5 ms·

It isn't just restaurants, but also supermarkets. They don't produce food; they produce shareholder wealth. That's their goal. Healthy food, grown naturally,

It isn't just restaurants, but also supermarkets. They don't produce food; they produce shareholder wealth. That's their goal. Healthy food, grown naturally, not sprayed with chemicals, harvested in the last week, is just not a cost-effective plan for them.

vkou 11mo ago
> Healthy food, grown naturally, not sprayed with chemicals, harvested in the last week, is just not a cost-effective plan for them. It's also not a cost-effective plan for most shoppers who have enough other expenses in their lives that they can't afford their food doubling in price. Most of us are stuck in globally-horrible local maximums, and we aren't going to get out of them without some external push.
- pil0u 11mo ago
  In 50 years, the proportion of the budget allocated to food, halved. I'm not saying everyone can have the choice to eat healthy, but probably a small majority has. I live in an area where small, local, sometimes organic producers are gathered to sell their product to the community in a way it is accessible to every budget.
  - vkou 11mo ago
    > In 50 years, the proportion of the budget allocated to food, halved. Sure. But 50 years ago, healthcare and education didn't cost an arm and both legs. In those 5 decades, every single rent-seeker that you need to engage with to live has dipped his hand deeper into our pockets. > I live in an area where small, local, sometimes organic producers are gathered to sell their product to the community in a way it is accessible to every budget.... You forgot the "For the brief period of time their produce is in season." Only selling what you have, when you have it removes a lot of costs from food supply chains. If, like the local grocery, those small, local, organic producers had to keep you fed 24/7/365, their prices would go up - by a lot. I am also pretty confident that those small, local, organic producers aren't the source of most of their customers' caloric demands.
    - pil0u 11mo ago
      I live in a part of the world where the healthcare system is also spread across the society in a more equalitarian way than what you describe. I don't understand your second point. One of my close friends is a farmer, they mostly grow organic apples. They work (insanely hard) across the whole year to prepare the crop and take care of the trees. They are not rich, but it starts to be sustainable. Locally, it's having a community of farmers that grow different things that make you fed across the year, as long as you accept eating exotic food only very occasionally. Regarding calories, I honestly don't know. What I know for sure is that apples in the 50s had at least an order of magnitude more calories than apples today. Different times, different agricultural practices, different population also, fair. Obesity has skyrocketed across the whole world. People already eat too much, too much hyper transformed, too much sugar, too many calories.
      - vkou 11mo ago
        > I don't understand your second point. When I go to the grocery, food is available to me at any time of year. Your friend's apples are only available for ~2 months/of the year. The supply chains that feed the world have to work year-round, and all the people that work them expect to get paid. Availability adds to the cost. > What I know for sure is that apples in the 50s had at least an order of magnitude more calories than apples today I have a very hard time believing that the average apple from the 50s had 94 * 10 = 940 calories.
        pil0u 11mo ago
        That's the whole point: don't eat apples from January to December.
        vkou 11mo ago
        Which is the whole problem. Your friend's apple orchard is not a replacement for the modern grocery. It's a seasonal supplement that replaces the cheapest and easiest part of a diet - in-season produce. And he has to work insanely hard all-year-long to do it.
  - onion2k 11mo ago
    In 50 years, the proportion of the budget allocated to food, halved. Did people choose to do that, or why they forced to by increased costs in other areas?
  - tonyedgecombe 11mo ago
    >I'm not saying everyone can have the choice to eat healthy, but probably a small majority has. I bet the least healthy options in people's shopping trolleys are some of the most expensive items. Cakes, biscuits, chocolate, ice creams, alcohol, pre-prepared meals, etc.
