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A plea for culinary modernism (2001) [pdf]
- symlinkk 4y agoThis is why Chipotle and Chick fil A are dominating. People go there because it’s the only fast food that’s perceived to be relatively healthy.
- kragen 4y agothe modern industrial diet seems to have caused an obesity epidemic everywhere it's been introduced in the last half century this is one of the major reasons for the slowing of the growth in life expectancy laudan mentions here, and even its reversal in places people who eat weird diets for some ideological reason that rule out eating food made in factories (raw-food vegans, carnivores, extreme-low-fat people) seem to be exempt but even lab animals are getting obese, despite never picking up the phone to order pizza it's not clear what's going on but it's probably not sugar, fat, saturated fat, unsaturated fat, protein, outgassing from household furnishings, advertising, lack of willpower, hormones in meat, pesticides, or transgenic grains. my guess is that it's one or more food additives generally regarded as safe that was almost unknown 50 years ago and is now almost universal unfortunately there are hundreds of candidates it's certainly true that 75 years ago the picture was very different, and this is not a defense of the kind of culinary romanticism laudan rightly scorns in this piece, but it's a different reason that today you might reasonably opt for old, slow, unprocessed food
- letharion 4y agoHave you read anything from SMTM? Their work has been on HN a few times and they dive deep into the rabbit hole of what causes obesity. Fascinating stuff. https://slimemoldtimemold.com/ https://slimemoldtimemold.com/
- kragen 4y agoi hadn't actually; which posts do you recommend
- akgoel 4y agoYou want this one: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-part-i-mysteries/ https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p... A series of mysteries as to different features of the obesity epidemic, that could possibly narrow down the causative factors. For example, people in higher elevations tend to be thinner than those in lower elevations, so perhaps the bad chemical is flowing downriver and accumulating at lower elevations.
- kragen 4y agothank you very much
- errantmind 4y agoAnecdotal but it was simple for me. The cause was seed oils and sweeteners and they are in most processed foods. I stopped eating them and then, a few months later, I stopped gaining weight. Instead my body now seems resistant to gaining weight, even when I eat poorly for a short interval. It is interesting because I actually eat more macros (carbs, fats, etc) now than before but don't gain weight, which indicates to me there is a qualitative component that often isn't accounted for.
- mort96 4y ago"Seed oils and sweeteners" are two radically different things. Do you think there's some common underlying mechanism, or that both just happen to be bad in completely unrelated ways which somehow both have the same result of encouraging weight gain?
- nerdponx 4y agoTriggering excessive inflammation (either systemically or locally in the gut) seems like a plausible common mechanism, even if the mechanisms by which that happens are completely different.
- errantmind 4y agoNo, I have no reason to believe they are connected directly, just both are bad in the quantities consumed when eating processed foods.
- kragen 4y agoi might be wrong about this but since sesame has been cultivated for seven thousand years throughout the middle east and india i am guessing that seed oils generically are not a significant part of the cause, though i'm not aware of a traditional diet that gets the majority of its calories from sesame oil (like the hadza with honey or some inuit diets with meat) but there are lots of other seed oils that have become much more popular in the last half-century that are more plausible suspects, like cottonseed oil, sunflower seed oil, and safflower oil i think rapeseed oil is probably not it because its popularity is more recent
- acchow 4y ago> but even lab animals are getting obese, despite never picking up the phone to order pizza This is surprising to me. Do you have a link to a definitive study? Seems it would be easy to pinpoint what is going for lab animals since they have a controlled diet and environment
- kragen 4y agoi don't; i got the assertion from some slatestarcodex post iirc please let me know if you find it or if i'm mistaken
- twic 4y agoIt's mentioned in the A Chemical Hunger series of blog posts, which were on Slate Star Codex at some point: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/13/a-chemical-hunger-part-iii-environmental-contaminants/ https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/13/a-chemical-hunger-p... The paper is linked to and discussed a bit here: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/52923/have-lab-animals-that-live-under-a-controlled-diet-become-more-obese-over-the-la https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/52923/have-lab-... I had a quick look, and couldn't find any other papers or commentary confirming or refuting this.
- kragen 4y agothis is great, thank you very much
- Jiro 4y agoThis needs to have (2001) added to the title.
