13 ms·

What's wrong with cheap food

103 points by bensummers 17y ago

stcredzero 17y ago
A lot of it isn't food, but is instead a food-like substance containing some macronutrients.
joubert 17y ago
Just because something is edible doesn't mean it is food.
- patterned 17y ago
  Especially when it makes you hungry 2 hours later.
bajul 17y ago
The worst is that cheap food usually tastes great... :)
- imajes 17y ago
  not really. that's the msg which is there to trick you that it tastes good.
  - yan 17y ago
    How is being tricked into thinking something tastes good and tasting good different?
    - ErrantX 17y ago
      Yeh, especially as it is, chemically speaking, pushing exactly the same sort of buttons.
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
    - julio_the_squid 17y ago
      Well, to put it in the most extreme example - if you were drinking pure formaldehyde that had an additive that made it taste just like a delicious lemonade, would you feel taht you had been tricked into thinking it tastes good? Taste is supposed to identify healthy and needed substances vs. deleterious or poisonous substances, so when this is subverted artificially, it feels like a trick to me.
      - chc 17y ago
        Taste is just a heuristic, and it's based on a definition of "healthy" that evolved in a very different environment. Your taste is as likely to be "subverted" naturally as artificially. For example, strawberries taste much better than kale, but they're not really better for you — just sweeter.
        robak 17y ago
        I don't think you know how strawberries really taste like, if you never ate them outside US... the same goes for Western Europe
    - imajes 17y ago
      It's a shame I've gotten downvoted here, and you got upvoted as much. I guess hackers like the idea of hacking food too. Here's the deal, though: You could conceivably add the right chemicals to a pile of offal cooked in a skin of some kind and it'd taste like a gourmet sausage. You might have in fact eaten such a thing. It's also common to add flavorings such as "grandma's special recipe" or that from a dude in a coat from Kentucky. All these things make us think that something tastes good, which as also commented in this thread translates in your brain to mean: "hey, this is good for you, have more!". But the reality is, what you're eating is almost certainly mechanically reclaimed meat (where carcasses with so little meat it's almost pointless to continue cutting are put through a machine which crushes, juices, minces and turns out a slushy type 'meat' goo). and MRM is the place where salmonella and other friends live. It's also not really meat: there's plenty of cartilage (aka 'gristle') and such that is cut so small, you actually ingest it. It doesn't cook properly, and it's not really good for you to eat- you just pass it. But if it's carrying salmonella or e-coli... I hope you didn't have something important to do for the next couple weeks. Also, the nutrition recovery from such a meal is incredibly limited. You feel bright and happy for a short period (the msg et al) and then you have a come down, a craving, and want some more- for that high again. So in fact, what you're eating is a bunch of mind-altering chemicals ontop of a bed of processed waste. Food shouldn't be like that. Food should melt in your mouth and be an explosion of flavor and something you genuinely feel excited about. It should be, you have a meal, which provides you with some instant energy, and also some which is "slow-burning". Brown grains (rice, some wheats, etc) are great for this. You will feel full and energised for longer periods. Cheap base foods are cheap because they are often subsidized (e.g.: corn) or because their most common consumer is the cattle, pigs, chickens etc that you want to eat. This has given a false sense of price - people expect all food to be as cheap. So supermarkets etc will look to find ways to make everything else like it. So you'll see battery farmed chickens, who are so close together they often aren't able to stand up; You'll find chickens who are injected with water to make extra weight. (yeah, that chicken you just bought? probably a pound of it is water. You just paid chicken price for water). Good food is good because it provides great nutrition, is often respectful of the environment and is sustainable. Everything else is just yet another sign of man's dominance over everything else. (BTW, no, i'm not an enviro-hippy, it's just that i refuse to eat crap if i can help it- why put yourself through that kind of thing when there's so much better choice out there?)
  - jonknee 17y ago
    We evolved to like MSG, it's no more of a trick than adding salt.
    - DrSprout 17y ago
      You actually need to eat a lot of salt to survive, so it's much more of a trick than adding salt. MSG is not an essential nutrient that you need in any quantity, so using it is a trick to make your body think you're being well nourished when you aren't.
      - jonknee 17y ago
        MSG still gets you the sodium you need so it's not worthless from that angle.
      - mtts 17y ago
        MSG is an essential nutrient. Glutamate (the G in MSG) is a component of protein rich foods, which we absolutely need to survive. That's why we have taste buds for it.
