8 ms·
> They want to distinguish themselves and buy the feeling of authentic life and values. More than this, I think there is a substantial portion of consumers who
by metamet 9y ago
> They want to distinguish themselves and buy the feeling of authentic life and values.
More than this, I think there is a substantial portion of consumers who aren't as much attempting to distinguish themselves as they are realizing how important their dollar vote is.
Buying from a small or local farm keeps money circulating locally (ideally). When there is a community of local businesses, this becomes amplified.
It's the primary reason why the whole "farm to table" concept with restaurants caught on. By choosing to eat at a diner that gets their eggs from a local farm, rather than, say, buying a breakfast sandwich from McDonalds, you're not only supporting the local restaurant, but also the local farmer.
So while there is certainly an appeal (not exclusively, either) to purchasing something labeled as classic, authentic, natural or original, there's a less selfish reasoning tied to the root of it.
An interesting part of this is the way primarily Liberal-metro local/organic movements have been ignored as a common ground, and even mocked as purely an aesthetic, by the "anti-globalists".
- huehehue 9y agoThere's at least a third explanation as well, which is the fact that eggs from farmer Tom down the road are likely to taste 1000x better than the egg-inspired food product in a McGriddle. I can't imagine many people are thinking "Screw local farmers, I want Tyson Chicken Nuggets!". That might be a bad example but the point is that cost is probably the bigger factor here, not politics or lifestyle or even taste.
- krrrh 9y agoI’m not disagreeing with the trust of your comment, but despite popular belief, McDonalds does use real eggs.[1,2] Though there’s no doubt that an egg from a chicken who has walked around, eating bits of grass and bugs, will taste better and have a better nutritional profile. [1] https://yourquestions.mcdonalds.ca/answer/does-your-egg-mcmuffin-use-real-eggs-they-look-too-perfect/ https://yourquestions.mcdonalds.ca/answer/does-your-egg-mcmu... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2015/01/27/are-mcdonalds-eggs-real-fast-food-giant-cracks-mystery.html https://www.cnbc.com/2015/01/27/are-mcdonalds-eggs-real-fast...
- jrs95 9y agoIt does, but only the McMuffin sandwiches really taste like it. The others use the folded egg that they get premade and frozen.
- greedo 9y agoThe folded eggs used to be made from fresh eggs. Did this change?
- jrs95 9y agoIt must have, if they were. It's still made from eggs, they just make a bunch of liquid egg and then make it into these shapes and freeze them & ship to restaurants. The scrambled eggs in the big breakfast weren't frozen, though. They could made with the sort-of-real liquid egg stuff or just fresh eggs, I'm not sure.
- greedo 9y agoStrange... We used to have a blender for both scrambled eggs and folded eggs. Crack the eggs in, blend them smooth as silk and Bob's your uncle.
- davemp 9y agoEggs are insanely cheap. I’m not sure why anyone would bother to fake them.
- bordercases 9y agoTo economize other costs on the supply chain and to standardize quality
- Clubber 9y agoThis plus spoilage, durability & logistics costs. (which you might be already including).
- goialoq 9y agoYou are confusing a recipe that you don't like with an ingredient that you don't like.
- uxp100 9y agoYou seem to be implying all eggs taste the same, which is not true.
- TimothyBJacobs 9y agoEh, at least one test seemed to show that there wasn't a noticeable difference: http://www.seriouseats.com/2010/08/what-are-the-best-eggs-cage-free-organic-omega-3s-grocery-store-brand-the-food-lab.html http://www.seriouseats.com/2010/08/what-are-the-best-eggs-ca...
- jeffdavis 9y agoI can taste the difference.
- adrianN 9y agoDid you do a double blind study?
- nitrogen 9y agoYou don't have to blind a study when the effect size is big enough (the classic example is the ridiculousness of a double-blind test of the use of parachutes). See my other comment for how easily egg flavor can be altered.
- slavik81 9y agoHe's right to be distrustful. People are terrible at taste tests. If you ask people how something tastes, they will tend to tell you what they think they're expected to taste rather than what they actually do. There's plenty of scientific evidence for this based on wine studies[1], but on a personal level, the tongue map myth[2] is the one that gets me. It was taught in science class as true, and we did (non-blind) experiments to measure the effect, but we failed to conclude the effect didn't exist. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_wine_tasting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_wine_tasting [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongue_map https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongue_map
- jjoonathan 9y ago> better than the egg-inspired food product in a McGriddle. People always use this as an insult, but how cool would it be if fast/processed food providers had actually found a way to make eggs/chicken/beef/etc artificially? It's been an area of active research with decades of failed attempts to show for it. Achieving fast-food level quality would be a huge step forward.
