically about the problem.
The way those people mean "natural" refers to things that people have been eating for millenia, not merely any natural thing.
They very well know that poisonous mushrooms and rocks are natural but not edible.
"Natural" in the context of food has a more constrained meaning than the main dictionary definition of "appears in nature". It means edible food products without additives or artificial preservatives.
So this thing about those people "talking about how healthy something is because it's natural, purely because it's natural" is a huge strawman.
> The way those people mean "natural" refers to things that people have been eating for millenia, not merely any natural thing.
No, it doesn't always mean that. Until recently I've mostly heard it in the context of "minimal processing". The whole paleo diet thing is much more recent interpretation of "natural", or at least it's more recent to the public at large (IMO).
> They very well know that poisonous mushrooms and rocks are natural but not edible.
Of course they know that some natural things are dangerous and deadly, it's this exact cognitive dissonance that I'm describing, and this is the problem. Adherence to a rule that we all know to be false (even those proposing it), while ignoring the times the rule isn't followed because it makes no sense, doesn't lead to useful results, it leads to dissatisfaction.
I don't see this as any different than the many previous hopelessly simplistic strategies for dealing with food. Fat is bad, caffeine is bad, alcohol is bad. Then, some fat is good, caffeine can had positive effects, alcohol in moderation helps. People strive for simple rules to help manage the complexity of their lives, and the multitude of choices we have. Unfortunately, simple rules rarely encapsulate a good strategy for a complex system, and we are very complex system, even just our dietary needs. Of all the places where (societally) we should accept, even encourage, some complexity and the required critical thinking is brings, I think our health is a good candidate.
>I think you just hit the nail on the head and then moved on without noticing. People want things to be "natural" because that's "healthy", but they aren't natural and natural doesn't mean healthy.
Natural doesn't mean always healthy (there are poisonous plants for example), but it does mean chickens that are grassfed and not loaded with growth hormones for example...
That's right in most cases, but not in all cases. Compare modern, industrial bread with "artisanal" bread. The latter is in my opinion vastly superior. Not because it's healthier because it isn't, but because it tastes better and has better texture. Also some "old" vegetables like parsnip taste great. Or cucumber varieties that aren't as big but don't taste like water. So there are certainly reasons beyond natural health hype to like older food. And natural <-> healthly, unnatural <-> unhealthly isn't a bad rule of thumb.
There's a a difference between being "anti-technology" and being cautious. Nassim Taleb's paper applying of the precautionary principle to the GMO debate is probably the most lucid piece on the matter.
There's a reason that most of the US population views the anti-vaccine crowd as delusional, while at the same time being skeptical of GMO's. Vaccines have been used for over a hundred years and have a very clear payoff. GMO's, not so much.
You're writing these people off as anti-technology. That's wrong. These people use all modern technology just like you do. The odd-balls are actually people like you (and most engineers), who are eager to embrace new technology without thinking through potential negative consequences.
I'm not saying that GMO's are bad or should be banned. But I do believe that the pro-business American approach is dead wrong. Just as the American approach to weight loss and nutritional supplements (just put them on the market, no need to test), is wrong.
I'd argue that your approach (the American, pro-business approach) shows disdain for the scientific method. It's the kind of policy vomited out of a Congress where only 2 out of the 535 representatives are scientists. In China on the other hand, where 8 of the 9 top government officials are trained scientists [1], they're very skeptical of GMO's and have only allowed them, I believe, for the papaya crop. But as the data continues to comes in, the Chinese government is showing signs of warming up to GMO's -- as they should.
You're treating "people" as isolated individuals, some may be more "cautious" than others. But what's happening here is probably no more and no less than social trends and attitudes. What you attribute to caution is an interesting shift in society's attitude to technology and industrialization that is far more complex than just well-reasoned caution. The rule is, whenever you see a lot of people behave in the same way, it's almost never due to some empirical, reasoned argument that they all arrive at, and almost always due to cultural influence (which may or may not be partly based on evidence).
SF is full of this. I've seen places proudly announce they're selling tea (green tea at that) with sugar, but "not that chemical stuff". They literally believe that eating sugar is better than sucralose or similar substitutes. When pressed, it's because "it's a chemical", "it's unnatural", or my favorite, "the FDA was corrupted into approving it". They claim all sorts of maladies, but aren't ever able to cite anything. They also ignore how not only the FDA, but every other food safety body, as far as Singapore, have also approved it. I cut out all aspartame and sucralose for a few months, and those people were shocked that I noticed no difference - so sure they were of evil chemicals hurting my, I dunno, being. I actually carry sucralose around in SF, as some restaurants won't have any zero glycemic index sweeteners.
Sorta like MSG. Double blind trials of people that claim MSG sensitivity show no problems. Yet "No MSG" is touted all over and people swear it's real.
To be really annoyed, read up on Golden Rice. Here's a rice mod that can literally save thousands of children annually, but anti "GMO" try to stop it because "we should just give all the kids supplements".
This all reminds me of Vibram's and the minimalist running shoe movement. Runner's wanted things to be "natural" because it's "healthier." It sounds very novel. But we didn't respect the fact that we're running miles on blacktop and concrete surfaces.
Besides rude, this comment doesn't have any arguments. He might very well believe in magic, but it seems like you believe you found the fountaint of truth.
There's nothing "magic" or "unscientific" about preservatives being bad for you. Not all of them, but a hell of a lot are. Chosing between a fruit or a meat with and without preservatives, it's a no brainer which is healthier (unless the latter is rotten to begin with).
Besides food processing is not "science" (which is all about understanding and analysing things) it's technology (which can be informed by science, but can also be all about being able to manipulate things for a quick buck, understanding or morals be damned).
You might argue sugar is a preservative, but I'd call it more filler. I think the science is out on salt but other wise, preservatives are fine. This backwards based beliefs that scary sounding names are bad for you is ridiculous.
People fear industrial farm products because they fear science, they are luddites, that's all there is to it.
Strawman attempts to justify it are just part of that fear.
Seriously who's more likely to illegally under pay workers, Joe Blow or Ronald McDonald? It doesn't even make sense for a big company to risk breaking the law. Look at the crap McDonalds is currently getting about Qatar.
And lets not get started about people driving all around town to buy local. (Although to be fair buying local is a large part racism)
>I think I'll just be hitting my head against a wall, but there no such thing as healthy food
Not even sure what this is supposed to mean. Of course even water can kill you if you take it in large does, so that statement is trivially true, but doesn't say anything much.
There is such a thing as food with harmful (cancinogenic, bad for the heart, causing higher pressure, etc) additives, and there is such a thing as the same food without them. There are cows and chickens stuffed with growth hormones and there are others without them.