- DennisP 4y agoLike the author I'm certainly glad I don't have to churn my own butter, but this attitude could easily be taken too far. A recent study "found a significant association between unprocessed or minimally processed foods and lower risks of all reported diseases." https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/new-evidence-links-ultra-processed-foods-with-a-range-of-health-risks/ https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/new-evidence-links-ultr...
- DeWilde 4y agoMy thoughts as well. You don't need to spend an entire day in the kitchen to prepare yourself a few meals with unprocessed or minimally processed foods: frozen or fresh veggies, dairy products, eggs, raw meat, or fish with about 20 mins of cooking, frying, or boiling and you have yourself a few meals. Its actually cheaper than eating out and if you apply meal prep on a weekly basis, like I do, it doesn't even take too much of your time.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kragen 4y agoof course it's cheaper than eating out, it's like an order of magnitude difference usually the weekly approach is especially efficient. one tip i've seen but never tried is to use a deep freeze to interleave different weeks, so within a given week you might cook three dishes but, by eating food you'd frozen over the previous 7 weeks, eat 21 different dishes
- hbrn 4y agoWhile processed foods consumption correlates with diseases, it's likely because food that's processed outside of your house typically includes ingredients (or preparation method) that either make it last longer or taste better at the expense of your health. But that doesn't mean that processing is always harmful. Frozen fish is considered "processed", but freezing also kills parasites.
- 4y ago
- AstixAndBelix 4y agoRobots should cook us human-tier healthy meals. Instead what we get is garbage. My dishwasher gives me very equivalent results to washing by hand, but it saves me so much time and water. Tech should save us time but maintain the same tenor of living. We need a dishwasher or washingmachine equivalent for automatic food preparation, not this industrialized garbage
- trgn 4y agoThis is the aspirational vision of the future. Tech to facilitate a more luxurious, healthier life. As opposed to us adapting our aspirations to the parameters of the technology. Right now, we act like battered housewives, apologizing for the shortcomings of our mass produced crap, I know it gave me cancer, but if only you saw the whole picture! No more of that please. The future _must_ be high grade; anything less is failure. Actual kitchen robots that cook! Actual cars that don't crush children! Actual cheap bespoke cabinets! Actual oceans of leisure time! Actual roombas that can navigate steps and nooks and crannies!
- schwartzworld 4y agoThere already is some of this sort of tech. Electric rice cookers, instant pots, stand mixers, breadmakers and even microwaves all take a lot of the work out of cooking. They don't help with prep, but it's hard to argue with the effectiveness of a sharp knife in accomplishing most tasks.
- abecedarius 4y agoMy fave existing tool of this sort is sous vide. It's not a complete robot chef, but it's done the most overall to reduce manual work in cooking/cleaning. (I used to use a microwave heavily, but mostly for TV dinners, not proper cooking.)
- chongli 4y agoThe instant pot is the closest thing to a dishwasher that I’ve seen in the cooking appliance space. You can literally throw a bunch of meat and vegetables in there with some salt and seasoning, add a bit of water, close the lid and turn it on. In 30 mins or less you’ll have delicious food with concentrated flavours. It’s really quite nice. I use mine for cooking pasta. I can throw a bunch of dry noodles, salt, water, spinach, and frozen pasta sauce in there and set it for 5 minutes. It cooks up perfectly al dente with no water to drain, sauce emulsified with a quick stir, and only one pot to clean. I get a great meal in 2 minutes of prep time. Now it seems downright quaint to imagine boiling a big pot of water and stirring pasta while it slowly cooks, only to dump all the water down the drain!
- akira2501 4y agoThis was seemingly written with a conclusion already in mind and takes a very muddy approach to reaching it. The author makes no apparent distinction between "prepared whole foods" and "industrially processed and modified foods" and "McDonald's." They paint the baguette as a modern mirage, even though is just ancient lean dough prepared with some skill. They ignore that farms experience seasons and so the workers on the farms experience them as well. Or that the five hour process of preparing tortillas would probably overlap with much other labor in the household, they truly imagine a women solely occupied with making tortillas for five hours a day? This article ignores much to make an over broad point all to arrive at the pithy conclusion that I'm actually an ancient aristocrat because I think McDonald's food is sub standard. Here's a better copy: https://jacobin.com/2015/05/slow-food-artisanal-natural-preservatives https://jacobin.com/2015/05/slow-food-artisanal-natural-pres...
- dang 4y agoRelated (by same author, not sure if same article): A Plea for Culinary Modernism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9592673 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9592673 - May 2015 (74 comments)