8 ms·

“It’s not that hard.” You hear that, single-mother-of-three? Stop eating unsustainably and just go pay a 20 percent markup for whatever food is available down

“It’s not that hard.” You hear that, single-mother-of-three? Stop eating unsustainably and just go pay a 20 percent markup for whatever food is available down at the local farmer’s market. It’s not that hard! Just make more money. What about those who find such markets price-prohibitive? Those who live in food deserts?

trav4225 5y ago
Well, if she's a mother of three, we already know her life goal is obviously planetary destruction, so what's a few avocados grown by Big Ag? ;-)
- tjr225 5y ago
  Or perhaps conservative government made birth control and abortion illegal. Or perhaps she was raped. Come on.
  - Fricken 5y ago
    Raped 3 times? Or were they triplets?
    - tjr225 5y ago
      You really don’t think that happens? Try even a cursory google search. Come on. https://www.google.com/search?q=raped+multiple+times&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari https://www.google.com/search?q=raped+multiple+times&ie=UTF-...
      - Fricken 5y ago
        Come on! Come on now. Come on!
        trav4225 5y ago
        "Come on, man!"
        tjr225 5y ago
        Exactly.
sethhochberg 5y ago
I'm not trying to downplay the difficulties of helping less privileged people eat well, but you should know many cities have programs that specifically make efforts to put farmers markets in food deserts, and often accept EBT/SNAP at above cash value (or with heavy rebates) - if these kind of programs don't exist where you are, perhaps consider petitioning whatever group runs your local farmers markets to see if they might be possible to introduce.
ganafagol 5y ago
If those who can afford it would do it, like the well-off people frequenting hacker news, that would be a start. That would drive up demand, make it worth for more farmers to do this sustainably, eventually driving those costs down, and thus making it more affordable for lesser income people. And it's not black and white, in each iteration more people can afford it. Similar to electric cars. It's easy to armchair-philosophise those things away with "oh but poor people wont ever have the money, so screw it". With that attitude we'd never hav gotten electric cars. Or solar power.
- jwilber 5y ago
  There’s no armchair philosophy here, nor the defeated apathy you seem to be responding to. GP posted a ridiculous, condescending, one-sentence solution to the issue of sustainable eating. I used hyperbole to try and highlight how out of touch they are. The whole point is that the problem is, in fact, hard.
megablast 5y ago
The big trick is not to get yourself in the situation of being a single mother with 3 kids for starters. Of course you can’t do the best for your kids with 3 of them on your own.
hombre_fatal 5y ago
Bringing up impoverished people every time someone asks what one should be eating doesn’t answer the question and it’s exhausting to watch “Avocados are healthy and—“ “Umm, try living in a food desert with three jobs!” Yes, it sucks for those people, but pointing out poverty doesn’t silence the conversation about nutrition for the rest of us who can afford some cheap vegetables.
- jwilber 5y ago
  Agreed. But when someone posts a one-sentence solution to a difficult problem, and frames it in the most condescending manner possible (eg “It’s not hard.”), it’s difficult not to respond with a low-effort (and very real) counterexample. I’m curious what the “unsilenced” (???) conversation would continue to look like in your opinion- seems to me like the “not hard” comment of the original response implied not much conversation was left to be had.
- cortesoft 5y ago
  Yeah, but if the conversation starts with “large agribusiness is unsustainable and needs to end”, you can’t propose a solution that doesn’t feed the entire population.
hervature 5y ago
Cheap unsustainable food or sustainably priced food is the decision we all have to make. Unfortunately, the government subsidizes some of the worst food industries in the name of providing "staples". We can't feed 8 billion people Wagyu beef for every meal. Yes, the world needs to eat more lentils. We can't complain that eating sustainable is "hard" when we really mean "it is 50% more expensive". Great, Disney World every 7 years instead of every 5. For the families that truly need help (which is the minority), we have programs to assist. But instead of giving them government cheese, let's push for locally sourced ingredients. But again, that's "hard".
- RugnirViking 5y ago
  > For the families that truly need help (which is the minority) 20% of the US population recieves wellfare payments - and a good proportion of those above this lowest quintile are precarious at best. I would go so far as to say that more than half of people absolubtely cannot afford a 50% price increase on food. Not to mention the additional labour and complexity involved in cooking food from raw & healthy ingredients. It cannot be overstated just how much "brain fog" one experiences growing up and living the life of those less fortuntate - it really is incredibly difficult for someone like this to just decide one day to not have their usual frozen pre-cooked microwave meal and instead learn how to make a vegetarian lentil curry, and a big part of that is the percieved difficulty of cooking and the psychological barrier of learning something new - it really is hard for a lot of people to feel the agency in their lives such that they can simply "decide" to learn something new like that. Now I'm not saying this to simply be contrarian, or to say that we can't do anything about this at all, but rather we need to approach the issue with large quantities of empathy and human understanding. Government funded cooking programmes pointed towards those with little time and money and that helps teach basic skills without talking down to people would be a good start, but realistically something like that would only work if they became popular - it would require a very talented face/crew that have passion for their mission.
hypertele-Xii 5y ago
There's what I call the "cheap shoes fallacy" at play here. When you buy cheap shoes, they break quickly, forcing you to buy another pair, ultimately costing more over time than if you had just bought good shoes to begin with. The same applies to food. When you buy cheap food, it will nourish you only a little bit, forcing you to buy more of it, ultimately costing more over time than if you had just bought good food to begin with. Cheap, industrial food contains the minimum amount of actual food to pass for grub, and is laden with artificial flavorings to fool your brain into thinking you're actually eating something, when you're not.
- cortesoft 5y ago
  I don’t think the data backs that up. The percentage of obese people would indicate that food not having enough calories is not the issue.
  - hypertele-Xii 5y ago
    You don't judge the quality of food by the amount of calories in it.
- giantrobot 5y ago
  > When you buy cheap shoes, they break quickly, forcing you to buy another pair, ultimately costing more over time than if you had just bought good shoes to begin with. This is only a "fallacy" if someone chooses to purchase the cheap shoes despite having the capability to buy good shoes. Being poor is expensive. If you can't buy good shoes you're stuck in a feedback loop of making do with cheap shoes. The same goes for many items and services. There's not a good option for a lot of people close to their margins.
  - hypertele-Xii 5y ago
    You can always go without shoes for a while to save up for good ones. A lot of the things people don't even consider giving up are non-essential. There's a strange hoarder mentality where poor people are unwilling to sacrifice anything at all, even if it led to future improvement. It's another fallacy, I think. When you're hungry it wouldn't occur to many to voluntarily fast. Sugars fool humans well. Artificial flavorings fool them even better. Note the core of my argument: $1 of good food sustains you longer than $1 of bad food. What good food is so expensive per smallest unit sold that anyone couldn't switch to it?

