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OwlFancier posted:I suppose that depends on whether you consider "conspiracy" to be relegated to active attempts to construct a state of affairs and merely perpetuating one as a series of consciously unrelated actions. I don't have a huge problem with food as private property; it's one of those cases where I won't bitch about the free market, because that state of affairs does encourage the availability of a wide variety of food that you get to pick and choose from, instead of like a more fixed menu of "ration packages" or whatever a government agency would come up with. My problem comes from the issue of food waste, on a lot of levels as noted in the OP. Food, like water, is different from other exploitable natural resources in that it's fundamentally necessary for the existence of human life. I think it's fine to make people pay for the food that they want, but I think we also shouldn't begrudge the less fortunate the option to be given what food they can get. The massive margin of wasted food from multiple points on the supply chain is, in my opinion, a humanitarian disaster in the face of people both here and abroad who face scarce or nonexistent food availability. It's clear that the US produces more than enough food to feed its own population, including the people who aren't buying said food, but so much of it just winds up in a landfill, for example. Why is that acceptable? It's not a business's or a citizen's personal responsibility to feed the poor, but the sheer wastefulness is just a grotesque oversight. It's not a private party's responsibility, but it should, in my opinion, be the government's responsibility. There's no solution that you can just elevator pitch that doesn't miss major logistical breakpoints. In the techbro thread, I proposed a "food recycling" program involving insulated food bins, in which the burden of redistribution was placed primarily on charity organizations that collect those bins. However, as was pointed out, that still places a responsibility on a store or restaurant to store that food until a collection day if they are to fully participate in said program. You can't force a farm to dial back its production, really; they'll try to sell the blemished produce for processing, but you still end up with rejected material. Is the government allowed to decide what happens to that rejected material? Is it feasible to dis-incentivize food waste by imposing a system of fines, thereby pushing the market to reduce waste, while still not really helping solve the problem of poverty-related hunger? At what point or points along the supply chain should this fine be applied? Note that the fine is probably a bad solution because its effects would ultimately just be passed down to consumers and doesn't address the issue that we have people reduced to scrounging through the garbage for anything to eat, due to the fact that they are still hungry in a society where we throw said food into the garbage in the first place.
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Mar 23, 2016 18:52
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OwlFancier posted:Currently, you work, you receive a portion of the product of your work as money, and that money is traded in exchagne for food so you can work. It's too band-aid like, and I think it would devalue labor, especially in low income brackets. The advantage of being paid entirely in currency is that you can choose how much of that currency you spend on food. People need different amounts of food; some people have lesser or greater appetites, or differing dietary preferences/requirements, some people are like power lifters in their spare time and need a lot of protein, and so on. Some people would rather eat beans and rice so they can save up their cash for a few months. Some people don't mind skimping in other areas so they can eat good steaks or whatever more frequently. Even paying people partially in "food vouchers" that can be exchanged for whatever doesn't account for the people who would have to eat into their "not food" section of the paycheck to buy extra protein, or expensive gluten-free everything due to celiac disease or whatever. Unless you're paying people different amounts of food vouchers for reasons other than them having dependents, in which case what's the point?
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Mar 23, 2016 20:39
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silence_kit posted:This doesn't make sense to me. The cost of "real food", whatever that is, is probably lower then it has ever been. It's mostly psychological. It takes the same amount of time to cook a pot of broccoli and sprinkle some cheese over it as it takes to microwave cheezy frozen broccoli, but it's not packaged and requires you to spend 5 minutes washing dishes afterwards. I mean, in that particular case. I'm not going to argue that organic kale isn't way expensive compared to iceberg lettuce, but I will argue that it takes the same amount of effort to prepare. If you're not frying or sauteeing absolutely everything you eat, most of cooking consists of "waiting 20 minutes - 4 hours while something sits in an oven," which, based on my own experience, leaves me with plenty of time to get wrecked by internet people playing Street Fighter while I wait.
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Mar 23, 2016 20:45
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OwlFancier posted:No you're not quite getting it. I'm saying give away food for free, like, lots of it. Obviously someone shouldn't be able to just take the entire supermarket but just give away a bunch of food to people. Fund food production through taxation. Let people pick what they want to eat and give them it. Okay, that's actually pretty fair, especially at our rate of overproduction. The original wording seemed like the "food pay" was going to cut into the "currency pay", which would massively devalue labor in the "Making $15/hour or less" sector.