- bpyne 17y ago
  A physician friend of mine explained to me once that humans are hardwired to like fat and sugar. Fat has a high number of calories per gram and is necessary for brain development. ("Healthy fats" are necessary anyway.) Sugar stimulates our most primitive taste preference - sweet. Out of the womb humans prefer sweet but learn to like the other 4 flavors. Cheap food typically gravitates towards a combination of these 2 ingredients. Cheap food tastes great until you try it next to food made from high quality ingredients and prepared the way you want it. For example, I used to like white bread. Since getting used to the different flavors in multigrain bread, white bread is too boring. (By multigrain, I don't mean the refined stuff being labeled as multigrain. I mean the kind in which you bite into a chewy grain with a nutty flavor.)
- prawn 17y ago
  Then comes the aftertaste... And the regret. And you vow never to eat it again, but that only lasts a couple of weeks until you're lazy and craving it again!
senthil_rajasek 17y ago
If you don't have the time to read the whole article Quick summary : - subsidized cheap food has adverse health effects and health care is expensive - affects the ecological system and is not sustainable - animals raised in meat factories have to be fed a lot of antibiotics that have consequences on human health.
goatforce5 17y ago
Why does a salad cost more than a Big Mac? http://www.pcrm.org/magazine/gm07autumn/health_pork.html http://www.pcrm.org/magazine/gm07autumn/health_pork.html
- r0s 17y ago
  One under-appreciated reason is storage. Frozen meat and most of the accoutrements can be stored for vastly longer and remain "fresh". Highly processed food products are all about preservation, to their nutritional detriment.
- lotharbot 17y ago
  I first saw the article you linked on a day when I'd made hamburgers and salad for dinner, and it didn't pass the smell test. I calculated the cost per person of a whole-dinner-plate salad (made from fresh veggies, including bell peppers, cucumbers, and tomatoes, with dressing) to be about half the cost per person of a quarter pound burger. This was right after the Chile quake, which had doubled the price of some of those veggies. A McDonalds salad costs more than a Big Mac, not because veggies cost more than meat, but because McDonalds salads typically come with meat (chicken/bacon) that's as expensive as ground beef, and the salad veggies, cheese, and dressing are more expensive than a hamburger bun and condiments. (The prices of non-meat salads are anchored to the prices of the meat-containing salads.) I'm all for criticizing food subsidies, but let's do it honestly. Even with subsidies, ground beef costs about twice as much per pound as the veggies I commonly buy, and ground beef is at the bottom end of the meat spectrum. Subsidies don't make a Big Mac cheaper than a salad; price anchoring to chicken-bacon-ranch salads make McDonalds salads expensive.
  - infinite8s 17y ago
    You are forgetting about storage costs. Frozen ground beef, buns and condiments have a much longer shelf life than the typical salad ingredients.
jswinghammer 17y ago
It'd be nice if the government just stayed out of all this so that people could decide for themselves what food they wanted to support. Right now the real costs are all hidden and incentives directed in all the wrong ways. The food that is cheap isn't actually cheap it just looks that way because the price signal has been so badly distorted. I don't want a "smarter" farm policy. I'd like no farm policy. It's clear that both parties don't actually care about this issue besides making sure that agribusiness is happy.
- senthil_rajasek 17y ago
  Food is tied to a nations security. If you haven't read Omnivore's Dilemma (http://www.worldcat.org/title/omnivores-dilemma-a-natural-history-of-four-meals/oclc/62290639 http://www.worldcat.org/title/omnivores-dilemma-a-natural-hi...) I highly recommend it. Michael Pollan, the author makes a much better and convincing argument. Imagine having no Farm Policy and we end up having food shortages, there would be a revolution. Personally, I try to buy/eat as much local organic food as I can and experiment by growing food indoors.
  - byrneseyeview 17y ago
    Imagine having no Farm Policy and we end up having food shortages, there would be a revolution. I can imagine. After all, this country has no Plate Policy, and I routinely end up eating off the floor. And I really wish we had a Consumer Electronics and Computers policy; I'm really jealous of the country that produced the iPhone and the Macbook because of those attributes. Fortunately, the country I live in does have a Real Estate Policy and a Banking System policy, and they're willing to put my money where their mouths are! It's working out about as well as one would expect.
    - senthil_rajasek 17y ago
      "After all, this country has no Plate Policy, and I routinely end up eating off the floor." So you agree we have policies only for issues that matter. Just because policies fail does not mean that we do not need any. What alternatives do we have to make sure we don't have food shortages, surprise food price increases and that it all scales for everyone etc.,?