    - epiccoleman 11mo ago
      i'm always a little surprised by how low my cart total is when i just go into the store to refresh a few produce items. that said, eating healthy certainly hasn't gotten any cheaper. i've paid $1+ for a single onion which feels absurd
  - TheOtherHobbes 11mo ago
    There are very few areas where it's physically possible to live like that. And even in those areas many staples will be industrially farmed and imported from other countries, or at least shipped from far away within the same country.
- charlieyu1 11mo ago
  Overtaxation, less disposable income.
- bikelang 11mo ago
  To push back on this idea a bit - my family buys a share from a CSA (community supported agriculture). Our CSA is a local organic farm operating on about 4 acres of land. They grow enough food for ~30 CSA shares and sell at farmers markets as well as to local restaurants. For $700 we get enough fresh produce to cover about 2/3rds of our groceries (for 2 adults) for a 20 week period. We spend a lot more than 35/week at Whole Foods typically! And this is in a relatively HCOL part of Colorado - which isn’t known for its easy growing climate. All that is to say - I’m not sure I agree that supermarkets are the cheapest outcome for food. Locally grown food can be substantially cheaper. What we give up is the year long availability for any kind of produce we could dream of. Instead we eat seasonally and we eat what is available. It requires a shift in cooking practice from “I want to make X - I am going to go buy A,B,C ingredients” to “I have A,B,C - what can I make with this?”. Maybe that lack of choice is an unacceptable trade off for some - for us we find it fun. It’s well worth cheaper, better tasting (really cannot understate this part), and substantially longer lasting produce. It’s actually crazy how long the produce we get from the farm lasts - we have basically zero spoilage now. I just wish we could get food like this year round - and I am considering buying a second share next year entirely to can it. So maybe it will be possible!
ErroneousBosh 11mo ago
> Healthy food, grown naturally, not sprayed with chemicals, harvested in the last week, is just not a cost-effective plan for them. It's not just "not cost-effective", it's not technically feasible. Do you want to grow enough food to feed maybe a couple of dozen people and spend every waking minute doing it, or do you want to scale out to feed everyone including the vast majority of the population who do no useful work?
- tonyedgecombe 11mo ago
  Not only that but there is no real evidence that organic food is better for you. Even from an environmental perspective the arguments are dubious. The yields on organic food are much lower which means you need more land under production, land that could have been left to the wilderness.
  - brnaftr361 11mo ago
    Isn't yield relative? Take a bell pepper for instance, perhaps one grown in x soil another in y, the nutrient contents will vary even if one is clonal. There have been some rumblings about the nutrient qualities of certain food goods. You also hear about European vs. American vs. garden-grown in terms of qualitative differences. I've even seen it quantitated, indeed there was a documentary surrounding this [0]. There's a researcher that took historical records of micronutrient measures and compared them against modern cultivars, finding a decline in the per-volume contents. I think it begs several questions about modern practices in agriculture beyond increased volume yield which is too often in the limelight. It just reminds me of Pika, which is associated with micronutrient deficiencies. [0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ngjAqzam0fU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ngjAqzam0fU
    - frm88 11mo ago
      Thank you for that link. This documentary was interesting for 3 reasons: A) clarifying that the seeds of all produce we eat comes from 5 international companies, 4 of which also have pesticides as a main product; B) child labour enables prices per kilo seeds of 400k (!) C) journalism that really confronts CEOs with uncomfortable questions is possible. And it introduced me to kokopelli which is where my future seeds will come from.

