3 ms·

Not All Industrial Food Is Evil

4 points by robg 13y ago

JoeAltmaier 13y ago
What a loaded title. The article is much more balanced than it might seem. <rant> Most of our modern food is very, very good for us. Compared to the alternative. There's some magical thinking that nature intended us to eat some foods and not others. This is confused at best. Nature consists of a system of every-creature-for-itself. Those 'natural' foods were doing their very best to kill you whilst propagating their seeds. The foods we historically ate were just those that injured us slowly enough that we could still reproduce. Nowadays we can assay foodstuffs and make a chart of their benefits vs issues. For the first time in history we can know which hurt us quickly, and which slowly. Take it one step further. Processed foods are those where we can remove the injurious portions and keep the part that benefits us. Add hybridizing and we can make that easier by having desirable components in higher proportions. Modern farming techniques allow feeding our teeming billions without periodic starvation, even in 'bad years' i.e. irrigation, chemicals to suppress competition (bugs, fungi, other weeds). Comes down to this: eat 'natural', eat 'organic', you are one in a million that can afford to indulge yourself with fad/cult foods at the expense of your carbon footprint. Go ahead; its a free country. But please no more with the evangelizing - only a tiny fraction of us can afford that foolishness. And some of us find it offensive, like eating cheetah or endangered animal meat. You indulge yourself, inflate your carbon footprint drastically, to keep your karma aligned or whatever. Cottage industries spin up that are devoted to taking your money and giving you whatever the food of the month is. All very self-indulgent seen from the outside. Anyway, I thank civilization for providing me with a corn-based food infrastructure that guarantees plentiful calories and protein, and even some variety, year in and year out.

4 points by robg 13y ago

What a loaded title. The article is much more balanced than it might seem. <rant> Most of our modern food is very, very good for us. Compared to the alternative. There's some magical thinking that nature intended us to eat some foods and not others. This is confused at best. Nature consists of a system of every-creature-for-itself. Those 'natural' foods were doing their very best to kill you whilst propagating their seeds. The foods we historically ate were just those that injured us slowly enough that we could still reproduce. Nowadays we can assay foodstuffs and make a chart of their benefits vs issues. For the first time in history we can know which hurt us quickly, and which slowly. Take it one step further. Processed foods are those where we can remove the injurious portions and keep the part that benefits us. Add hybridizing and we can make that easier by having desirable components in higher proportions. Modern farming techniques allow feeding our teeming billions without periodic starvation, even in 'bad years' i.e. irrigation, chemicals to suppress competition (bugs, fungi, other weeds). Comes down to this: eat 'natural', eat 'organic', you are one in a million that can afford to indulge yourself with fad/cult foods at the expense of your carbon footprint. Go ahead; its a free country. But please no more with the evangelizing - only a tiny fraction of us can afford that foolishness. And some of us find it offensive, like eating cheetah or endangered animal meat. You indulge yourself, inflate your carbon footprint drastically, to keep your karma aligned or whatever. Cottage industries spin up that are devoted to taking your money and giving you whatever the food of the month is. All very self-indulgent seen from the outside. Anyway, I thank civilization for providing me with a corn-based food infrastructure that guarantees plentiful calories and protein, and even some variety, year in and year out.