6 ms·
Big Food vs. the People
- jruohonen 3mo agoRef.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49124738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49124738
- connor11528 3mo agoamerica has a monopoly problem
- black_13 3mo ago[dead]
- dabbz 3mo agoTrue, we have way too many thematic versions of Monopoly. I'm still missing so many copies.
- dhosek 3mo ago[dead]
- artisinal 3mo agoIn many European countries, the largest restaurant chain is American. Not great.
- bluGill 3mo agoYou seem to be assuming chains are good. I prefer the one location restaurant myself, but by definition they will never be the largest chain.
- cbg0 3mo agoMcDonald's might be the largest restaurant chain in Italy but that doesn't really mean much given how many small restaurants the country has with high quality food.
- artisinal 3mo agoAlso due to food standards a random McDonalds in a random village in Italy will have significantly better food than most restaurants in the US. The Italian McDonalds will use locally sourced fresh produce straight from the farm, cooked by high-end chefs to create a very good tasting meal that is super healthy and good for you. There is a reason those Italians live so long. Their McDonalds is better than others. It is literally illegal to sell McDonalds foods the way Americans make it.
- vjvjvjvjghv 3mo ago“ cooked by high-end chefs” They aren’t high end chefs. They are normal workers that aren’t squeezed by their company to produce food in the cheapest way
- artisinal 3mo agoAll chefs at McDonalds Italy are highly trained skilled professionals with a passion to provide everyone in their country with healthy meals.
- rootusrootus 3mo ago> It is literally illegal to sell McDonalds foods the way Americans make it. You should see what they do in the UK. Looks tasty, but healthy it certainly is not.
- rootusrootus 3mo agoIndeed if we could solve one thing with our gov't, I'd want it to be antitrust enforcement. For an ostensibly free market society we seem awfully willing to accept it being anything but.
- kibwen 3mo agoFree markets tend to produce monopolies. You know how economies of scale are a thing? That's another way of saying that small companies lose to large companies at scale. "Disruption" or "agility" is the only thing that small companies have going for them, but once the monopolist gets large enough they can just buy up any upstarts and keep the market all to themselves forever. This is why you require governments to periodically shake the snowglobe and restore markets to competitiveness... until the monopolist gets big enough that they just buy the government, anyway.
- pphysch 3mo agoExactly. If you ask anyone on the street, "is it easier for a fast food worker or a business-owning millionaire to make their next million dollars?", common sense will prevail. Money begets money (and power). It doesn't require an economics degree to understand this positive feedback loop.
- fragmede 3mo agoWouldn't that be more of a negative feedback loop? My signals and systems class was a long time ago, but a system that throttles to extremes is negative, not positive feedback.
- pphysch 3mo agoNope, negative feedback is dampening and stabilizing. Antitrust enforcement represents a healthy negative feedback for the natural runaway concentration of wealth and power.
- Straw 3mo ago
- arthurjj 3mo agoThe article says 80% of the lawsuits were in Mexico and ~3% were in America.
- IncreasePosts 3mo agoI think chess and scrabble are more popular here
- xXSLAYERXx 3mo agoI believe this is the second best time to start a business in America. The first was colonial times.
- stronglikedan 3mo agoit's an extension of our crony capitalism problem, where the free market is just an illusion
- EGreg 3mo agoVery relevant: https://magarshak.com/blog/government-and-industry-distract-us-from-solving-systemic-problems/ https://magarshak.com/blog/government-and-industry-distract-...
- nickff 3mo agoThe measures related to lawsuits are misleading and terrible, because of the way class-action lawsuits have incentivized lawyers to pursue dubious cases against large companies.
- wombat-man 3mo agoDon't they still need to win to get paid?
- bluGill 3mo agoWinning one and losing five is in their favor.
- strictnein 3mo agoThey're purchasing lottery tickets that are mostly paid for by tax payers who fund the court systems.
- jt2190 3mo ago- “Purchasing”: The attorneys that are taking these cases for $0 in the hopes that they’ll get n% of $SETTLEMENT - “paid for by tax payers who fund the court systems”. The alternative would mean taking away the right of private citizens to sue.