vkou 11mo ago

> Healthy food, grown naturally, not sprayed with chemicals, harvested in the last week, is just not a cost-effective plan for them. It's also not a cost-effective plan for most shoppers who have enough other expenses in their lives that they can't afford their food doubling in price. Most of us are stuck in globally-horrible local maximums, and we aren't going to get out of them without some external push.

pil0u 11mo ago
In 50 years, the proportion of the budget allocated to food, halved. I'm not saying everyone can have the choice to eat healthy, but probably a small majority has. I live in an area where small, local, sometimes organic producers are gathered to sell their product to the community in a way it is accessible to every budget.
- vkou 11mo ago
  > In 50 years, the proportion of the budget allocated to food, halved. Sure. But 50 years ago, healthcare and education didn't cost an arm and both legs. In those 5 decades, every single rent-seeker that you need to engage with to live has dipped his hand deeper into our pockets. > I live in an area where small, local, sometimes organic producers are gathered to sell their product to the community in a way it is accessible to every budget.... You forgot the "For the brief period of time their produce is in season." Only selling what you have, when you have it removes a lot of costs from food supply chains. If, like the local grocery, those small, local, organic producers had to keep you fed 24/7/365, their prices would go up - by a lot. I am also pretty confident that those small, local, organic producers aren't the source of most of their customers' caloric demands.
  - pil0u 11mo ago
    I live in a part of the world where the healthcare system is also spread across the society in a more equalitarian way than what you describe. I don't understand your second point. One of my close friends is a farmer, they mostly grow organic apples. They work (insanely hard) across the whole year to prepare the crop and take care of the trees. They are not rich, but it starts to be sustainable. Locally, it's having a community of farmers that grow different things that make you fed across the year, as long as you accept eating exotic food only very occasionally. Regarding calories, I honestly don't know. What I know for sure is that apples in the 50s had at least an order of magnitude more calories than apples today. Different times, different agricultural practices, different population also, fair. Obesity has skyrocketed across the whole world. People already eat too much, too much hyper transformed, too much sugar, too many calories.
    - vkou 11mo ago
      > I don't understand your second point. When I go to the grocery, food is available to me at any time of year. Your friend's apples are only available for ~2 months/of the year. The supply chains that feed the world have to work year-round, and all the people that work them expect to get paid. Availability adds to the cost. > What I know for sure is that apples in the 50s had at least an order of magnitude more calories than apples today I have a very hard time believing that the average apple from the 50s had 94 * 10 = 940 calories.
      - pil0u 11mo ago
        That's the whole point: don't eat apples from January to December.
        vkou 11mo ago
        Which is the whole problem. Your friend's apple orchard is not a replacement for the modern grocery. It's a seasonal supplement that replaces the cheapest and easiest part of a diet - in-season produce. And he has to work insanely hard all-year-long to do it.
- onion2k 11mo ago
  In 50 years, the proportion of the budget allocated to food, halved. Did people choose to do that, or why they forced to by increased costs in other areas?
- tonyedgecombe 11mo ago
  >I'm not saying everyone can have the choice to eat healthy, but probably a small majority has. I bet the least healthy options in people's shopping trolleys are some of the most expensive items. Cakes, biscuits, chocolate, ice creams, alcohol, pre-prepared meals, etc.
  - epiccoleman 11mo ago
    i'm always a little surprised by how low my cart total is when i just go into the store to refresh a few produce items. that said, eating healthy certainly hasn't gotten any cheaper. i've paid $1+ for a single onion which feels absurd
- TheOtherHobbes 11mo ago
  There are very few areas where it's physically possible to live like that. And even in those areas many staples will be industrially farmed and imported from other countries, or at least shipped from far away within the same country.
charlieyu1 11mo ago
Overtaxation, less disposable income.
bikelang 11mo ago
To push back on this idea a bit - my family buys a share from a CSA (community supported agriculture). Our CSA is a local organic farm operating on about 4 acres of land. They grow enough food for ~30 CSA shares and sell at farmers markets as well as to local restaurants. For $700 we get enough fresh produce to cover about 2/3rds of our groceries (for 2 adults) for a 20 week period. We spend a lot more than 35/week at Whole Foods typically! And this is in a relatively HCOL part of Colorado - which isn’t known for its easy growing climate. All that is to say - I’m not sure I agree that supermarkets are the cheapest outcome for food. Locally grown food can be substantially cheaper. What we give up is the year long availability for any kind of produce we could dream of. Instead we eat seasonally and we eat what is available. It requires a shift in cooking practice from “I want to make X - I am going to go buy A,B,C ingredients” to “I have A,B,C - what can I make with this?”. Maybe that lack of choice is an unacceptable trade off for some - for us we find it fun. It’s well worth cheaper, better tasting (really cannot understate this part), and substantially longer lasting produce. It’s actually crazy how long the produce we get from the farm lasts - we have basically zero spoilage now. I just wish we could get food like this year round - and I am considering buying a second share next year entirely to can it. So maybe it will be possible!

ErroneousBosh 11mo ago

> Healthy food, grown naturally, not sprayed with chemicals, harvested in the last week, is just not a cost-effective plan for them. It's not just "not cost-effective", it's not technically feasible. Do you want to grow enough food to feed maybe a couple of dozen people and spend every waking minute doing it, or do you want to scale out to feed everyone including the vast majority of the population who do no useful work?

tonyedgecombe 11mo ago
Not only that but there is no real evidence that organic food is better for you. Even from an environmental perspective the arguments are dubious. The yields on organic food are much lower which means you need more land under production, land that could have been left to the wilderness.
- brnaftr361 11mo ago
  Isn't yield relative? Take a bell pepper for instance, perhaps one grown in x soil another in y, the nutrient contents will vary even if one is clonal. There have been some rumblings about the nutrient qualities of certain food goods. You also hear about European vs. American vs. garden-grown in terms of qualitative differences. I've even seen it quantitated, indeed there was a documentary surrounding this [0]. There's a researcher that took historical records of micronutrient measures and compared them against modern cultivars, finding a decline in the per-volume contents. I think it begs several questions about modern practices in agriculture beyond increased volume yield which is too often in the limelight. It just reminds me of Pika, which is associated with micronutrient deficiencies. [0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ngjAqzam0fU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ngjAqzam0fU
  - frm88 11mo ago
    Thank you for that link. This documentary was interesting for 3 reasons: A) clarifying that the seeds of all produce we eat comes from 5 international companies, 4 of which also have pesticides as a main product; B) child labour enables prices per kilo seeds of 400k (!) C) journalism that really confronts CEOs with uncomfortable questions is possible. And it introduced me to kokopelli which is where my future seeds will come from.