3 ms·

Both of those until very recently were extremely expensive to the point of luxury for many, as well as much more difficult to effectively use a lot of cheap and

by phil21 3y ago

Both of those until very recently were extremely expensive to the point of luxury for many, as well as much more difficult to effectively use a lot of cheap and easily. Effectively zero people are chugging bottles of Olive Oil they buy from the corner store. There just is no comparison whatsoever to modern processed foods set for immediate consumption and tuned for maximum taste and pleasure response. Edit: to refute some other points downthread. > the cost of edible oil has not been a bar to access to calorie-dense foods for at least centuries if not millennia I believe this to be false. Even my grandparents saw things like olive oil and real butter as luxury items. Crisco started to exist because it was cheap. It took hours of work to turn these items into palatable calorie-dense foods, if that was even the outcome. Today? The average working class person goes out to fast food multiple times per week. This was a luxury even in my time growing up. Culture has simply changed, and (bad) food has gotten to be incredibly cheap and easy to access. > it seems to closely follow industrially-mass-produced foods, but the relevant feature of those foods is clearly not that they are more convenient or higher in calorie density than a can of crisco or an amphora of olive oil; they aren't I'm not sure how you could come to such a conclusion? That is pretty much the sole feature of those foods. Readily available highly-addictive and highly calorie dense foods fit for immediate (or near it) consumption. No magic woo-woo explanations needed. We simply teleported society into a place literally surrounded by cheap easy to access food typically hundreds of feet away at any given time and then wondered what happened to "willpower" as if it ever existed in such a manner.

kragen 3y ago
if you're from the usa, your grandparents could buy corn oil and margarine, and didn't see them as luxury items; but their generation didn't make a diet out of it conventional convenience foods like mcdonalds hamburgers, coca-cola, and twinkies are about 3, 0.5, and 4 kilocalories per gram; olive oil and butter are 9. healthier foods like whole-wheat bread, eggs, eggplant, and fatty steak are 2.5, 1.5, 0.4, and 3.5 calories per gram. calorie density is not what makes eggs healthier than coca-cola your hypothesis would also imply that people on low-carbohydrate diets consisting of fatty meat and cheese would rapidly gain weight, but instead they lose it in case it wasn't clear, i think the explanation that the obesity pandemic is due to a sudden decline in willpower is unlikely
- RC_ITR 3y ago
  The amount of calories available per capita has gone up by c. 20% over the last 60 years. Meanwhile, the amount of fat available has gone up 40%, while protein supplies have risen closer to c. 10%. It is absolutely anti-data to imply that previous generations had access to the same amount/mix of food/calories as we do today. https://ourworldindata.org/food-supply https://ourworldindata.org/food-supply
Scoundreller 3y ago
> Culture has simply changed, and (bad) food has gotten to be incredibly cheap and easy to access. It’s Gresham’s “law”: “bad money drives out good”, but applied to food. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham's_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham's_law
- kragen 3y ago
  people hoard good food in their vaults while giving other people their bad food as quickly as they can, because the government has decreed that bad food is equivalent to good food? that's total nonsense. gresham's law doesn't apply to food
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  It's also the simple fact that the average blue collar worker hasn't seen rising wages since the 80s. All the money accrued to the top, and the workers were left trying to make the same value of take home pay stretch farther and farther. The reason most people think inflation sucks is because modern society would rather collapse than pay workers in line with historical norms.
  - opo 3y ago
    >It's also the simple fact that the average blue collar worker hasn't seen rising wages since the 80s. You probably need to define what you mean by average blue collar worker as there are many ways of looking at this data (and it is often difficult to even find the estimated levels of transfer payments being given). For example, this Fed chart shows CPI adjusted median household income rising from around 57 thousand to around 75 thousand today: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    Every real wage chart I see looks like workers have made slight but reasonably steady improvements since 2000 and are 10-15% ahead of the 1980s. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
bigbillheck 3y ago
> Even my grandparents saw things like olive oil and real butter as luxury items. That "real" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
- dopidopHN 3y ago
  Where I grew up we rarely use “real” for food. We take it for granted it is : butter, mayonnaise, mustard.

by phil21 3y ago

kragen 3y ago

if you're from the usa, your grandparents could buy corn oil and margarine, and didn't see them as luxury items; but their generation didn't make a diet out of it conventional convenience foods like mcdonalds hamburgers, coca-cola, and twinkies are about 3, 0.5, and 4 kilocalories per gram; olive oil and butter are 9. healthier foods like whole-wheat bread, eggs, eggplant, and fatty steak are 2.5, 1.5, 0.4, and 3.5 calories per gram. calorie density is not what makes eggs healthier than coca-cola your hypothesis would also imply that people on low-carbohydrate diets consisting of fatty meat and cheese would rapidly gain weight, but instead they lose it in case it wasn't clear, i think the explanation that the obesity pandemic is due to a sudden decline in willpower is unlikely

RC_ITR 3y ago
The amount of calories available per capita has gone up by c. 20% over the last 60 years. Meanwhile, the amount of fat available has gone up 40%, while protein supplies have risen closer to c. 10%. It is absolutely anti-data to imply that previous generations had access to the same amount/mix of food/calories as we do today. https://ourworldindata.org/food-supply https://ourworldindata.org/food-supply

Scoundreller 3y ago

> Culture has simply changed, and (bad) food has gotten to be incredibly cheap and easy to access. It’s Gresham’s “law”: “bad money drives out good”, but applied to food. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham's_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham's_law

kragen 3y ago
people hoard good food in their vaults while giving other people their bad food as quickly as they can, because the government has decreed that bad food is equivalent to good food? that's total nonsense. gresham's law doesn't apply to food
mrguyorama 3y ago
It's also the simple fact that the average blue collar worker hasn't seen rising wages since the 80s. All the money accrued to the top, and the workers were left trying to make the same value of take home pay stretch farther and farther. The reason most people think inflation sucks is because modern society would rather collapse than pay workers in line with historical norms.
- opo 3y ago
  >It's also the simple fact that the average blue collar worker hasn't seen rising wages since the 80s. You probably need to define what you mean by average blue collar worker as there are many ways of looking at this data (and it is often difficult to even find the estimated levels of transfer payments being given). For example, this Fed chart shows CPI adjusted median household income rising from around 57 thousand to around 75 thousand today: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
- sokoloff 3y ago
  Every real wage chart I see looks like workers have made slight but reasonably steady improvements since 2000 and are 10-15% ahead of the 1980s. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

bigbillheck 3y ago

> Even my grandparents saw things like olive oil and real butter as luxury items. That "real" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

dopidopHN 3y ago
Where I grew up we rarely use “real” for food. We take it for granted it is : butter, mayonnaise, mustard.