davidedicillo 17y ago
Do you want cheap and healthy food? Eat organic (cost more) but cook yourself and grow your on condiments. Cooking yourself it's a no-brainer, and you know exactly what you are eating. Also I have on my patio all the herbs and few vegetables (I live in a urban area in Miami, don't think I have fields behind my condo). When you go to the store you pay $3 for a couple of springs of sage, when you could buy a sage plant for $3 and keep using it all year long. And the money you save you can reinvest it in more healthy (and more expensive) food.
- ErrantX 17y ago
  > Eat organic (cost more) For the most part there is no real extra benefit for Organic food - assuming you are not opposed to the idea of pesticides and other treatments (which are mostly benign anyway). Personally all I require from my food is that it has been farmed ethically and preferably produced on smaller scales (i.e. no Bernard Matthews Turkey) That can save you a lot. (seconded on the cook for yourself part - it doesn't have to take long and it's a great way to unwind :D)
  - bpyne 17y ago
    "For the most part there is no real extra benefit for Organic food - assuming you are not opposed to the idea of pesticides and other treatments (which are mostly benign anyway)." From a nutritional viewpoint, what you said agrees with what I've read. I think there's real worth, though, in experimenting with different farming techniques that don't rely on mass produced chemicals. Reliance on these chemicals makes me think of the "putting all your eggs in one basket" adage. Recently I heard an NPR piece about nutrition studies done across decades. One line that struck me is an apple grown in the early 20th century in the US had the nutritional value of 3 apples grown today. I'm not sure how the researchers came to that conclusion. But, if it's true and if a similar ratio applies to other produce, we have the potential for a serious health issue coming up. EDIT: Enclosed the quoted text in actual quotes for readability.
    - ErrantX 17y ago
      Yes, you're right there. As I said in my main post I think the real important thing to work on is ethical farming - regardless of organic or not. The other thing is that from a sustainability point of view (in terms of the farming infrastructure) Organic is very cost/labour intensive compared to other techniques. There is probably a good balance; as you say we can reach it by experimenting.
Tichy 17y ago
Just wondering, if vegetables were cheaper than corn, would McDonalds invent a vegetable bun with a small token pancake slipped in with the meat?
- chipsy 17y ago
  They would probably have to find a way to preserve the vegetable buns as well as the existing bread buns. They're currently loaded with a generous amount of sugar and miscellaneous preservatives.
dhyasama 17y ago
If unhealthy food is cheaper than healthy food on a per calorie basis and we eat too many calories, than why don't we just eat fewer calories in total, comprised of healthy food for the same amount of money?
- steveklabnik 17y ago
  Because often unhealthy food tastes better.
- roc 17y ago
  One, because the math doesn't work. You can live on a few dollars a day if you eat unhealthy food. If you buy healthy food with those same dollars, you're going to see people going hungry again. Two, because the choices aren't equally available. At least in Detroit (the only city I'm qualified to share anecdotes about) it's not as if healthy and unhealthy food choices are across the aisle, or even across the street from one another. You simply can't make healthy choices without special scheduling, trips and thus even higher cost. Can people do it? Sure. Do they? Absolutely. The local gardens and the Eastern market are the absolute brightest spots in this city. The problem is that they simply can't afford (in time, energy or money) to make that choice nearly often enough. So, to me, the question isn't "why don't people make better choices?" nearly as much as "why do we, as a society, make it so much harder to make better choices?". There's certainly a willpower and personal responsibility component to this problem, but the larger issue is why our society has stacked the deck against it.
  - starkfist 17y ago
    Another issue which is often ignored in discussions about food and health is that healthy food doesn't keep well. By that factor alone it's going to be more limited and more expensive, because it's harder to produce, transport and store.
  - r0s 17y ago
    You can live on a few dollars a day if you eat unhealthy food. In my experience this is only true about processed and prepared foods. Check the price on dry beans or rice in bulk. If you're willing to bake your own bread the cost is competitive to even the cheapest products. Learning these techniques requires a time investment initially, but if your time is really so valuable why are you living on a few dollars a day? because the choices aren't equally available. This is a big problem, and a free-market paradox in my opinion. When healthy food isn't available, it's removed from the culture and unless everyone has good education about nutrition demand disappears.
ajscherer 17y ago
