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> consumers allow the behaviour by largely being ignorant about their own nutrition. This idea that "consumers allow the behavior" is a very pernicious one - i

by GuiA 6y ago

> consumers allow the behaviour by largely being ignorant about their own nutrition. This idea that "consumers allow the behavior" is a very pernicious one - it's common in the context of global warming too ("if only people stopped driving their car and started caring about the planet!"). It's an utter reversion of causality. People are going to do whatever makes the most sense given their own context, and if you're struggling time and money wise to take care of your family in a nutritional desert [0], and the only jobs you can get require you to drive an hour a day, then of course you're going to be buying frozen waffles at Walmart and Big Mac takeout for your kids and driving your car around. Not to mention the billions of dollars spent on advertising to manipulate people - what do you want citizens to do, when their own educational system fails to teach them the most basic literacy/numerical skills? [1] We need to be angry at governments and companies, not people doing what they can to merely get by. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert [1] https://cepa.stanford.edu/content/patterns-literacy-among-us-students https://cepa.stanford.edu/content/patterns-literacy-among-us...

deleted 6y ago
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pmoriarty 6y ago
Not only that, but even if you can afford (both in time and money) to shop for honest, nutritional alternatives, how many people are really going to spend a significant amount of their time seeking out and acquiring these alternatives? The OP talks about finding local sources of coffee and eggs, but many people would have no idea of where to get those, nor have any means of verifying that they were really what they claimed and not fraudulent. As a consumer, I have no way of knowing if, for instance, the people hawking food at my local farmer's market (which I'm lucky enough to live within a convenient distance of) are really source their food locally or just pretend to. I have no means of verifying whether their food is really "organic", or is merely sold as such. To take an example, the adulteration of "raw", "organic" honey with fillers like corn syrup is a serious problem.[1][2] An individual consumer has virtually no means at their disposal to determine which honey is genuine, short of becoming a beekeeper themselves or having a trusted beekeper friend, which is (I would venture to guess) the case for approximately 0% of the population. The same goes for pretty much every other product. In aggregate, for all of the products a typical consumer buys, this can not be solved at an individual level. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22518291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22518291 [2] - https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/884kq4/your-fancy-honey-might-not-actually-be-honey https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/884kq4/your-fancy-honey-m...

by GuiA 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

pmoriarty 6y ago

Not only that, but even if you can afford (both in time and money) to shop for honest, nutritional alternatives, how many people are really going to spend a significant amount of their time seeking out and acquiring these alternatives? The OP talks about finding local sources of coffee and eggs, but many people would have no idea of where to get those, nor have any means of verifying that they were really what they claimed and not fraudulent. As a consumer, I have no way of knowing if, for instance, the people hawking food at my local farmer's market (which I'm lucky enough to live within a convenient distance of) are really source their food locally or just pretend to. I have no means of verifying whether their food is really "organic", or is merely sold as such. To take an example, the adulteration of "raw", "organic" honey with fillers like corn syrup is a serious problem.[1][2] An individual consumer has virtually no means at their disposal to determine which honey is genuine, short of becoming a beekeeper themselves or having a trusted beekeper friend, which is (I would venture to guess) the case for approximately 0% of the population. The same goes for pretty much every other product. In aggregate, for all of the products a typical consumer buys, this can not be solved at an individual level. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22518291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22518291 [2] - https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/884kq4/your-fancy-honey-might-not-actually-be-honey https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/884kq4/your-fancy-honey-m...