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Mar 23, 2016 20:47
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LogisticEarth posted:The only way this would work and not devolve into a classic case of mass shortages and overproduction is if you literally treat it like municipal water supply and just pipe a uniform food product into everyone's home. So...go Soylent I guess? There's already mass overproduction, and arguably already shortages that are fake shortages caused by poverty. Just keep overproducing, and nothing really changes except that people who would have otherwise been really desperate and stressed about how the hell they are going to provide for their family are now able to have a modest meal that doesn't consist of canned beans from the local church. You'd have to cross this kind of program with a massive and probably expensive food education campaign, though, because something is broken in Americans' heads that makes them choose foods with way too much caloric density when given the option. You don't want to swing the balance from people who don't have enough food to people who can't afford to address the medical complications that arise from weighing like 450 lbs. Take a look at our beautiful heartland's casserole-based traditional cuisine, which is made out of like 3 different types of carbs, plus a cheese (or a "cheese"). edit: moved edit to its own post deadly_pudding fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Mar 23, 2016 |
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Mar 23, 2016 21:08
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Liberal_L33t posted:What the gently caress does "real food" mean? Can anyone give a concrete definition of this term that gets thrown around so much? Is it food that has never been inside a packaging plant? Is it food that has never had a corporation involved in any step of its production or distribution? If so, I have some real bad news for you about your produce. We're just trying to explain that you can make your own cheesey broccoli in like 4 minutes, and it won't have a kind of unnecessary amount of sodium or hydrogenated vegetable oil. I understand the convenience of packaged food, but in this case there is a simple alternative that is better for you unless you are in a place where you don't have access to a stove, like at work. Like you said, though, it's hard to discuss the merits of food preparation versus packaged food without turning the conversation a little elitist.
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Mar 23, 2016 21:13
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OwlFancier posted:No I didn't I said you wouldn't be paid in food, I said you get food regardless and that it should be more than you realistically need. Whether you actually need to ration it or not I suppose depends on the food. Do people regularly go up to public fountains and try to fill an 18 wheeler tanker off them? Exactly how much dried rice do you feel like carting away from the supermarket even if it was free? For the first decade or so, this would definitely happen. You'd have like the food version of "scalpers" trying to get their entrepreneurship on, the crazy coupon people following old habits, and the doomsday preppers hording all the good stuff to stop "zombies" (minorities) from getting it. Which is why it would need to be accompanied by a massive food education campaign to cut it off at that generation.
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Mar 23, 2016 21:19
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Jarmak posted:gently caress dude you could make that easily in a microwave No, it'll get mushy  I like my broccoli lightly steamed so it still has some crunch to it.
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Mar 23, 2016 21:29
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Somebody is mega defensive  Cereal sales are probably on the decline because millennials are realizing that maybe it's a bad idea to eat a big bowl of sugar for breakfast, not because it's too hard to wash a bowl. Even if it's like whole grain adult cereal, combined with the milk you're looking at a high amount of sugar-based carbohydrate content and a modest amount of fiber. It's probably fine if you're about to go on a long-rear end run or something, but most people aren't. I find that a modest protein-based breakfast of like a couple fried eggs and some cottage cheese works just as well for me, and I barely feel hungry by lunch time. Acealthebes posted:I recall in 3rd grade our teacher, who came from India, refused to take the lunch shifts because she couldn't stand to see the immense amount of waste produced every day. This is super true, or at least it was when I was in school. There were like one or two things on that lunch tray that most kids were willing to eat, and the rest got trashed. At least we drank our milk  . In high school, you could get actually a pretty nice chef salad, but it was more expensive than the regular school lunch. I didn't start giving a poo poo about what I ate until like my late 20s, so I missed that boat.
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Mar 24, 2016 13:08
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Discendo Vox posted:That source says nothing about anything you are claiming, unless I missed something and this thread has been about France. Try this one from the ERS instead. Glancing at two different brands of frozen cheesey broccoli product, they both have about 50% of your daily sodium requirement if you eat the whole box, which probably a person who is using that as their whole meal is doing. Calorie-wise you could do worse at about 150 calories per package, but it's kind of empty where the only meaningful nutrients you're deriving are sodium and vitamin C. It's not a real useful food. Liberal_L33t posted:There may be a grain of truth to this, but you are also discounting the considerable (and, to the working poor and the hectic middle class, extremely unpalatable) time costs of shopping for, buying and preparing 2 or 3 meals consisting entirely of fresh produce every day. I am actually quite sympathetic to the unspoken argument that these peoples' time would be better used watching television, or whatever other sedentary entertainment which the tsk-tsking advocates of "slow food" would sneer at. If, hypothetically speaking, someone obsessively spends 2 hours a day cooking for themselves with fresh, healthy ingredients but takes up smoking cigarettes as a side effect of the increased stress and time pressure, are they actually better off? People would probably get off his back if he wasn't reacting to the "moral grandstanding of slow food people" like he has something to defend. I'm a fat office drone who barely has his poo poo together and eats too much pizza, but I also I go to the gym, have a salad for lunch almost every day, and try to have a healthy dinner with a good balance of vegetables and protein at night most days. I consider myself a work in progress. Liberal_L33t just sounds kinda... I dunno, sad? He comes off like one of those soylent people, only his hill to die on appears to be TV Dinners. I'm probably opening up myself to a series of scathing remarks. Anyway, I'll stop trying to repair L33t's life; if I'm being real I'm in no position to talk down to him.
