5 ms·

You need people to eat real food, which means cooking, which means taking time to cook. That's antithetic to the US way of doing things, which is to work all th

You need people to eat real food, which means cooking, which means taking time to cook. That's antithetic to the US way of doing things, which is to work all the time and outsource everything else to someone else (I'm caricaturing a little here of course).

esotericn 7y ago
It doesn't necessarily mean cooking though. That's the solution right now because the market is stuck in this minima. It means no junk food. There's nothing at all stopping McDonalds or whoever from making the hotpot I just cooked up from fresh vegetables without adding 1 billion bollocks preservatives or whatever else. Scaled up the labour costs become trivial. But that's not the world we live in. I go outside and I want non-shit food and there's nothing there, so yeah, the option is eat shit or don't eat.
smn1234 7y ago
My concern with this statement is that restaurants can surely cook you "real" food and thus allow you to have your time back. Where I think we've made a big cultural mistake is in food _industry_ and in franchising. In essence, food isn't as "real" when it's meant for shelf life, to always look and taste the same, and to scale for every point of presence where it's intended to be sold such that there's strong profit margins / brand recognition to be made.
- thatfrenchguy 7y ago
  > My concern with this statement is that restaurants can surely cook you "real" food and thus allow you to have your time back. But they won't, because it's more expensive.
jniedrauer 7y ago
Processed food doesn't, by definition, have to be poison. We've set up this race to the bottom between competing food brands where the brand with the most sodium, fat, or high glycemic index sugar wins. The "free market" has an unfortunate tendency to select local maxima in the form of addictive substances. I don't know how to get there, but I can conceive of a reality where we could eat healthy and also not have to cook everything from scratch. It would require a shift of incentive from maximizing consumption to maximizing consumer health.
knightofmars 7y ago
It's not just cooking. The problem that we as Americans (and possibly other countries have) is that we don't understand our ingredients. It's easy to "cook" when you put a jar of store bought sauce over some noodles without ever looking at the ingredients. The grams of sugar in lots of store bought "pre-made" items is shocking. As an example with the staple "PB&J" when you look at the P. One tablespoon of a popular peanut butter has 1.5g of sugar. If you get an "organic" or "natural" alternative you often see that number drop to 0.5g of sugar per tablespoon. If you've been fed the 1.5g of sugar version growing up then you're going to have a hard time accepting the 0.5g version. Bread is another area. Bread shouldn't have sugar in it unless it's a dessert bread. Yet most store bought breads have corn syrup or sugar in them. Detoxing from sugar sounds like it could be a joke. But if you cut out most sugar from your diet for a month (read ingredients and pick low or none sugar alternatives as best you can). You'll be amazed at how much sweeter items such as tomatoes, carrots, and other fresh fruits and vegetables begin to taste.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  " It's easy to "cook" when you put a jar of store bought sauce over some noodles without ever looking at the ingredients." That's not what I would call cooking. That's "heating up".
  - knightofmars 7y ago
    Hence the quotes around the word cook. :) Even if a person is cooking, if that person isn't preparing everything from scratch it's quite possible they are using sweetened ingredients (I'm not suggesting everyone should cook only from scratch).
    - esotericn 7y ago
      I dislike the use of the term "from scratch" here because it implies something.. esoteric or special. Boiling potatoes is just cooking, there's nothing "from scratch" about it, you're not a farmer. It's more about using real ingredients rather than processed stuff. (Sure, we can talk about what you consider 'processed' - I'd say basically anything that has more than one or two constituent parts).

esotericn 7y ago

It doesn't necessarily mean cooking though. That's the solution right now because the market is stuck in this minima. It means no junk food. There's nothing at all stopping McDonalds or whoever from making the hotpot I just cooked up from fresh vegetables without adding 1 billion bollocks preservatives or whatever else. Scaled up the labour costs become trivial. But that's not the world we live in. I go outside and I want non-shit food and there's nothing there, so yeah, the option is eat shit or don't eat.

smn1234 7y ago

My concern with this statement is that restaurants can surely cook you "real" food and thus allow you to have your time back. Where I think we've made a big cultural mistake is in food _industry_ and in franchising. In essence, food isn't as "real" when it's meant for shelf life, to always look and taste the same, and to scale for every point of presence where it's intended to be sold such that there's strong profit margins / brand recognition to be made.

thatfrenchguy 7y ago
> My concern with this statement is that restaurants can surely cook you "real" food and thus allow you to have your time back. But they won't, because it's more expensive.

jniedrauer 7y ago

Processed food doesn't, by definition, have to be poison. We've set up this race to the bottom between competing food brands where the brand with the most sodium, fat, or high glycemic index sugar wins. The "free market" has an unfortunate tendency to select local maxima in the form of addictive substances. I don't know how to get there, but I can conceive of a reality where we could eat healthy and also not have to cook everything from scratch. It would require a shift of incentive from maximizing consumption to maximizing consumer health.

knightofmars 7y ago

It's not just cooking. The problem that we as Americans (and possibly other countries have) is that we don't understand our ingredients. It's easy to "cook" when you put a jar of store bought sauce over some noodles without ever looking at the ingredients. The grams of sugar in lots of store bought "pre-made" items is shocking. As an example with the staple "PB&J" when you look at the P. One tablespoon of a popular peanut butter has 1.5g of sugar. If you get an "organic" or "natural" alternative you often see that number drop to 0.5g of sugar per tablespoon. If you've been fed the 1.5g of sugar version growing up then you're going to have a hard time accepting the 0.5g version. Bread is another area. Bread shouldn't have sugar in it unless it's a dessert bread. Yet most store bought breads have corn syrup or sugar in them. Detoxing from sugar sounds like it could be a joke. But if you cut out most sugar from your diet for a month (read ingredients and pick low or none sugar alternatives as best you can). You'll be amazed at how much sweeter items such as tomatoes, carrots, and other fresh fruits and vegetables begin to taste.

Ididntdothis 7y ago
" It's easy to "cook" when you put a jar of store bought sauce over some noodles without ever looking at the ingredients." That's not what I would call cooking. That's "heating up".
- knightofmars 7y ago
  Hence the quotes around the word cook. :) Even if a person is cooking, if that person isn't preparing everything from scratch it's quite possible they are using sweetened ingredients (I'm not suggesting everyone should cook only from scratch).
  - esotericn 7y ago
    I dislike the use of the term "from scratch" here because it implies something.. esoteric or special. Boiling potatoes is just cooking, there's nothing "from scratch" about it, you're not a farmer. It's more about using real ingredients rather than processed stuff. (Sure, we can talk about what you consider 'processed' - I'd say basically anything that has more than one or two constituent parts).