trav4225 5y ago

Well, if she's a mother of three, we already know her life goal is obviously planetary destruction, so what's a few avocados grown by Big Ag? ;-)

tjr225 5y ago
Or perhaps conservative government made birth control and abortion illegal. Or perhaps she was raped. Come on.
- Fricken 5y ago
  Raped 3 times? Or were they triplets?
  - tjr225 5y ago
    You really don’t think that happens? Try even a cursory google search. Come on. https://www.google.com/search?q=raped+multiple+times&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari https://www.google.com/search?q=raped+multiple+times&ie=UTF-...
    - Fricken 5y ago
      Come on! Come on now. Come on!
      - trav4225 5y ago
        "Come on, man!"
        tjr225 5y ago
        Exactly.

sethhochberg 5y ago

I'm not trying to downplay the difficulties of helping less privileged people eat well, but you should know many cities have programs that specifically make efforts to put farmers markets in food deserts, and often accept EBT/SNAP at above cash value (or with heavy rebates) - if these kind of programs don't exist where you are, perhaps consider petitioning whatever group runs your local farmers markets to see if they might be possible to introduce.

ganafagol 5y ago

If those who can afford it would do it, like the well-off people frequenting hacker news, that would be a start. That would drive up demand, make it worth for more farmers to do this sustainably, eventually driving those costs down, and thus making it more affordable for lesser income people. And it's not black and white, in each iteration more people can afford it. Similar to electric cars. It's easy to armchair-philosophise those things away with "oh but poor people wont ever have the money, so screw it". With that attitude we'd never hav gotten electric cars. Or solar power.

jwilber 5y ago
There’s no armchair philosophy here, nor the defeated apathy you seem to be responding to. GP posted a ridiculous, condescending, one-sentence solution to the issue of sustainable eating. I used hyperbole to try and highlight how out of touch they are. The whole point is that the problem is, in fact, hard.

megablast 5y ago

The big trick is not to get yourself in the situation of being a single mother with 3 kids for starters. Of course you can’t do the best for your kids with 3 of them on your own.