Sure some perfectly untouched foods can be harmful in themselves too -- e.g. eating lard. That's OK, seeing that not selling food at all is not an option, whereas not selling food with additives is.
And it's not that those are needed because else food would be prohibitevely expensive. A lot of additives and preservatives those are used to squeeze extra profit margins -- while keeping prices the same or even raising them.
People ate just fine even before the rise of corn syrup in the 70s. It's not like all these HFCS industry and invansion on the american diet "had to happen" because "the poor where starving".
>People fear industrial farm products because they fear science, they are luddites, that's all there is to it.
Some do.
Not all, and there are people well versed in the science and actual processing of food (people working in food chemistry, food industry etc.) that can assure you that's not the only case.
The belief described above -- that complaints against anything "scientific" come from luddites and people who fear -- is a pseudo-scientific ideology, where science is some pure ideal, and not a pragmatic, human driven endeavor.
That kind of belief in this abstract "science" is no less magic and unicorny than believing that the government or the police are good guys always there for the good of society. (And usually serves as a substitute for religion).
The worst thing is that it cannot separate "science" (which is mostly a method, that can also be followed imperfectly, and often has) with "technology" (which is the application of knowledge in building things, and can very well produce harmful stuff either by intention to cause harm, or by intention to cut margins).
>There's nothing "magic" or "unscientific" about preservatives being bad for you. Not all of them, but a hell of a lot are. Chosing between a fruit or a meat with and without preservatives, it's a no brainer which is healthier (unless the latter is rotten to begin with).
Why do we add preservatives? To prevent the food from rotting in the first place, which means that fresh food vs food with preservatives will always be rotting food vs food with preservatives, unless you want the poor to starve.
No, I said it because I've been bodybuilding for 10 years and I know nutrition. Food with added preservatives are significantly higher in sodium, which causes your body to retain more water. This is critical to know if you're trying to stay lean, but it's also important to know if you're trying to stay healthy. The excess water adds an extra burden for your heart, which can lead to high blood pressure and all the ills that come with it.
It's a very simple concept, and it has nothing to do with Luddism. It's the reason that I eat "fresh" Foster Farms chicken breasts instead of the frozen Foster Farms chicken breasts.
You've been bodybuilding for 10 years, but you've still got a lot to learn.
Sudden increases in sodium intake cause you to retain water, but as long as your sodium intake stays fairly regular, it doesn't really matter how much you consume. This is because the body responds to sodium intake by adjusting the production of aldosterone, which controls water retention and sodium excretion in the kidneys. Thus, if you regularly eat more sodium, your body responds by excreting more sodium.
This is the reason that bodybuilders will sodium load for 4-5 days before competition, then cut all sodium 24 hours before competition. The loading phase causes the body to readily excrete sodium, and when sodium is suddenly cut from the diet it takes time for the body to start retaining sodium, producing a short-lived diuretic effect.
In Comments
Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face-to-face
conversation. Avoid gratuitous negativity.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of
calling names. E.g. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3"
can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Often, consuming local produce uses more carbon. Transportation is often a minor contributor to food production's carbon footprint (http://www.cleanmetrics.com/pages/Ch9_0923.pdf). We tend to get our food from places which can efficiently produce it. Even when factoring in transportation, it can still use less overall carbon than consuming less efficiently grown local food.
I live in a place where nothing fresh or natural grows for 7 months of the year, and for most of the other 5 what's fresh is still growing and "not ready yet". The "eat local" movement is therefore directly opposed to eating "fresh and natural". It's not surprising that practically nobody eats local here. Yet, people have lived here for thousands of years.
Nomadic natives hunted buffalo, and you can bet they got sick of pemmican and jerky after a few months of being snowbound. It's no wonder that they considered liver, plucked fresh and warm from the body of a still-quivering kill, to be a delicacy. Settlers subsisted on stored grains and potatoes stored underground. They ate the occasional cow or chicken too and hunted for venison, but meat was not had with every meal. In the first half of the previous century canning techniques allowed them to greatly expand their diet by storing everything they could lay their hands on in the month or two of plenty. In the latter half of the twentieth century refrigeration let them expand their diet again. Today, fresh food from around the globe is brought in by plane, train, and automobile. Meanwhile, this province produces vast amounts of grains and beef for export all around the globe. By eating globally, we all eat better.
I don't know what global trends are like, but locally we're in the midst of another big transformation. When I was a child, almost everyone made their own meals. Eating out was expensive and rare. There was no local equivalent to England's fish&chip shops or the street vendors of Thailand. Even McDonald's was expensive when compared to home-cooking. That's changed. Restaurant fare has become so affordable that it's almost cheaper to eat out. The main downside to doing so is health. Restaurants always put in that extra pound of butter if the outcome will taste better. There are a few fledgling restaurants trying to carve out a niche for healthy fast-food. It will be interesting to see if they succeed.
Food, as a commodity, is much cheaper than most people think. The price of rice is hovering around $400 per metric ton. Wheat is less than $250. Soybeans about $400. Pork is about $1500 per metric ton, Beef about 3 times that.
According to random sites I googled, the average american eats just under a metric ton of food a year. Depending on what you eat, you could potentially eat for a year on considerably less than $1000, if you bought food at commodity prices.
The reason we can't buy food at that price is because of all of the processing and handling that goes on between the farmer and the plate. A restaurant is just another level of processing and handling, so it appears to the average consumer that it isn't much more expensive than cooking at home. In reality, it is possible to source food in large quantities and to do all the processing yourself at a significantly reduced cost. There are even groups of people who do this for fun. With the advent of the internet it is now easier than ever to do it.
However, the reason that this is not so popular is that most people in the western world are comparatively rich and have no free time. Most people don't care if they can cut $1000 a year from their food budget if it means that they have to invest 2 hours a day to do it. Many, many families have dual incomes, so even if we say that we could cut their overall household food budget by $4000, they wouldn't do it because they would have to give up one of those incomes.
So, I don't think restaurants have gotten cheaper -- people have gotten richer, but have given up time to get the money.
A while ago I decided that if I couldn't kill and prepare my own meat because I was too squeamish, I had no moral right to eat store-bought meat.
So when I found processing my first rabbit a little challenging (they smell bad on the inside, and their teeth are long, yellow and very definitely rodent teeth), I kept the thought of steak and bacon in my mind and pushed on through.
But I still find it interesting how I had trouble reconciling the fact that my meat used to be a corpse - when you're cooking game animals, the meat often retains a flavour that you can smell while processing the carcass. The first few times I ate something I had prepared, I ate sparingly, while my family tucked in. I think it was due to my own mental assocation of corpses with disease and decay.