- strictnein 3mo agoI mean, I think you understand what I'm saying. They're externalizing the costs and internalizing the benefits. The same thing we complain about with numerous other industries. The alternative would not be to take away the right of private citizens to sue. There is, surprisingly enough, quite a chasm between identifying that some parties are taking advantage of a system and completely shutting that system down.
- jt2190 3mo agoIt sounds like you’re proposing that individuals should have to pay court costs, in full so that the “taxpayer” doesn’t have to pay the bill
- arthurjj 3mo agoI'm about as hippie with my food as you can get, but this "article" is badly written propaganda that conceals more than it reveals. Half way down the article you learn that ~80% (193 out of 239) of the lawsuits are in Mexico and > many of them were against the country’s labelling regulation. Quinto Elemento Lab reveals the companies’ arguments: that the laws were a violation of their constitutional rights But the article doesn't say what those rights are, which makes me think the lawsuits were just
- thegrim33 3mo agoPeople have to learn to recognize the patterns. In this case, lighthouse reports is an international NGO which receives on the order of ~1MM in income per year (an extremely common pattern for these NGOs), which was directly given to them by (unspecified) government grants and (unnamed) private donors (can see all this in their openly published annual reports). In exchange for the funding (80.38% of which they paid out to themselves as wages/compensation), they put together and release "reports", "studies", etc., that push the messaging the NGO was created to push.
- dfxm12 3mo ago1MM in any currency doesn't sound like a lot, especially relative to who they're up against...
- mikem170 3mo agoSounds like enough to pay some people for some months or a year or two - a combination of experts, part-time specialists, cotractors, etc. - to do things like gather some data via their contacts, hack together a meta-study, put out a glossy report andsome press releases, etc.
- munk-a 3mo agoI think the bigger point is that there's an overwhelming amount of money going to push the opposite narrative. A quick search revealed that Tyson alone spends well over a million annually on lobbying and I am sure the industry at large spends significantly more on this issue alone.
- irthomasthomas 3mo ago"Senators don't have the luxury that a research scientist has of waiting for evidence." - 1977 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbFQc2kxm9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbFQc2kxm9c FYI obesity 1977 ~14% 2026 40%+ T2 Diabetes 1977 ~3% 2026 ~12%
- codemac 3mo agoMcGovern is not someone to hold up, but that's not the quote. It was: "I would only argue that senators don't have the luxury that a research scientist does awaiting until every last shred of evidence is in"
- yndoendo 3mo agoI would say the idea aged poorly in the USA. Older generation of politicians were more welcoming to experts in their fields. Now they reject the experts. Either to a please their voter base or for personal profit. Big grocery has more money for political donations / legal bribery. USA Supreme Court conservative judges have ruled that expertise has no value in a ruling against protecting the environment from toxic chemicals.
- perpetuallunch 3mo agoAre you talking about the June 2024 decision that scraps the Chevron defence?
- arjie 3mo agoIt’s an adaptive system. Once you know that politicians can be influenced by an appropriately placed expert you can wield political power through the expert. At that point the logical incentive is for the politician to cut out the middleman and be directly influenced by you. After all, the expert can manufacture a snail-darter on demand. Why wait for that manufactured science when you can simply deliver the outcome yourself? To try to go back to the past is like thinking that the UK would rule the seas once more if only they returned to building sail ships of wood to do battle with.
- downrightmike 3mo ago
- thatmf 3mo agoFantastic infographics!
- mathgeek 3mo agoCame here to see if anyone was discussing the infographics, but oddly enough because I found them incredibly distracting and in that zone of "pretty to look at but taking too long to comprehend well, if at all". To each their own!
- thatmf 3mo agoFair point! Some of them are certainly more legible than others. I thought the vending machine one was brilliant. But for instance the one with the slices of pizza... does get a little lost in its own sauce, yes :P I just rarely see someone commit to the bit so deeply, and I think that's fun.