I agree with maybe half the things the author is saying, but I hate the way he tries to group them all together into some larger narrative of "the way we live has become synthetic and corrupted and we need to go back to a more natural way of life" Appealing to this story is only going to convince people who already believe it. If he has specific improvements in mind, he should describe them and make his case for how they will help. Also, he opens up referring to 1 billion people going hungry, but never returns to this point. If we embrace techniques that produce less food, what happens to these people?
- teach 17y ago
  That's probably because the blog linked to is mostly just a cut-and-paste from the linked Time article (http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1917458-1,00.html http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1917458-1,00....). This blog post only quotes a part of page 2 of a five-page article, all of which is worth reading.
  - ajscherer 17y ago
    Thanks for pointing that out, I totally missed the attribution to time.com. I thought the article was just formatted weird. I agree the full Time article is better, but it still doesn't address the billion people it mentions going hungry. Ultimately the agricultural system that is sustainable determines the population that is sustainable, and I am concerned that the people who aren't going to be sustained won't have much say in the matter.
c00p3r 17y ago
The mantra is very simple: Fresh. Organic. Seasonal.
- sipior 17y ago
  Technically, I think that's a dogma, not a mantra. In a way, of course, one of the greatest triumphs of modern civilisation is that we now have so many folks who can afford to be picky about where their vegetables come from. I think that's great! More or less. However, I rather like the notion of getting certain produce all year-round...there's no talking me out of it, frankly.
  - eru 17y ago
    Indeed. So the better mantra might be: "Eat food. Mostly vegetables." (Where food is defined as anything your great-great grandma would have recognized as food.) I am fond of going with the seasons, but I am also fond of oranges, which do not grow here--any season.
  - c00p3r 17y ago
    In India or Nepal people are consuming exactly this kind of food, because it is local which means cheap. Locally grown vegetables is the cheapest food possible. The main source of food is local markets, which operates at morning and evening times. Most of goods are managed to be sold the same day, and delivery agents adopts to this circles. So, each morning it is fresh. If you enter into some local tea-shop or kitchen and take a look which kind of dishes they serve and how it was made and from which ingredients you could catch the idea. Of course, most of fast foods are using not fresh or organic sources simply to get more profit, but if you can cook yourself you can choice whatever you want on nearest market.
    - sipior 17y ago
      No, thank you.
LoneCoder 17y ago
Is it just me or has HN gotten really cynical today?
frankus 17y ago
It's funny that there are people who won't put ARCO gas in their car, but will gladly put AM-PM hot dogs in their stomach.
- jrockway 17y ago
  The government pays to fix your stomach problems, but not your car problems.
  - mediaman 17y ago
    I don't think that fully explains it. Government paying for your health care is not the same as if government were to pay for your car repair. The former will always carry repercussions for you--diabetes is a very difficult condition to have, even if the bills are paid by Medicare--whereas there is no real other pain caused by a car repair, other than financial. Many of those without health care insurance still eat food that is linked to detrimental health.
- ulysses 17y ago
  ARCO gas is negligibly cheaper and less convenient. AM-PM hot dogs are considerable cheaper, and more convenient.
istari 17y ago
Hated this. Distorted statistics mixed with cliched sound bites and fermented in rhetoric. For starters, sugar and starch have more calories than lettuce and fruit not just for each dollar, but also for every pound. The author took a couple of well known symptoms(run-off! animal cruelty! resistant bacteria!), tossed it together in a salad bowl, and chucked it in the general direction of the nebulous "food industry". He doesn't offer deeper reasons of why the system is how it is, doesn't suggest methods of fixing the situation, and goes no further than regurgitating one sided talking points.
robak 17y ago
The problem I have with American-style capialism is that for 25 cents of extra gain tomorrow, they are ready to loose 10usd after a month.
neonscribe 17y ago
For those who are wondering, PEI is Prince Edward Island, a small province in Eastern Canada.
johnrob 17y ago
I think we have as much a knowledge problem as a food problem. If cheaper food has more calories, then for heaven's sake eat less of it! Split a supersized big mac meal into breakfast/lunch/dinner and you'll hit your daily caloric target right on the button. Not saying this is healthy, but there's no reason it should cause obesity if you're smart about it.
setori88 17y ago
"We have given up control of our food to people from far away" no most of the grain grown goes to feeding the animals to be slaughtered - not to third world countries.