So yeah, I think a fair few people who eat meat would not do so if they had to process it from living animal to carcass to meat.
Perhaps we shouldn't take this squeamishness to signify anything other than a simple discomfort with novel sensory input, rather than any deep moral insights. I've butchered fish and game since I was in grade school. While I recognize the odors, textures, and sights involved as specific to that process, they don't put me off in any way. (Although perhaps in sufficient volume they would; I've never been in a Tyson chicken plant.) Does that mean that it's moral for me to eat all the meat I want, while more squeamish people must eat less? Frankly I'm not sure either way. Maybe the squeamishness of the most delicate among us indicts meat-eating for all of us?
>The Luddites’ fable of disaster, of a fall from grace, smacks more of wishful thinking than of digging through archives. It gains credence not from scholarship but from evocative dichotomies: fresh and natural versus processed and preserved; local versus global; slow versus fast: artisanal and traditional versus urban and industrial; healthful versus contaminated and fatty. History shows, I believe, that the Luddites have things back to front.
No, they don't. And his work is less historical than ideological.
We have lots of historically verified facts to know that modern processed foods are unhealthy and created to maximize profit. From corn syrup everywhere, to things like this:
I didn't really read the article, I just Ctrl-F'd for "Japan". Japanese is among the healthiest food cultures in the world, if you go by obesity prevalence and life expectancy, and one I happen to know very well.
Predictably, the author mentions something about "sushi and soy sauce" because that's the only thing he cared to learn about.
Forgive me a short anecdote. About ten years ago to the day, I was backpacking around Kyushu with a friend of mine. One afternoon we had grown particularly thirsty, and when we happened upon a farm with cows we sought the owner to see if there was any milk. She was extraordinarily gracious and invited us into her home. They had milk, of course, but far more interesting to me was the 90+ year old grandmother of the house, who was just about to arrive from picking a kind of wild vegetable that grew everywhere and happened to be in season that week. When she entered the house and saw the two of us, she presented us with the crop and kowtowed such that her face, knees, and hands were all on the floor, to honor us. Remarkably spry for a 90 year old.
In Japan there is a time and a season for every ingredient. We (Americans) go to the supermarket every week and expect the same boring vegetables because we have no idea how to make dinner unless it's tomatoes, onions, and broccoli, if we are even making our own food at all. If those things aren't in season we have them shipped from other countries. In reality the food we need is all around us, or at least it is in places the environment hasn't been completely destroyed. Industrial food will never lead us to the kind of richness of variety and sensitivity to season you will find in Japan, or France, or almost anywhere that isn't the USA really.
Yes, industrial factory food makes life 'easier' for us, but does it really make life better? We like to eat our chicken without contemplating the fact that all our animals are spending their entire lives in an abattoir.
I think a lot of people are missing the point of the article. It's not saying that pumping food full of high-fructose corn syrup is this great and wonderful thing that has no downsides. It's pointing out how technology has made food more affordable and accessible, and asking to "go back" to how things used to be means condemning lots of people to poverty. If we want to make food healthier, we need to figure out how to make better food affordable, not try to return to a past that never was.
It's not just about affordability, it's also about education. Plain rice, flour and the like are much cheaper per calorie/nutrient than junk food, and healthier, but many people simply don't know how to cook. I know families in Asia, for instance, who while being almost an order of magnitude poorer than the American poverty line are still a lot healthier, because they know how to prepare their own food from staples.
Subsidies are what makes industrial food "more affordable".
It's interesting that you bring up people "in poverty". People "in poverty" do much better when they can grow their own food using more natural methods such as polycultures. Centralized Industrial agriculture is what created the situation where they were not able to grow their own food by decimating their local markets, buying up all of their land, & destroying their ecosystems.
Also, till methods using monoculture annual monocultures is more resource & energy intensive than no-till methods using perennial polycultures.
> Subsidies are what makes industrial food "more affordable".
My country has no agricultural subsidies, indeed the competitiveness of our agricultural sector is shaped by it, and if international trade were to cease, we'd be largely self-sufficient in foodstuffs although we'd lose some of the cheaper options for things like tinned tomatoes.
Despite our lack of subsidies, we have yet to revert to 19th century living standards.
New Zealand. We went through a very painful era in the late 70s when agricultural subsidies were removed, it ended a lot of farms that were unsustainable without them, with some farmers committing suicide and some very painful impacts on rural communities, but our agricultural sector is much the better for it. The fact that we can compete effectively in the EU and USA against subsidised and tariff-protected local farmers despite the tyranny of distance is an indication of it.
Unfortunately, our current government is leaning towards indirect subsidisation of aspects of the agricultural sector via funding for irrigation works and omitting action on the environmental externalities of intensive dairying, but we'll never again be in a place where people are being paid just for owning animals or growing a certain crop.
Just out of curiosity, what were the agricultural subsidies like in NZ before they were abolished?
In the US, the direct subsidies are something like $0.25 / bushel for most grains, with price guarantees of around $2 / bushel. Market rates tend to be $4-15 / bushel, depending on the grain. There are, of course, indirect subsidies through the beef and ethanol industries, but that gets more complex.
I'm curious if the NZ subsidies were more distorted than that -- in the US, the subsidies will definitely encourage over-production (which I consider a good thing), but I'm not intrinsically bothered by a $0.25 / bushel subsidy on $4-7 / bushel corn.
Interesting, is the term "bushel" still used? I'd have thought it was somewhat archaic by now (having only read it in that context in children's stories, as a kid), but what do I know.
In the US, bushels are the standard measurement of grains, at least as far as farmers are concerned. Whenever I hear about relief being sent to a place with a famine, it is always tons of grain, so it definitely isn't a universal measurement. But prices and yields are still discussed in bushels.
Hilariously, while the bushel started out as a volume -- 8 dry gallons, which are totally different from liquid gallons -- they are now a measurement of the weight of a specific grain at a specific moisture content. So to measure a grain, you need to measure its weight and its moisture content, convert it to its weight at the specific moisture content, and then divide it by the standard weight for the grain. So if you have a thousand pounds of corn at 20% moisture, it is just under 17 bushels, but if it were soybeans, just over 15.
People "in poverty" do much better when they can grow their own food using more natural methods such as polycultures.
But having individuals, or small groups (ie. families) grow their own food is massively expensive compared to modern industrial techniques. The cost per whatever you want to measure it in (if you're that poor, the question is "will I stay alive or will I starve?" so calories is a pretty good measure) of a small group growing their own food is huge.
I actually calculated it myself the last time I came back from a country with an enormous proportion of agricultural labourers using broadly manual and outdated techniques, in which famine is a recent event. They were spending an enormous amount on trying to make enough food to stay alive. It takes me literally between five and ten minutes to earn enough to buy food that will keep me alive for a day. If I were to decide to create that food myself, it would not be five or ten minutes of my time each day.