hombre_fatal 5y ago

Bringing up impoverished people every time someone asks what one should be eating doesn’t answer the question and it’s exhausting to watch “Avocados are healthy and—“ “Umm, try living in a food desert with three jobs!” Yes, it sucks for those people, but pointing out poverty doesn’t silence the conversation about nutrition for the rest of us who can afford some cheap vegetables.

jwilber 5y ago
Agreed. But when someone posts a one-sentence solution to a difficult problem, and frames it in the most condescending manner possible (eg “It’s not hard.”), it’s difficult not to respond with a low-effort (and very real) counterexample. I’m curious what the “unsilenced” (???) conversation would continue to look like in your opinion- seems to me like the “not hard” comment of the original response implied not much conversation was left to be had.
cortesoft 5y ago
Yeah, but if the conversation starts with “large agribusiness is unsustainable and needs to end”, you can’t propose a solution that doesn’t feed the entire population.

hervature 5y ago

Cheap unsustainable food or sustainably priced food is the decision we all have to make. Unfortunately, the government subsidizes some of the worst food industries in the name of providing "staples". We can't feed 8 billion people Wagyu beef for every meal. Yes, the world needs to eat more lentils. We can't complain that eating sustainable is "hard" when we really mean "it is 50% more expensive". Great, Disney World every 7 years instead of every 5. For the families that truly need help (which is the minority), we have programs to assist. But instead of giving them government cheese, let's push for locally sourced ingredients. But again, that's "hard".

RugnirViking 5y ago
> For the families that truly need help (which is the minority) 20% of the US population recieves wellfare payments - and a good proportion of those above this lowest quintile are precarious at best. I would go so far as to say that more than half of people absolubtely cannot afford a 50% price increase on food. Not to mention the additional labour and complexity involved in cooking food from raw & healthy ingredients. It cannot be overstated just how much "brain fog" one experiences growing up and living the life of those less fortuntate - it really is incredibly difficult for someone like this to just decide one day to not have their usual frozen pre-cooked microwave meal and instead learn how to make a vegetarian lentil curry, and a big part of that is the percieved difficulty of cooking and the psychological barrier of learning something new - it really is hard for a lot of people to feel the agency in their lives such that they can simply "decide" to learn something new like that. Now I'm not saying this to simply be contrarian, or to say that we can't do anything about this at all, but rather we need to approach the issue with large quantities of empathy and human understanding. Government funded cooking programmes pointed towards those with little time and money and that helps teach basic skills without talking down to people would be a good start, but realistically something like that would only work if they became popular - it would require a very talented face/crew that have passion for their mission.

hypertele-Xii 5y ago

There's what I call the "cheap shoes fallacy" at play here. When you buy cheap shoes, they break quickly, forcing you to buy another pair, ultimately costing more over time than if you had just bought good shoes to begin with. The same applies to food. When you buy cheap food, it will nourish you only a little bit, forcing you to buy more of it, ultimately costing more over time than if you had just bought good food to begin with. Cheap, industrial food contains the minimum amount of actual food to pass for grub, and is laden with artificial flavorings to fool your brain into thinking you're actually eating something, when you're not.

cortesoft 5y ago
I don’t think the data backs that up. The percentage of obese people would indicate that food not having enough calories is not the issue.
- hypertele-Xii 5y ago
  You don't judge the quality of food by the amount of calories in it.
giantrobot 5y ago
> When you buy cheap shoes, they break quickly, forcing you to buy another pair, ultimately costing more over time than if you had just bought good shoes to begin with. This is only a "fallacy" if someone chooses to purchase the cheap shoes despite having the capability to buy good shoes. Being poor is expensive. If you can't buy good shoes you're stuck in a feedback loop of making do with cheap shoes. The same goes for many items and services. There's not a good option for a lot of people close to their margins.
- hypertele-Xii 5y ago
  You can always go without shoes for a while to save up for good ones. A lot of the things people don't even consider giving up are non-essential. There's a strange hoarder mentality where poor people are unwilling to sacrifice anything at all, even if it led to future improvement. It's another fallacy, I think. When you're hungry it wouldn't occur to many to voluntarily fast. Sugars fool humans well. Artificial flavorings fool them even better. Note the core of my argument: $1 of good food sustains you longer than $1 of bad food. What good food is so expensive per smallest unit sold that anyone couldn't switch to it?