- citizenpaul 3mo agoIs it REALLY that hard for so many people to just stop drinking sugar water? I just don't get it. I can drink a soda or whatever once a year and thats more than enough for me, I usually don't even finish it. Is there something wrong with me or everyone else?
- flerchin 3mo agoThere's a large subsection of people that choose various vices. Gambling, drugs, alcohol (I repeat), soda and junk food. To folks that do not partake in these things, it's bizarre behavior. Literally none of those appeal to me, but there's clearly profit to be made supplying them.
- bix6 3mo agoFree clean water isn’t available many places so would you rather spend your money on water or a sugar hit? I’m with you on water though it’s so delicious.
- program_whiz 3mo agoAre you asking why people can't seem to stop? Or why you seem to possess that ability? Both are biologically mechanistic like all behavior. Probably similar to why some people will kill for heroine while many don't. Or maybe the same reason your gut bacteria can process certain foods others would die from (peanuts), it's environment plus biology in a complex set of local minima that cause repeated behaviors. Is it surprising a biological system optimized to gorge sugary food as late as 200 years ago struggles to stop now? You may have well starved if you ate just one helping while food was available, discipline around food would be a fools pursuit (like intentionally drinking less water than your fill at an oasis).
- deely3 3mo agoGood for you. Can you please convince anyone to do the same?
- tom2026hn 3mo agoIf someone wants to cut out sugar or addictive foods, they can try making those foods harder to get—sometimes it’s just a matter of eating out of habit, and you don’t necessarily need to have them that often. As for Coke, I drink about 6 to 12 cans a year, all during the hottest part of the year; the rest of the time, I hardly ever think about it.
- bix6 3mo agoSupport your local farmers and get a weekly CSA (community supported agriculture) box, delicious!
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- wxw 3mo agoLink to the list of court cases: https://search.openaleph.org/entities/52243ef9aea6719ce8a69e7da70f1464c456f71b.8530b463c185149c4ac189ab3fe0055a45ce4408#mode=csv-explorer https://search.openaleph.org/entities/52243ef9aea6719ce8a69e...
- StilesCrisis 3mo ago"But behind closed doors, they have taken governments to court" -- uh, I guess courtrooms technically have doors??
- techterrier 3mo agoyes, closed ones.
- StilesCrisis 3mo agoTechnically correct! The best kind of correct.
- throwawayffffas 3mo agoCan you blame them? Would you sue if the government suddenly decided your industry has to pay extra taxes, or they tried to restrict your advertising? Honestly coca cola should probably thank the UK government for the sugar tax. They are the only ones that had the courage to keep the sugar and pay the tax, making their original soda the only potable soda in the UK.
- hamper653 3mo ago> potable soda There is no such thing. > potable in the UK Now you’re getting silly.
- throwway120385 3mo ago> Can you blame them? Would you sue if the government suddenly decided your industry has to pay extra taxes, or they tried to restrict your advertising? No. I'd probably try to understand the purpose of the tax and what it was being used to fund, but a lawsuit wouldn't be my first stop. There are plenty of industries that get new taxes all the time and don't cry about it. Frankly the behavior on display here is right out of the Phillip Morris playbook on "how to keep profiting from a product you know is terrible for the people you're selling it to."
- matchbok3 3mo agoComparing soda to cigarettes is ridiculous. People like soda, and in moderation, it is completely fine. There is no reason to single out sugary sodas to try to "solve" obesity. It is a consumer problem, not a product problem.
- DangitBobby 3mo agoWe all know individual consumer action could technically make the difference between an obesity epidemic and a healthy country. We all also know that individual consumers will literally never take that action, be it health or any of the other myriad ways that corporations are fucking us over. It's time to stop suggesting it. The point of governments and other central organizations is to coordinate, because large groups of people can't coordinate, and without coordination collective action just doesn't happen.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- latentframe 3mo ago595 cumulative year of litigation is probably most important statistic here => even when governments eventually win the process itself can be delay policy for years
- Xorakios 3mo agoI'm okay with complaining and proposing solutions, but saying "blue" and "red" in colors for product designs is manipulating children is odd.