Is the situation that simple? A lot of produce you consume might actually come from manual labor, at least AFAICT. Granted, not as much that you would ave to starve, but still.
> it would not be five or ten minutes of my time each day
In optimal conditions, it would be 5 minutes to sow and 5 minutes to pick. The plants grow on their own. Of course, it isn't that easy, but neither is working only 5 hours a month.
As an example, the amount of life-sustaining food we can get from a cow using modern techniques is so much more than by using old techniques. Yeah, sure, some of it doesn't look very pretty; cry me a river. For a very, very long time throughout human history dying because there wasn't enough food to eat was something everyone had in the back of their mind (and still do in many places).
Much processed food and big bags of frozen vegetables and so on is healthy and cheap; it's got what you need to stay alive in good condition and doesn't have (for example) arsenic in it, which to my mind is pretty much the definition of healthy food. Fat, protein, whatever; once it's broken down to cross the stomach, it all looks the same. It's only a problem if people simply eat too much (or not enough) of something.
>Meanwhile, the rich, in search of a more varied diet, bought, stole, wheedled, robbed, taxed, and ran off with appealing plants and animals, foodstuffs, and culinary techniques from wherever they could find them.
I've found that people don't fundamentally understand what "processed food" means, on any side of the question. Even people who try to follow a "Raw Fruit" only diet, pit their cherries, cut the skin and hard parts off of pineapples and peel bananas. Turning grain into flour and then into bread is processing, so is fermenting things, salting them, smoking them, drying them and so on. Do you take all raw, fresh, organic, home garden grown ingredients and put them in a pot of boiling water? Or how about making a reduction by boiling the water off, or making a gravy by mixing fat and flour together under heat?
Processing is what animals do so they can eat their food. Even squirrels crack nuts and lions separate meat from bones. But humans have also learned to process food to even out uneven food harvests and bring some measure of surety to eating.
I'm frequently surprised at the creativeness and inventiveness of Koreans, a culture I married into -- and a culture that's come into refrigeration much later than the U.S. A surprising amount of their traditional food preservation culture carries on today, earned through centuries of hardship and resulting in remarkably stable and healthy foodstuffs year round. Kimchi, the national dish is a prime example of this heritage. Even the kings of old had acres of food preservation and fermentation operations on the palace grounds [1].
Soy sauce, brought up in the article, is a supremely processed food -- the good stuff takes years of continuous processing to make. But on the path from Soy Beans to Soy Sauce, there's half a dozen stages where food stuffs can be rendered out of the process, making appetizers, side-dishes, snacks, main meal proteins, condiments, soup stock, and more. Soy sauce is the most processed outcome of this trail, a necessary thing to make inedible soy beans human consumable.
However, very few people arguing against processed food would compare Doenjang and American Sliced Cheese. The former might be called a quaint but tasty traditional foodstuff, the "cheese" considered spawn of hell in some circles. But an easy argument can be made the Doenjang is probably more processed than Kraft sliced American cheese.
(I agree with most of this article, the author should take care not to fall into the same trap as the "culinary Luddites" he describes, stating something they merely believe to be the case, that isn't actually based in fact)
> prompting him to wonder whether they would really like things the way they naturally used to be. Natural was unreliable. Fresh fish began to stink. Fresh milk soured, eggs went rotten.
Eggs don't work that way. They don't go rotten unless they're damaged. An egg is like a really big cell, and it's sterile on the inside.
US eggs are washed clean, to protect against Salmonella--which lives in intestines and spreads through faecal matter, therefore occurs strictly on the outside of an egg shell, and washing it probably works well against that. Except it also removes/damages a protective layer (cuticle) in the shell, allowing the rotting process to enter the inside.
I have heard (but never tested! so take this with a grain of salt) that with an unwashed egg, in the end it is the yolk that sinks down, touches the shell, making the membrane more permeable, that allows for the rotting to start. I've been told (but again, never tested, own risk, etc) that if you turn those eggs weekly, keeping the yolk floating in the middle, you can even keep them for 1-2 years. I suppose it might lose some of its flavour though :-P
If I were to look purely at the health-factors of rotting vs Salmonella, I'd have to prefer washing. At least if your egg is rotten, you'll immediately know it's rotten as soon as you open it (the smell is either there or it isn't), while with Salmonella, you won't know until half a day after eating. But I do like being able to keep my eggs at room-temperature in the kitchen cupboard, though :)
The article misconstrues multiple food movements from by taking three words, natural, fresh, and local, and not understanding the context around them. The article therefore boils down into a straw man argument.
The slow food movement particularly is a tiny minority, it’s like bringing up the Tea Party, for a political debate. There is a much larger movement against fast food, and that’s mostly because of chemicals used in fast food. Nitrate preserved meat has links to cancer. Azodicarbonamide, a dough conditional, banned in Europe/Australia, was in US Subway sandwiches till last year. Then of course there is soda, a food engineered to be over-consumed, which leads to diabetes and obesity.
No one outside of Raw Vegans, again another tiny minority, is against preservation of foods. In fact, it’s common and promoted. The mechanism though is typically through bacterial fermentation and pickling with vinegar which is how most of the foods (soy, tofu, kimchi, sauerkraut, pickles, herring, yogurt etc) are prepared, stored, and used during winter times when no vegetation is available. Synthetic preservatives have been linked to negative health outcomes.
The local food movement is really just about eating produce locally when possible. Why should? Typically it’s cheaper, more varied, and more nutritious. All of the words agriculture is bred for maximum shelf life. You aren’t getting the best tasting food, you are just getting the food that won’t go bad. That also means it’s less genetically diverse. There 10k varieties of tomatoes, you can only buy about 5 commercially. Emphasis here is on produce, no one is abstaining from imported spices.
Most of these movements come at the heels of rising obesity epidemic in the US and around the world against an industry that’s for profit and not for pro health. Some are extreme, but that helps swing the pendulum the opposite direction. You can see the rise of more ingredient conscious and more delicious Chipotle, which sources all ingredients within 350mi and the fall of the heavily processed McDonalds. This is a net positive and not something we should be condemning.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] threadI watched a TEDx talk (I think) by some lady talking about the pre-human-intervention foods and how this one's toxic and that one's gross and so on. I've been unable to find the video since, though. If anyone knows the talk I'm talking about, I'd love a link.
If it's a TEDx talk then don't bother; there is no scrutiny regarding the talks they allow and most are quite embarrassing displays of science ignorance. I'm actually surprise TEDx hasn't damaged the TED brand more than it has.