103 points by bensummers 17y ago

stcredzero 17y ago

A lot of it isn't food, but is instead a food-like substance containing some macronutrients.

joubert 17y ago

Just because something is edible doesn't mean it is food.

patterned 17y ago
Especially when it makes you hungry 2 hours later.

bajul 17y ago

The worst is that cheap food usually tastes great... :)

imajes 17y ago
not really. that's the msg which is there to trick you that it tastes good.
- yan 17y ago
  How is being tricked into thinking something tastes good and tasting good different?
  - ErrantX 17y ago
    Yeh, especially as it is, chemically speaking, pushing exactly the same sort of buttons.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - julio_the_squid 17y ago
    Well, to put it in the most extreme example - if you were drinking pure formaldehyde that had an additive that made it taste just like a delicious lemonade, would you feel taht you had been tricked into thinking it tastes good? Taste is supposed to identify healthy and needed substances vs. deleterious or poisonous substances, so when this is subverted artificially, it feels like a trick to me.
    - chc 17y ago
      Taste is just a heuristic, and it's based on a definition of "healthy" that evolved in a very different environment. Your taste is as likely to be "subverted" naturally as artificially. For example, strawberries taste much better than kale, but they're not really better for you — just sweeter.
      - robak 17y ago
        I don't think you know how strawberries really taste like, if you never ate them outside US... the same goes for Western Europe
  - imajes 17y ago
    It's a shame I've gotten downvoted here, and you got upvoted as much. I guess hackers like the idea of hacking food too. Here's the deal, though: You could conceivably add the right chemicals to a pile of offal cooked in a skin of some kind and it'd taste like a gourmet sausage. You might have in fact eaten such a thing. It's also common to add flavorings such as "grandma's special recipe" or that from a dude in a coat from Kentucky. All these things make us think that something tastes good, which as also commented in this thread translates in your brain to mean: "hey, this is good for you, have more!". But the reality is, what you're eating is almost certainly mechanically reclaimed meat (where carcasses with so little meat it's almost pointless to continue cutting are put through a machine which crushes, juices, minces and turns out a slushy type 'meat' goo). and MRM is the place where salmonella and other friends live. It's also not really meat: there's plenty of cartilage (aka 'gristle') and such that is cut so small, you actually ingest it. It doesn't cook properly, and it's not really good for you to eat- you just pass it. But if it's carrying salmonella or e-coli... I hope you didn't have something important to do for the next couple weeks. Also, the nutrition recovery from such a meal is incredibly limited. You feel bright and happy for a short period (the msg et al) and then you have a come down, a craving, and want some more- for that high again. So in fact, what you're eating is a bunch of mind-altering chemicals ontop of a bed of processed waste. Food shouldn't be like that. Food should melt in your mouth and be an explosion of flavor and something you genuinely feel excited about. It should be, you have a meal, which provides you with some instant energy, and also some which is "slow-burning". Brown grains (rice, some wheats, etc) are great for this. You will feel full and energised for longer periods. Cheap base foods are cheap because they are often subsidized (e.g.: corn) or because their most common consumer is the cattle, pigs, chickens etc that you want to eat. This has given a false sense of price - people expect all food to be as cheap. So supermarkets etc will look to find ways to make everything else like it. So you'll see battery farmed chickens, who are so close together they often aren't able to stand up; You'll find chickens who are injected with water to make extra weight. (yeah, that chicken you just bought? probably a pound of it is water. You just paid chicken price for water). Good food is good because it provides great nutrition, is often respectful of the environment and is sustainable. Everything else is just yet another sign of man's dominance over everything else. (BTW, no, i'm not an enviro-hippy, it's just that i refuse to eat crap if i can help it- why put yourself through that kind of thing when there's so much better choice out there?)
- jonknee 17y ago
  We evolved to like MSG, it's no more of a trick than adding salt.
  - DrSprout 17y ago
    You actually need to eat a lot of salt to survive, so it's much more of a trick than adding salt. MSG is not an essential nutrient that you need in any quantity, so using it is a trick to make your body think you're being well nourished when you aren't.
    - jonknee 17y ago
      MSG still gets you the sodium you need so it's not worthless from that angle.
    - mtts 17y ago
      MSG is an essential nutrient. Glutamate (the G in MSG) is a component of protein rich foods, which we absolutely need to survive. That's why we have taste buds for it.
bpyne 17y ago
A physician friend of mine explained to me once that humans are hardwired to like fat and sugar. Fat has a high number of calories per gram and is necessary for brain development. ("Healthy fats" are necessary anyway.) Sugar stimulates our most primitive taste preference - sweet. Out of the womb humans prefer sweet but learn to like the other 4 flavors. Cheap food typically gravitates towards a combination of these 2 ingredients. Cheap food tastes great until you try it next to food made from high quality ingredients and prepared the way you want it. For example, I used to like white bread. Since getting used to the different flavors in multigrain bread, white bread is too boring. (By multigrain, I don't mean the refined stuff being labeled as multigrain. I mean the kind in which you bite into a chewy grain with a nutty flavor.)
prawn 17y ago
Then comes the aftertaste... And the regret. And you vow never to eat it again, but that only lasts a couple of weeks until you're lazy and craving it again!