- whatshisface 9y agoEgg synthysizers exist and they're shaped exactly like chickens.
- adrianN 9y agoNow do it without a nervous system that can experience suffering
- jjoonathan 9y agoand without losing 90% (or was it 99%?) of the input energy to heat.
- nkurz 9y agoI think egg production by chickens is actually more efficient than that. If I'm reading Figure 1 in the following link correctly, it looks like modern farms are about 17% efficient for calories of food fed to the chickens to calories of eggs produced: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/105002/pdf http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/10/10... For comparison (from the same figure) pork is 9%, chickens raised for meat are 13%, cow production of milk is 17%, and cows raised for beef are 3% efficient.
- razakel 9y agoThe secret to fast-food "quality" is the same as any other restaurant: fat, sugar and salt.
- pq0ak2nnd 9y ago+1 for "food product". i use that more accurate term frequently.
- jrs95 9y agoIt seems to me that there's a small fraction of people who are into this stuff that are really doing this thoughtfully and for the right reasons, and that the majority really are either pursuing an aesthetic or using this or other social causes as sort of a prop or a distraction. I suppose this could vary based on where you're at, but I've met few people in the Midwest who were into this stuff that were not shallow and/or neurotic. At the same time, that's an incredibly stupid argument to use to dismiss what is being done. The positive effects you mention happen regardless of the motivation of the individuals, and the people that start these trends seem to be the ones who really care.
- gamegoblin 9y agoQuestions to someone with more economics knowledge than me: I understand the sentiment and intuitive reasoning behind this argument (I find myself thinking it every week when I go to the local farmers' market!), but is there evidence that "buying local" actually increases the local standard of living? And a followup: if it does increase the local standard of living, would this behavior, if duplicated in all communities in the world, increase the average standard of living in the world? Some conflicting (and probably all wrong) intuitions I have for different sides of these questions: Pro local: The notion of keeping money circulating locally makes sense. If money is a sort of proxy for productivity, then money leaving the community is productivity leaving the community. Anti local: If I pay more for Local Larry's eggs and Down-the-road Dave's cabbage (etc.), then to maintain my standard of living at a constant level, I have to charge more for whatever service I provide the community. And recursively, everyone else has to as well. It seems like, at best, we just wind up at the same standard of living we started at (and at worst, lower). Pro local: If money is a proxy for productivity, and buying non-local means trading productivity to some large corporation in exchange for some good or service, and that corporation will disproportionately funnel that money to the already-wealthy who can afford to save that money (productivity) for a rainy day, then we have effectively contributed to removing productivity from the economy.
- kuschku 9y agoA good argument is the question what happens with the money. For example, assume Facebook replaces a local competitor. Now instead of the profit going to owners, which spend it locally, on philanthropic projects, or just high quality goods, instead it goes to Mark Zuckerberg, who spends it in the US, on US brands, and to fund US charities, in best case. If you currently live outside the US, outside SV and NYC, you’d very likely gain an advantage if everyone would buy local. The skyscrapers of NYC, and the philanthropic projects in these regions of the US, are funded with money that was extracted all over the globe, but will probably never leave the US again.
- mseebach 9y agoYou need to see a layer deeper than that. The opportunity cost of the tens of thousands of highly qualifies engineers required to build and run dozens of national/regional Facebooks rather than doing something else is absolutely huge.
- canadianwriter 9y agoHell, here in Canada at least, McDonalds is trumping up that it buys it's beef locally. Same with eggs.
- Yeroc 9y agoThey may well be buying locally (as in within Canadian borders, or perhaps even within the province) but they certainly won't be buying from small individual producers for the simple reason that a small scale farmer can't supply enough beef or eggs to satisfy McDonald's consumption requirements.
- copenja 9y agoFor what it's worth, almost all McDonald's are franchises. If you buy a breakfast sandwich there, the money likely goes to a local owner.
- jacobush 9y agosome of it
- pq0ak2nnd 9y agocame here to say exactly what you said, but you did a more elegant job of exposing the thinly-veiled cynicism of the parent-post. i also find it ironic that in many cases of debating this issue I find that those of us who consider "organic" to be the lowest-baseline quality are literally deploying capitalist principles by voting with our dollars, even thought my foodie kin tend to be super liberal, because the opposition attempts to claim the libertarian mantle in these scenarios.