Really commented because I felt very compelled to diss store bought strawberries.
This is what we're dealing with: http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0210.p... 40% of people my age are over 200 pounds. It's mind blowing. And then there is this graph:
http://www.google.ca/imgres?imgurl=http://bradpilon.com/wp-c...
Almost 90% of men are over the ideal weight (not to confused with "overweight" which is a complete misnomer due to the normalization of high body fat), and it is even worse for women. This is the largest source of preventative deaths in America and much of the world and it is primarily due to the rise of processed foods which remove things like fibre and other nutritious food-elements.
"The obsession with eating natural and artisanal is ahistorical. We should demand more high-quality industrial food."
in that sense i feel the author cannot be accused of saying "let them eat tomato bbq sauce", rather they are imploring industrial food manufacturers to provide food 'on par' with fresh produce - like tomatos.
Is that social posturing?
There may be some reasonable items at these places, but a lot of their food really is just dressed up versions of what you might find in a high school cafeteria.
When I go to small local joints, I see owners who are in love with their business and really want to share their passion of food with customers. This care really shows in the quality of the food. They made the recipe themselves, so they know every nuance of it. They often get fresh local ingredients.
Now this is just a generalization, there are plenty of passionate workers in chain restaurants, and plenty of apathetic local restaurants. It might just be a local thing too. I just had a revelation once I moved from the chain restaurants of midwest suburbia to the local shops and food carts here in Portland. It was a night and day difference of quality and general experience.
- it has to be cheap
- cooked by a largely untrained worker in a couple of minutes, who does not really care about what is served to you
- the taste has to be such that most people will not dislike it
Every time I've tried a chain restaurant the quality was mediocre at best except for foods that fit well within those constraints (e.g. potato fries, and even those weren't great). If you can recommend a chain restaurant that has good food I'd love to hear it.
maybe OPH (a much, much higher quality IHOP, though it varies by location) also.
It is also true, though, that modern ultra-processed foods are often the ones that are not healthy. Potato chips, sugar-laden pastries, not to speak of the now almost unseen trans-saturated fat.
Look at Soylent though. Not sure about its tastiness, but it's supposed to be all you need to eat.
another great truism is that value is subjective.
And those are good not because they are old, but because they provide knowledge of the past.
Plus, even if we did, nutrition is not a simple thing that we have all figured out. So even assuming the best of intentions from everyone involved, it's still a big leap that chopping everything up into its constituent parts, then reformulating it to be as tasty as possible (while still meeting nutritional standards of course!) is going to result in a healthy diet.
In this light, eating whole foods is not about declaring the superiority of "natural" foods, it's just a hedge against the ignorance and mis-aligned incentives that exist in the industrial foods industry.
Yes, but the whole point of the article is that what we consider today to be whole, unprocessed, natural foods are in fact:
* Selectively bred for digestibility and taste
* Only affordable thanks to agriculture becoming a mass-production industry
Most of nutritional "findings" are based on sketchy statistics run on inaccurate data obtained from really bad experiments. If anything, what little evidence there is suggests that there may not even be such a thing as "healthy" or "unhealthy" food, but food that may be more or less healthy for a specific individual. And what is more certain (from large scale statistics) is that the effect food has on our health (within a reasonable margin) is quite small in most healthy people without some genetic anomalies. What makes it seem large is simply magical thinking (or placebo, if the two are different).
Which raises the far more interesting question of why is it that otherwise scientifically minded people treat nutrition as a science rather than the "science" it really is? The psychologist and anthropologist Jonathan Haidt believes that this is a psychological manifestation of a drive for "purity" (one of several common moral drives he's classified in many societies) as it expresses itself among some people, especially liberals. He says conservatives channel purity to sex and liberals to food. He says people in all cultures believe that some behaviours contaminate us; conservatives tend to think those behaviors are sex related, and liberals think they're food related. Which is why accounts of people "feeling more energetic" after changing their diet read just like conversion stories -- they are simply two manifestations of the same phenomenon. And just like what religion people convert to doesn't matter, the accounts of being "more energetic" and "feeling better" are the same no matter what diet people switch to (of course, sometimes you read other accounts, but such is the nature of placebo -- it's complicated). As long as there is the slightest excuse to justify a particular choice of diet -- and in the case of science fans that can be a "science" paper -- psychology kicks in.
Second, there's a world of difference between saying something is related to nutrition in general, saying it relates to some global nutritional variable such as calorie intake, and saying something relates to a more specific nutritional variable such as intake of animal fat. While making each of these statements may be dubious due to the inherent difficulty of doing any sort of nutritional research (it must be observational and longitudinal, and there are too many confounding variables), at each of these three levels of nutritional explanation, there are so many more variables being added, so that to prove the third one you'll probably need many more samples than there are people on this planet. The dimensionality is just too big to tackle with statistics.
Imagine that the real explanation could be something like: amount of animal fat consumed between the ages 0 and 13, and unrelated to anything consumed later. Or it could also be that the same causes of diabetes also reduce the chance of, say, brain cancer, and so what we're seeing is actually a good thing. There are just too many variables, especially that we know food interacts in very complex ways with anything from hormones to gut flora.
What we can say with certainty is that life expectancy has been increasing steadily (not at a steady pace, of course) since the industrial revolution, and that it is very similar among all industrialized countries. The variations are hardly more than a couple of percentage points in spite of sometimes very different diets, different levels of pollution, different amounts of sunlight, different occupations, different leisure activities etc. So countries are so different, yet life expectancy is almost the same everywhere (in the industrial world, of course). Another thing we know for sure is that life expectancy in the developing world is much, much lower.
Of course, rather than clinical studies -- or "clinical", as nutritional studies are observational and wildly confounded -- one could try to study nutrition through biological metabolism, but we're probably decades away from having a really good grasp of human metabolism.
There's ALWAYS another reason. It could be because the consumer believes that raising chickens without any sunlight or space to walk around is cruel. Or because the industrial farm pays its migrant laborers under minimum wage. Or because the brand under which the product is sold has a parent company that spends millions lobbying for anti-consumer laws. Or because the final product is so loaded with preservatives that its not as healthy as its fresh alternative. Or perhaps someone favors local produce because transportation to the market emits less carbon than the imported variety.
Sure, there might be some irrational people who don't like industrial farm products because they're industrial farm products. But they're a tiny, insignificant percentage of the "slow food" advocates.
casting a wide lens over consumers past and present, she uses her understanding of history to critique present day tastes as ahistorical and challenges consumers and producers alike to evaluate food on a case by case basis - rather than behaving a certain way because of assumptions that are just too general.