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Mar 24, 2016 20:34
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Christ this thread turned dumb as hell. So, the current talking point is that nothing can be "bad for you" unless it's actively poisonous in like a toxic or pathogenic way? Humans have an idiot animal part of the brain that craves salt and sweet. It craves salt because, until a couple thousand years ago, salt was in short supply while still being necessary for survival. It craves sweet because, evolution having not occurred in a vacuum, it turns out that sweet foods are often safe because plants are incentivised to get animals to eat their fruit and thereby transport seeds. By happy coincidence, sweet foods are also often calorically dense and full of vitamin content, with sugar for quick & easy energy on the go. For similar reasons to these, fat content also contributes to a thing being objectively delicious to an average human being. See: why avocados are so good, despite ostensibly tasting like diluted grass if you think about it too much. Our glorious food-manufacturing megacorporations know these facts, and the snack industry is a race to the bottom to produce edible items that are as sweet, salty, and fatty as possible, while also being as cheap to make as possible, because they know that such a food is functionally addictive. Their target demo is the person who will gladly make an evening meal out of a full-size bag of Doritos while they watch TV or play Call of Duty or whatever, because this is a person who could be as frequent as a daily repeat customer. I'll say this about Doritos: You get a surprising amount of protein from the 12 servings of chips that constitute a whole bag- 24 grams, which is about what you'd get from a serving of chicken breast. However, that comes with your entire day's requirement of sodium, most of what is increasingly appearing to be a way overestimate of your daily carbohydrate intake, about half of some of your vitamin needs, with a payload of 1800 calories. That is to say, a sedentary person eating this way is meeting all of their caloric needs in one "meal", with very little else to show for it. If we are to follow the Doritos marketing train to the station, they likely also drank at least 20 oz of MTN DEW during this time. This is the intended way that Doritos wants you to consume their product; they can say whatever "enjoy in moderation" feel-good bullshit they want, but the fatty/salty composition of the snack's flavor profile is designed to make a person cram as much of it into their face as possible. Obviously, like almost anything, your Doritos are fine in moderation. I would use Doritos as croutons without a hint of irony. I would even eat a small bowl of them as an evening snack (that's portion control). I struggle to not let my buddy catch me rolling my eyes when he demolishes a party-size bag over the course of an afternoon and then complains about being fat. The point is that over-eating a "whole food" is still in general a healthier choice than over-eating a manufactured snack food. I fuckin challenge you to eat 12 servings of chicken breast they way a person can easily eat 12 servings of Doritos. You won't want to, even if it's delicious. You might get up to 4, which is like a pound of meat and still fewer calories than 1/3 of a bag of Doritos. You'd have enough protein to support a fairly heavy lifting routine, and enough calories left out of your daily neutral requirement to fill in the vitamin and mineral gaps with other more balanced meals.
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Mar 30, 2016 20:20
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Nevvy Z posted:Yes. This a thousand times. Food waste is bad because... I agree with this. I think the logical linkup comes from the "obviously we are producing way more food than actually gets consumed" side of the equation. Like, if we have so much surplus food then why do we have people struggling to get a proper meal?
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Mar 31, 2016 16:56
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Fwiw, I started taking a multivitamin again and shortly afterwards found myself with enough surplus energy to go to the gym on my lunch break 3 times a week, instead of just watching anime on my phone. It's possible that "not enough energy to cook, so I heat up this frozen dinner product" is actually a self-perpetuating cycle. Like, I'm not sure what I was running low on, but I probably could have seen similar results by getting less lazy with the composition of my salads. None of that has anything to do with food waste, but it does factor into food distribution. As you said, your processed and marketed prepared foods are designed to be easy and addictive; actual nutritional value doesn't really factor into the marketing here. A person who doesn't have access, or believes they don't have access, to foods outside of prepared convenience foods, is still experiencing a form of food crisis. That's more of an education/infrastructure problem than it is an actual supply problem, though. Clearly food is available to people in that situation, since they are buying food, but it may be unfeasible to reach it given available transportation options, or there may be a lack of will to abandon the convenience of a microwaved meal after a hard day at the office/warehouse/whatever. deadly_pudding fucked around with this message at 19:47 on Apr 5, 2016 |
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Apr 5, 2016 19:42
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