Food Waste is Hard to Deal With.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Food Waste is Hard to Deal With.

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Helsing posted:

I'm not telling you to feel bad about how you live I'm just saying that the life choices you're describing are pretty strongly linked to poorer mental and physical health, which makes me believe that the appropriate response here would be to ask what the constrains are on you having the necessary time and income to live a healthier and more fulfilling lifestyle.

Which behaviors? I'm not seeing anything specifically where variance in outcomes wouldn't be explained by separate causes. With the possible exception of salt levels, brand dependent, TV dinners aren't innately unhealthy.

# ¿ Mar 24, 2016 01:03

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 08:25

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

I don't tend to cook for myself, but my food waste is extremely low because I eat nearly everything I purchase and store food properly to prevent spoilage. Whether or not one cooks is not going to be a direct cause of personal food waste.

Liberal_L33t posted:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the puritanism from the left side of the political spectrum is vastly stronger than that of the right on this particular issue (cooking from scratch vs. pre-prepared meals). And I get that; avoiding food waste aside, it really would be better if we all ate less red meat, corn syrup and other processed sugars.

This is about what I was afraid of-you don't know what you're talking about. Red meat bad for you, maybe-the carnitine literature isn't fully developed and the initial heart damage studies were probably overstated. The rest is completely wrong. Corn syrup is a sugar, and is not meaningfully different from other "processed sugars", which are not meaningfully different from cane sugar. Sugars are overwhelmingly identical in their health effects unless you're looking at glycemic impacts of things like honey or, in particular, agave "nectars". To the extent that you're referring to weight gain, the content of interest is calories.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 04:46 on Mar 24, 2016

# ¿ Mar 24, 2016 04:44

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

wateroverfire posted:

Just to reiterate since it's in the OP..

Supermarket food waste is not a bigger source of waste than personal food waste. In aggregate, personal waste accounts for about 70% of wastage and supermarket waste about 10% if you include smaller markets. Large supermarkets represent like 5%.

There are ongoing programs run by governments, ngos, and the supermarket chains themselves, to increase donations of foods that would otherwise be wasted.

It is entirely appropriate to talk about personal food waste. A 10% decrease in food wastage at a personal level has 7 times the impact of a 10% decrease in wastage at the distribution level.

Got a source for that?

# ¿ Mar 24, 2016 14:45

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

wateroverfire posted:

~~It's~~ The source is in the OP.

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.

Here's the most relevant parts of the summary.

quote:

In the United States, 31 percent�or 133 billion pounds�of the 430 billion pounds of the available food supply at the retail and consumer levels in 2010 went uneaten. Retail-level losses represented 10 percent (43 billion pounds) and consumer-level losses 21 percent (90 billion pounds) of the available food supply. (Losses on the farm and between the farm and retailer were not estimated due to data limitations for some of the food groups.)

The estimated total value of food loss at the retail and consumer levels in the United States was $161.6 billion in 2010. The top three food groups in terms of share of total value of food loss were meat, poultry, and fish (30 percent, $48 billion); vegetables (19 percent, $30 billion); and dairy products (17 percent, $27 billion). The total amount of food loss represents 387 billion calories (technically, we mean Calorie or kcal hereafter) of food not available for human consumption per day in 2010, or 1,249 out of 3,796 calories available per American per day. Recovery costs, food safety considerations, and other factors would reduce the amount of food that could actually be recovered for human consumption.

The study also reviewed the literature and found that food loss is economically efficient in some cases. There is a practical limit to how much food loss the United States or any other country could realistically prevent, reduce, or recover for human consumption given: (1) technical factors (e.g., the perishable nature of most foods, food safety, storage, and temperature considerations); (2) temporal and spatial factors (e.g., the time needed to deliver food to a new destination, and the dispersion of food loss among millions of households, food processing plants, and foodservice locations); (3) individual consumers’ tastes, preferences, and food habits (e.g., throwing out milk left over in a bowl of cereal); and (4) economic factors (e.g., costs to recover and redirect uneaten food to another use).

Helsing posted:

Do I really need to explain to you why someone who says that a staple of their diet is a "frozen broccoli with cheese sauce" dish that's loaded with sodium, and who justifies this because it gives them an extra couple hours a day for "sedentary activities" such as TV watching, doesn't sound like they're living the healthiest life?

What I'm seeing is that you're extrapolating from limited information to make a bunch of assumptions in as uncharitable a manner as possible about the person you're arguing with in order to attack them personally. It has nothing to do with what's being argued and is intensely counterproductive. "junk food" isn't a meaningful descriptor, cheese on broccoli isn't likely to be particularly high in salt, manufacturer dependent. "fresh" isn't meaningful in terms of nutritional impact for most foods. "Processed" doesn't have health connotations either, except under specific circumstances not immediately relevant. Cooking is not a high-impact caloric activity, so complaining that the time displaced by not doing it is spent in a sedentary fashion isn't meaningful either.