I think you just hit the nail on the head and then moved on without noticing. People want things to be "natural" because that's "healthy", but they aren't natural and natural doesn't mean healthy.
In my experience, these people are very, very far from being a tiny, insignificant percentage Maybe you hang out with engineers instead of hippies, but I can assure you that there's no shortage of baseless anti-technology culinary Luddites. Try asking the average American (or European how they feel about GMO crops. Sure, scientists overwhelmingly say they're safe to eat, but the majority of Americans disagree[1], often very vehemently.
(I will admit that my situation, is certainly biased towards over-estimating the number of "all-natural" proponents, but the data show it's not just the people I hang out with--it's pervasive.)
[1] http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/01/29/chapter-3-attitudes-an...
I'll be the first to admit I don't always eat very well, but doing something as extreme as some of the fad diets that have popped up is (in some cases) like deciding to walk everywhere myself because I'm concerned about some unsafe driving habits I have. There is a middle ground with positive aspects and less negative consequences, it just takes some thought and effort.
The way those people mean "natural" refers to things that people have been eating for millenia, not merely any natural thing.
They very well know that poisonous mushrooms and rocks are natural but not edible.
"Natural" in the context of food has a more constrained meaning than the main dictionary definition of "appears in nature". It means edible food products without additives or artificial preservatives.
So this thing about those people "talking about how healthy something is because it's natural, purely because it's natural" is a huge strawman.
No, it doesn't always mean that. Until recently I've mostly heard it in the context of "minimal processing". The whole paleo diet thing is much more recent interpretation of "natural", or at least it's more recent to the public at large (IMO).
> They very well know that poisonous mushrooms and rocks are natural but not edible.
Of course they know that some natural things are dangerous and deadly, it's this exact cognitive dissonance that I'm describing, and this is the problem. Adherence to a rule that we all know to be false (even those proposing it), while ignoring the times the rule isn't followed because it makes no sense, doesn't lead to useful results, it leads to dissatisfaction.
I don't see this as any different than the many previous hopelessly simplistic strategies for dealing with food. Fat is bad, caffeine is bad, alcohol is bad. Then, some fat is good, caffeine can had positive effects, alcohol in moderation helps. People strive for simple rules to help manage the complexity of their lives, and the multitude of choices we have. Unfortunately, simple rules rarely encapsulate a good strategy for a complex system, and we are very complex system, even just our dietary needs. Of all the places where (societally) we should accept, even encourage, some complexity and the required critical thinking is brings, I think our health is a good candidate.
Natural doesn't mean always healthy (there are poisonous plants for example), but it does mean chickens that are grassfed and not loaded with growth hormones for example...
There's a reason that most of the US population views the anti-vaccine crowd as delusional, while at the same time being skeptical of GMO's. Vaccines have been used for over a hundred years and have a very clear payoff. GMO's, not so much.
You're writing these people off as anti-technology. That's wrong. These people use all modern technology just like you do. The odd-balls are actually people like you (and most engineers), who are eager to embrace new technology without thinking through potential negative consequences.
I'm not saying that GMO's are bad or should be banned. But I do believe that the pro-business American approach is dead wrong. Just as the American approach to weight loss and nutritional supplements (just put them on the market, no need to test), is wrong.
I'd argue that your approach (the American, pro-business approach) shows disdain for the scientific method. It's the kind of policy vomited out of a Congress where only 2 out of the 535 representatives are scientists. In China on the other hand, where 8 of the 9 top government officials are trained scientists [1], they're very skeptical of GMO's and have only allowed them, I believe, for the papaya crop. But as the data continues to comes in, the Chinese government is showing signs of warming up to GMO's -- as they should.
[1] http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/13/why-dont-a...
Sorta like MSG. Double blind trials of people that claim MSG sensitivity show no problems. Yet "No MSG" is touted all over and people swear it's real.
To be really annoyed, read up on Golden Rice. Here's a rice mod that can literally save thousands of children annually, but anti "GMO" try to stop it because "we should just give all the kids supplements".
I try to avoid MSG to limit the amount of sodium in my diet, I get enough through salt already.
It's funny to see your attempt to justify your beliefs. Humans are strange creatures.
> Or because the final product is so loaded with preservatives that its not as healthy as its fresh alternative.
You said this line is because you believe in magic. Not sure if pointing it out can help. But I'll try anyway.
There's nothing "magic" or "unscientific" about preservatives being bad for you. Not all of them, but a hell of a lot are. Chosing between a fruit or a meat with and without preservatives, it's a no brainer which is healthier (unless the latter is rotten to begin with).
Besides food processing is not "science" (which is all about understanding and analysing things) it's technology (which can be informed by science, but can also be all about being able to manipulate things for a quick buck, understanding or morals be damned).
This magic belief system is ridiculous to have in this day and age, and is dangerous.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preservative
You might argue sugar is a preservative, but I'd call it more filler. I think the science is out on salt but other wise, preservatives are fine. This backwards based beliefs that scary sounding names are bad for you is ridiculous.
People fear industrial farm products because they fear science, they are luddites, that's all there is to it.
Strawman attempts to justify it are just part of that fear. Seriously who's more likely to illegally under pay workers, Joe Blow or Ronald McDonald? It doesn't even make sense for a big company to risk breaking the law. Look at the crap McDonalds is currently getting about Qatar.
And lets not get started about people driving all around town to buy local. (Although to be fair buying local is a large part racism)
Not even sure what this is supposed to mean. Of course even water can kill you if you take it in large does, so that statement is trivially true, but doesn't say anything much.
There is such a thing as food with harmful (cancinogenic, bad for the heart, causing higher pressure, etc) additives, and there is such a thing as the same food without them. There are cows and chickens stuffed with growth hormones and there are others without them.
Sure some perfectly untouched foods can be harmful in themselves too -- e.g. eating lard. That's OK, seeing that not selling food at all is not an option, whereas not selling food with additives is.
And it's not that those are needed because else food would be prohibitevely expensive. A lot of additives and preservatives those are used to squeeze extra profit margins -- while keeping prices the same or even raising them.
People ate just fine even before the rise of corn syrup in the 70s. It's not like all these HFCS industry and invansion on the american diet "had to happen" because "the poor where starving".
>People fear industrial farm products because they fear science, they are luddites, that's all there is to it.
Some do.
Not all, and there are people well versed in the science and actual processing of food (people working in food chemistry, food industry etc.) that can assure you that's not the only case.
The belief described above -- that complaints against anything "scientific" come from luddites and people who fear -- is a pseudo-scientific ideology, where science is some pure ideal, and not a pragmatic, human driven endeavor.
That kind of belief in this abstract "science" is no less magic and unicorny than believing that the government or the police are good guys always there for the good of society. (And usually serves as a substitute for religion).