senthil_rajasek 17y ago

If you don't have the time to read the whole article Quick summary : - subsidized cheap food has adverse health effects and health care is expensive - affects the ecological system and is not sustainable - animals raised in meat factories have to be fed a lot of antibiotics that have consequences on human health.

goatforce5 17y ago

Why does a salad cost more than a Big Mac? http://www.pcrm.org/magazine/gm07autumn/health_pork.html http://www.pcrm.org/magazine/gm07autumn/health_pork.html

r0s 17y ago
One under-appreciated reason is storage. Frozen meat and most of the accoutrements can be stored for vastly longer and remain "fresh". Highly processed food products are all about preservation, to their nutritional detriment.
lotharbot 17y ago
I first saw the article you linked on a day when I'd made hamburgers and salad for dinner, and it didn't pass the smell test. I calculated the cost per person of a whole-dinner-plate salad (made from fresh veggies, including bell peppers, cucumbers, and tomatoes, with dressing) to be about half the cost per person of a quarter pound burger. This was right after the Chile quake, which had doubled the price of some of those veggies. A McDonalds salad costs more than a Big Mac, not because veggies cost more than meat, but because McDonalds salads typically come with meat (chicken/bacon) that's as expensive as ground beef, and the salad veggies, cheese, and dressing are more expensive than a hamburger bun and condiments. (The prices of non-meat salads are anchored to the prices of the meat-containing salads.) I'm all for criticizing food subsidies, but let's do it honestly. Even with subsidies, ground beef costs about twice as much per pound as the veggies I commonly buy, and ground beef is at the bottom end of the meat spectrum. Subsidies don't make a Big Mac cheaper than a salad; price anchoring to chicken-bacon-ranch salads make McDonalds salads expensive.
- infinite8s 17y ago
  You are forgetting about storage costs. Frozen ground beef, buns and condiments have a much longer shelf life than the typical salad ingredients.

jswinghammer 17y ago

It'd be nice if the government just stayed out of all this so that people could decide for themselves what food they wanted to support. Right now the real costs are all hidden and incentives directed in all the wrong ways. The food that is cheap isn't actually cheap it just looks that way because the price signal has been so badly distorted. I don't want a "smarter" farm policy. I'd like no farm policy. It's clear that both parties don't actually care about this issue besides making sure that agribusiness is happy.

senthil_rajasek 17y ago
Food is tied to a nations security. If you haven't read Omnivore's Dilemma (http://www.worldcat.org/title/omnivores-dilemma-a-natural-history-of-four-meals/oclc/62290639 http://www.worldcat.org/title/omnivores-dilemma-a-natural-hi...) I highly recommend it. Michael Pollan, the author makes a much better and convincing argument. Imagine having no Farm Policy and we end up having food shortages, there would be a revolution. Personally, I try to buy/eat as much local organic food as I can and experiment by growing food indoors.
- byrneseyeview 17y ago
  Imagine having no Farm Policy and we end up having food shortages, there would be a revolution. I can imagine. After all, this country has no Plate Policy, and I routinely end up eating off the floor. And I really wish we had a Consumer Electronics and Computers policy; I'm really jealous of the country that produced the iPhone and the Macbook because of those attributes. Fortunately, the country I live in does have a Real Estate Policy and a Banking System policy, and they're willing to put my money where their mouths are! It's working out about as well as one would expect.
  - senthil_rajasek 17y ago
    "After all, this country has no Plate Policy, and I routinely end up eating off the floor." So you agree we have policies only for issues that matter. Just because policies fail does not mean that we do not need any. What alternatives do we have to make sure we don't have food shortages, surprise food price increases and that it all scales for everyone etc.,?