The worst thing is that it cannot separate "science" (which is mostly a method, that can also be followed imperfectly, and often has) with "technology" (which is the application of knowledge in building things, and can very well produce harmful stuff either by intention to cause harm, or by intention to cut margins).
Why do we add preservatives? To prevent the food from rotting in the first place, which means that fresh food vs food with preservatives will always be rotting food vs food with preservatives, unless you want the poor to starve.
It's a very simple concept, and it has nothing to do with Luddism. It's the reason that I eat "fresh" Foster Farms chicken breasts instead of the frozen Foster Farms chicken breasts.
Sudden increases in sodium intake cause you to retain water, but as long as your sodium intake stays fairly regular, it doesn't really matter how much you consume. This is because the body responds to sodium intake by adjusting the production of aldosterone, which controls water retention and sodium excretion in the kidneys. Thus, if you regularly eat more sodium, your body responds by excreting more sodium.
This is the reason that bodybuilders will sodium load for 4-5 days before competition, then cut all sodium 24 hours before competition. The loading phase causes the body to readily excrete sodium, and when sodium is suddenly cut from the diet it takes time for the body to start retaining sodium, producing a short-lived diuretic effect.
Nomadic natives hunted buffalo, and you can bet they got sick of pemmican and jerky after a few months of being snowbound. It's no wonder that they considered liver, plucked fresh and warm from the body of a still-quivering kill, to be a delicacy. Settlers subsisted on stored grains and potatoes stored underground. They ate the occasional cow or chicken too and hunted for venison, but meat was not had with every meal. In the first half of the previous century canning techniques allowed them to greatly expand their diet by storing everything they could lay their hands on in the month or two of plenty. In the latter half of the twentieth century refrigeration let them expand their diet again. Today, fresh food from around the globe is brought in by plane, train, and automobile. Meanwhile, this province produces vast amounts of grains and beef for export all around the globe. By eating globally, we all eat better.
I don't know what global trends are like, but locally we're in the midst of another big transformation. When I was a child, almost everyone made their own meals. Eating out was expensive and rare. There was no local equivalent to England's fish&chip shops or the street vendors of Thailand. Even McDonald's was expensive when compared to home-cooking. That's changed. Restaurant fare has become so affordable that it's almost cheaper to eat out. The main downside to doing so is health. Restaurants always put in that extra pound of butter if the outcome will taste better. There are a few fledgling restaurants trying to carve out a niche for healthy fast-food. It will be interesting to see if they succeed.
According to random sites I googled, the average american eats just under a metric ton of food a year. Depending on what you eat, you could potentially eat for a year on considerably less than $1000, if you bought food at commodity prices.
The reason we can't buy food at that price is because of all of the processing and handling that goes on between the farmer and the plate. A restaurant is just another level of processing and handling, so it appears to the average consumer that it isn't much more expensive than cooking at home. In reality, it is possible to source food in large quantities and to do all the processing yourself at a significantly reduced cost. There are even groups of people who do this for fun. With the advent of the internet it is now easier than ever to do it.
However, the reason that this is not so popular is that most people in the western world are comparatively rich and have no free time. Most people don't care if they can cut $1000 a year from their food budget if it means that they have to invest 2 hours a day to do it. Many, many families have dual incomes, so even if we say that we could cut their overall household food budget by $4000, they wouldn't do it because they would have to give up one of those incomes.
So, I don't think restaurants have gotten cheaper -- people have gotten richer, but have given up time to get the money.
"comparatively rich and have no free time"
That depends on the definition of "rich".
So when I found processing my first rabbit a little challenging (they smell bad on the inside, and their teeth are long, yellow and very definitely rodent teeth), I kept the thought of steak and bacon in my mind and pushed on through.
But I still find it interesting how I had trouble reconciling the fact that my meat used to be a corpse - when you're cooking game animals, the meat often retains a flavour that you can smell while processing the carcass. The first few times I ate something I had prepared, I ate sparingly, while my family tucked in. I think it was due to my own mental assocation of corpses with disease and decay.
So yeah, I think a fair few people who eat meat would not do so if they had to process it from living animal to carcass to meat.
No, they don't. And his work is less historical than ideological.
We have lots of historically verified facts to know that modern processed foods are unhealthy and created to maximize profit. From corn syrup everywhere, to things like this:
E.g. http://www.amazon.com/Tomatoland-Industrial-Agriculture-Dest...
Predictably, the author mentions something about "sushi and soy sauce" because that's the only thing he cared to learn about.
Forgive me a short anecdote. About ten years ago to the day, I was backpacking around Kyushu with a friend of mine. One afternoon we had grown particularly thirsty, and when we happened upon a farm with cows we sought the owner to see if there was any milk. She was extraordinarily gracious and invited us into her home. They had milk, of course, but far more interesting to me was the 90+ year old grandmother of the house, who was just about to arrive from picking a kind of wild vegetable that grew everywhere and happened to be in season that week. When she entered the house and saw the two of us, she presented us with the crop and kowtowed such that her face, knees, and hands were all on the floor, to honor us. Remarkably spry for a 90 year old.
In Japan there is a time and a season for every ingredient. We (Americans) go to the supermarket every week and expect the same boring vegetables because we have no idea how to make dinner unless it's tomatoes, onions, and broccoli, if we are even making our own food at all. If those things aren't in season we have them shipped from other countries. In reality the food we need is all around us, or at least it is in places the environment hasn't been completely destroyed. Industrial food will never lead us to the kind of richness of variety and sensitivity to season you will find in Japan, or France, or almost anywhere that isn't the USA really.
Yes, industrial factory food makes life 'easier' for us, but does it really make life better? We like to eat our chicken without contemplating the fact that all our animals are spending their entire lives in an abattoir.
Take a look at what actual food looks like (it's not sushi and soy sauce): https://www.google.com/search?q=%E5%89%B2%E7%83%B9%E6%96%99%...
It's interesting that you bring up people "in poverty". People "in poverty" do much better when they can grow their own food using more natural methods such as polycultures. Centralized Industrial agriculture is what created the situation where they were not able to grow their own food by decimating their local markets, buying up all of their land, & destroying their ecosystems.
Also, till methods using monoculture annual monocultures is more resource & energy intensive than no-till methods using perennial polycultures.
My country has no agricultural subsidies, indeed the competitiveness of our agricultural sector is shaped by it, and if international trade were to cease, we'd be largely self-sufficient in foodstuffs although we'd lose some of the cheaper options for things like tinned tomatoes.
Despite our lack of subsidies, we have yet to revert to 19th century living standards.