davidedicillo 17y ago

Do you want cheap and healthy food? Eat organic (cost more) but cook yourself and grow your on condiments. Cooking yourself it's a no-brainer, and you know exactly what you are eating. Also I have on my patio all the herbs and few vegetables (I live in a urban area in Miami, don't think I have fields behind my condo). When you go to the store you pay $3 for a couple of springs of sage, when you could buy a sage plant for $3 and keep using it all year long. And the money you save you can reinvest it in more healthy (and more expensive) food.

ErrantX 17y ago
> Eat organic (cost more) For the most part there is no real extra benefit for Organic food - assuming you are not opposed to the idea of pesticides and other treatments (which are mostly benign anyway). Personally all I require from my food is that it has been farmed ethically and preferably produced on smaller scales (i.e. no Bernard Matthews Turkey) That can save you a lot. (seconded on the cook for yourself part - it doesn't have to take long and it's a great way to unwind :D)
- bpyne 17y ago
  "For the most part there is no real extra benefit for Organic food - assuming you are not opposed to the idea of pesticides and other treatments (which are mostly benign anyway)." From a nutritional viewpoint, what you said agrees with what I've read. I think there's real worth, though, in experimenting with different farming techniques that don't rely on mass produced chemicals. Reliance on these chemicals makes me think of the "putting all your eggs in one basket" adage. Recently I heard an NPR piece about nutrition studies done across decades. One line that struck me is an apple grown in the early 20th century in the US had the nutritional value of 3 apples grown today. I'm not sure how the researchers came to that conclusion. But, if it's true and if a similar ratio applies to other produce, we have the potential for a serious health issue coming up. EDIT: Enclosed the quoted text in actual quotes for readability.
  - ErrantX 17y ago
    Yes, you're right there. As I said in my main post I think the real important thing to work on is ethical farming - regardless of organic or not. The other thing is that from a sustainability point of view (in terms of the farming infrastructure) Organic is very cost/labour intensive compared to other techniques. There is probably a good balance; as you say we can reach it by experimenting.

Tichy 17y ago

Just wondering, if vegetables were cheaper than corn, would McDonalds invent a vegetable bun with a small token pancake slipped in with the meat?

chipsy 17y ago
They would probably have to find a way to preserve the vegetable buns as well as the existing bread buns. They're currently loaded with a generous amount of sugar and miscellaneous preservatives.

dhyasama 17y ago

If unhealthy food is cheaper than healthy food on a per calorie basis and we eat too many calories, than why don't we just eat fewer calories in total, comprised of healthy food for the same amount of money?

steveklabnik 17y ago
Because often unhealthy food tastes better.
roc 17y ago
One, because the math doesn't work. You can live on a few dollars a day if you eat unhealthy food. If you buy healthy food with those same dollars, you're going to see people going hungry again. Two, because the choices aren't equally available. At least in Detroit (the only city I'm qualified to share anecdotes about) it's not as if healthy and unhealthy food choices are across the aisle, or even across the street from one another. You simply can't make healthy choices without special scheduling, trips and thus even higher cost. Can people do it? Sure. Do they? Absolutely. The local gardens and the Eastern market are the absolute brightest spots in this city. The problem is that they simply can't afford (in time, energy or money) to make that choice nearly often enough. So, to me, the question isn't "why don't people make better choices?" nearly as much as "why do we, as a society, make it so much harder to make better choices?". There's certainly a willpower and personal responsibility component to this problem, but the larger issue is why our society has stacked the deck against it.
- starkfist 17y ago
  Another issue which is often ignored in discussions about food and health is that healthy food doesn't keep well. By that factor alone it's going to be more limited and more expensive, because it's harder to produce, transport and store.
- r0s 17y ago
  You can live on a few dollars a day if you eat unhealthy food. In my experience this is only true about processed and prepared foods. Check the price on dry beans or rice in bulk. If you're willing to bake your own bread the cost is competitive to even the cheapest products. Learning these techniques requires a time investment initially, but if your time is really so valuable why are you living on a few dollars a day? because the choices aren't equally available. This is a big problem, and a free-market paradox in my opinion. When healthy food isn't available, it's removed from the culture and unless everyone has good education about nutrition demand disappears.

ajscherer 17y ago

I agree with maybe half the things the author is saying, but I hate the way he tries to group them all together into some larger narrative of "the way we live has become synthetic and corrupted and we need to go back to a more natural way of life" Appealing to this story is only going to convince people who already believe it. If he has specific improvements in mind, he should describe them and make his case for how they will help. Also, he opens up referring to 1 billion people going hungry, but never returns to this point. If we embrace techniques that produce less food, what happens to these people?

teach 17y ago
That's probably because the blog linked to is mostly just a cut-and-paste from the linked Time article (http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1917458-1,00.html http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1917458-1,00....). This blog post only quotes a part of page 2 of a five-page article, all of which is worth reading.
- ajscherer 17y ago
  Thanks for pointing that out, I totally missed the attribution to time.com. I thought the article was just formatted weird. I agree the full Time article is better, but it still doesn't address the billion people it mentions going hungry. Ultimately the agricultural system that is sustainable determines the population that is sustainable, and I am concerned that the people who aren't going to be sustained won't have much say in the matter.

c00p3r 17y ago

The mantra is very simple: Fresh. Organic. Seasonal.

sipior 17y ago
Technically, I think that's a dogma, not a mantra. In a way, of course, one of the greatest triumphs of modern civilisation is that we now have so many folks who can afford to be picky about where their vegetables come from. I think that's great! More or less. However, I rather like the notion of getting certain produce all year-round...there's no talking me out of it, frankly.
- eru 17y ago
  Indeed. So the better mantra might be: "Eat food. Mostly vegetables." (Where food is defined as anything your great-great grandma would have recognized as food.) I am fond of going with the seasons, but I am also fond of oranges, which do not grow here--any season.
- c00p3r 17y ago
  In India or Nepal people are consuming exactly this kind of food, because it is local which means cheap. Locally grown vegetables is the cheapest food possible. The main source of food is local markets, which operates at morning and evening times. Most of goods are managed to be sold the same day, and delivery agents adopts to this circles. So, each morning it is fresh. If you enter into some local tea-shop or kitchen and take a look which kind of dishes they serve and how it was made and from which ingredients you could catch the idea. Of course, most of fast foods are using not fresh or organic sources simply to get more profit, but if you can cook yourself you can choice whatever you want on nearest market.
  - sipior 17y ago
    No, thank you.

LoneCoder 17y ago

Is it just me or has HN gotten really cynical today?

frankus 17y ago

It's funny that there are people who won't put ARCO gas in their car, but will gladly put AM-PM hot dogs in their stomach.

jrockway 17y ago
The government pays to fix your stomach problems, but not your car problems.
- mediaman 17y ago
  I don't think that fully explains it. Government paying for your health care is not the same as if government were to pay for your car repair. The former will always carry repercussions for you--diabetes is a very difficult condition to have, even if the bills are paid by Medicare--whereas there is no real other pain caused by a car repair, other than financial. Many of those without health care insurance still eat food that is linked to detrimental health.
ulysses 17y ago
ARCO gas is negligibly cheaper and less convenient. AM-PM hot dogs are considerable cheaper, and more convenient.

istari 17y ago

Hated this. Distorted statistics mixed with cliched sound bites and fermented in rhetoric. For starters, sugar and starch have more calories than lettuce and fruit not just for each dollar, but also for every pound. The author took a couple of well known symptoms(run-off! animal cruelty! resistant bacteria!), tossed it together in a salad bowl, and chucked it in the general direction of the nebulous "food industry". He doesn't offer deeper reasons of why the system is how it is, doesn't suggest methods of fixing the situation, and goes no further than regurgitating one sided talking points.

robak 17y ago

The problem I have with American-style capialism is that for 25 cents of extra gain tomorrow, they are ready to loose 10usd after a month.

neonscribe 17y ago

For those who are wondering, PEI is Prince Edward Island, a small province in Eastern Canada.

johnrob 17y ago

I think we have as much a knowledge problem as a food problem. If cheaper food has more calories, then for heaven's sake eat less of it! Split a supersized big mac meal into breakfast/lunch/dinner and you'll hit your daily caloric target right on the button. Not saying this is healthy, but there's no reason it should cause obesity if you're smart about it.

setori88 17y ago

"We have given up control of our food to people from far away" no most of the grain grown goes to feeding the animals to be slaughtered - not to third world countries.