Unfortunately, our current government is leaning towards indirect subsidisation of aspects of the agricultural sector via funding for irrigation works and omitting action on the environmental externalities of intensive dairying, but we'll never again be in a place where people are being paid just for owning animals or growing a certain crop.
In the US, the direct subsidies are something like $0.25 / bushel for most grains, with price guarantees of around $2 / bushel. Market rates tend to be $4-15 / bushel, depending on the grain. There are, of course, indirect subsidies through the beef and ethanol industries, but that gets more complex.
I'm curious if the NZ subsidies were more distorted than that -- in the US, the subsidies will definitely encourage over-production (which I consider a good thing), but I'm not intrinsically bothered by a $0.25 / bushel subsidy on $4-7 / bushel corn.
Hilariously, while the bushel started out as a volume -- 8 dry gallons, which are totally different from liquid gallons -- they are now a measurement of the weight of a specific grain at a specific moisture content. So to measure a grain, you need to measure its weight and its moisture content, convert it to its weight at the specific moisture content, and then divide it by the standard weight for the grain. So if you have a thousand pounds of corn at 20% moisture, it is just under 17 bushels, but if it were soybeans, just over 15.
But having individuals, or small groups (ie. families) grow their own food is massively expensive compared to modern industrial techniques. The cost per whatever you want to measure it in (if you're that poor, the question is "will I stay alive or will I starve?" so calories is a pretty good measure) of a small group growing their own food is huge.
I actually calculated it myself the last time I came back from a country with an enormous proportion of agricultural labourers using broadly manual and outdated techniques, in which famine is a recent event. They were spending an enormous amount on trying to make enough food to stay alive. It takes me literally between five and ten minutes to earn enough to buy food that will keep me alive for a day. If I were to decide to create that food myself, it would not be five or ten minutes of my time each day.
> it would not be five or ten minutes of my time each day
In optimal conditions, it would be 5 minutes to sow and 5 minutes to pick. The plants grow on their own. Of course, it isn't that easy, but neither is working only 5 hours a month.
Much processed food and big bags of frozen vegetables and so on is healthy and cheap; it's got what you need to stay alive in good condition and doesn't have (for example) arsenic in it, which to my mind is pretty much the definition of healthy food. Fat, protein, whatever; once it's broken down to cross the stomach, it all looks the same. It's only a problem if people simply eat too much (or not enough) of something.
Yup, that's Jacobin!
Processing is what animals do so they can eat their food. Even squirrels crack nuts and lions separate meat from bones. But humans have also learned to process food to even out uneven food harvests and bring some measure of surety to eating.
I'm frequently surprised at the creativeness and inventiveness of Koreans, a culture I married into -- and a culture that's come into refrigeration much later than the U.S. A surprising amount of their traditional food preservation culture carries on today, earned through centuries of hardship and resulting in remarkably stable and healthy foodstuffs year round. Kimchi, the national dish is a prime example of this heritage. Even the kings of old had acres of food preservation and fermentation operations on the palace grounds [1].
Soy sauce, brought up in the article, is a supremely processed food -- the good stuff takes years of continuous processing to make. But on the path from Soy Beans to Soy Sauce, there's half a dozen stages where food stuffs can be rendered out of the process, making appetizers, side-dishes, snacks, main meal proteins, condiments, soup stock, and more. Soy sauce is the most processed outcome of this trail, a necessary thing to make inedible soy beans human consumable.
However, very few people arguing against processed food would compare Doenjang and American Sliced Cheese. The former might be called a quaint but tasty traditional foodstuff, the "cheese" considered spawn of hell in some circles. But an easy argument can be made the Doenjang is probably more processed than Kraft sliced American cheese.
1 - https://imgur.com/r/korea/SUpPmts
> prompting him to wonder whether they would really like things the way they naturally used to be. Natural was unreliable. Fresh fish began to stink. Fresh milk soured, eggs went rotten.
Eggs don't work that way. They don't go rotten unless they're damaged. An egg is like a really big cell, and it's sterile on the inside.
US eggs are washed clean, to protect against Salmonella--which lives in intestines and spreads through faecal matter, therefore occurs strictly on the outside of an egg shell, and washing it probably works well against that. Except it also removes/damages a protective layer (cuticle) in the shell, allowing the rotting process to enter the inside.
In Europe the eggs aren't washed (I guess we take our chances with the Salmonella?), and can therefore be stored unrefrigerated up to (at least) 21 days. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_%28food%29#Storage
I have heard (but never tested! so take this with a grain of salt) that with an unwashed egg, in the end it is the yolk that sinks down, touches the shell, making the membrane more permeable, that allows for the rotting to start. I've been told (but again, never tested, own risk, etc) that if you turn those eggs weekly, keeping the yolk floating in the middle, you can even keep them for 1-2 years. I suppose it might lose some of its flavour though :-P
If I were to look purely at the health-factors of rotting vs Salmonella, I'd have to prefer washing. At least if your egg is rotten, you'll immediately know it's rotten as soon as you open it (the smell is either there or it isn't), while with Salmonella, you won't know until half a day after eating. But I do like being able to keep my eggs at room-temperature in the kitchen cupboard, though :)
The slow food movement particularly is a tiny minority, it’s like bringing up the Tea Party, for a political debate. There is a much larger movement against fast food, and that’s mostly because of chemicals used in fast food. Nitrate preserved meat has links to cancer. Azodicarbonamide, a dough conditional, banned in Europe/Australia, was in US Subway sandwiches till last year. Then of course there is soda, a food engineered to be over-consumed, which leads to diabetes and obesity.
No one outside of Raw Vegans, again another tiny minority, is against preservation of foods. In fact, it’s common and promoted. The mechanism though is typically through bacterial fermentation and pickling with vinegar which is how most of the foods (soy, tofu, kimchi, sauerkraut, pickles, herring, yogurt etc) are prepared, stored, and used during winter times when no vegetation is available. Synthetic preservatives have been linked to negative health outcomes.
The local food movement is really just about eating produce locally when possible. Why should? Typically it’s cheaper, more varied, and more nutritious. All of the words agriculture is bred for maximum shelf life. You aren’t getting the best tasting food, you are just getting the food that won’t go bad. That also means it’s less genetically diverse. There 10k varieties of tomatoes, you can only buy about 5 commercially. Emphasis here is on produce, no one is abstaining from imported spices.
Most of these movements come at the heels of rising obesity epidemic in the US and around the world against an industry that’s for profit and not for pro health. Some are extreme, but that helps swing the pendulum the opposite direction. You can see the rise of more ingredient conscious and more delicious Chipotle, which sources all ingredients within 350mi and the fall of the heavily processed McDonalds. This is a net positive and not something we should be condemning.