# ¿ Mar 24, 2016 20:14

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Farmer Crack-rear end posted:

What's the difference between the daily requirement and what would be considered unhealthy to eat on a daily basis? i.e. is there a range where you can go up to daily requirement +50% or something like that and still be perfectly normal, or are we assuming a linear no-threshold model where every milligram beyond the daily requirement is inching us closer to excruciating cardiac arrest?

Because if your assumption is that someone is using that box as a whole meal, then 50% of your daily sodium requirement in a meal doesn't strike me as that shocking - especially if the other meals had less than 50% of the daily sodium requirement.

This gets even messier, because the sodium DRI is one of the most contentious metrics in nutrition science. People have been arguing about it for decades. There's basically no question that increased sodium intake past a certain threshold increases likelihood of hypertension (high blood pressure), but what that threshold is, if it varies for different people, why and when it varies, and whether the hypertensive effect causes other negative outcomes, are all basically questions without solid answers. This is made worse because extremely(as in hard to do unintentionally) low sodium diets have clearer and fairly severe negative health effects.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 21:12 on Mar 24, 2016

# ¿ Mar 24, 2016 21:08

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

wateroverfire, could you do me a solid and put that ERS source in the OP instead of the crappy France-focused one? Everytime someone new enters the thread, the lack of detail and the problem of country comparison reoccurs.

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 01:50 on Mar 25, 2016

# ¿ Mar 25, 2016 01:40

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

unhealthy preservatives and additives

Please explain this too, while you're at it.

# ¿ Mar 25, 2016 19:13

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Helsing posted:

So your position is that the doctors who signed on to that open letter I quoted from are incorrect and really just fear mongering.

Yes, actually (most open letters aren't good claim sources, fyi). Doctors aren't nutrition scientists, and the lead author on that one is primarily a political actor. Lumping together "cheap, sweet, fatty, salty, or processed foods" is a pretty good indication that something is wrong with their causal claim structure, as is any attempt to apply the word "fresh" as having nutritional connotations.

TheImmigrant posted:

Food-safety regulations in the US make it nearly prohibitive to give away food waste.

Not to my knowledge? Retail-side disposal policies are based on internal guidance, not, afaik, FDA or USDA regs. Sell by and use by dates are advisory only and based on manufacturer decisions.

# ¿ Mar 25, 2016 22:22

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Jarmak posted:

You realize that not every word in the English language is an exact scientific qualification process right? That people can disagree what qualifies and what doesn't? Because this sounds goony as all gently caress.

It's because Helsing's use of "junk food" as a proxy is coupled with a variety of other throwaway comments that indicate he's neck deep in the naturalistic fallacy.

Helsing posted:

You keep trying to say that junk food is meaningless while tacitly accepting that it actually does have a meaning, just one that you feel is overly broad (though you haven't actually said why it's too broad for a conversation about shopping in a grocery store). Also one of the "problems" with my definition that you raised was essentially "if I eat a bag of cheetos but then I follow it with a multivitamin pill then is that still junk food?!" which is such an asinine thought experiment I haven't even wanted to engage with it.

It's also generally accurate-though the contents of the multivitamin would be a factor.

Helsing posted:

Ok, well let's just go ahead and use the definition of junk food that you yourself just offered, keeping in mind we're talking from the perspective of someone who actually shops in a grocery store. You're telling me that people who think that this kind of food is unhealthy to eat in excess are engaging in "magical thinking"? You're telling me that those doctors writing in the Lancet were full of crap suggesting that it's a problem that food prices are driving the poor to buy less fresh fruit and veggies and to buy more microwave ready meals and more items that are high in salt and fat and sugar? After the tortured arguments about word usage are actually said and done, what substantive comments on nutritious eating are you going to make?

Doctors writing in Lancet are routinely full of crap. So, yes, you are engaged in magical thinking because you don't know what any of these things are or what they do. "fresh" has no nutritional connotations. Microwave-ready meals aren't innately nutritionally harmful. Salt intake levels are debated, as I previously discussed. Dietary fat is no longer viewed as a particular concern, since health impacts vary depending on the types of fats involved- the "total fat" label on nutrition labels will probably be removed at some point in the next 5-10 years. The fat type that is a primary source of concern, trans fat, is already heavily excluded from foods in the US, particularly in partially hydrogenated oils, which are being phased out. Saturated fats are common in both "natural" and "processed" foods, and different types have different health impacts that are currently being researched. Sugar is not innately harmful unless we're talking about specific glycemic impact factors. For weight gain, the relevant nutritional measure is calories.

Helsing posted:

The only merit I can see is that they're totally correct that, in the most abstract kind of way, there's no necessary reason why processed food would be less healthy than whole food. It just happens to very often be the case in the context of a modern North American grocery store but it's not some timeless eternal truth of the universe.

Then don't use the word "processed" when there are more accurate terms to use in terms of the nutritional impact of the foods in question.

Helsing posted:

Is there some kind of alternative framework for nutrition that these people advocate? Do 9 out of 10 Goondoctors recommend the Cheetos + Centrum diet?

https://ods.od.nih.gov/Health_Information/Dietary_Reference_Intakes.aspx
https://fnic.nal.usda.gov/dietary-guidance/dietary-reference-intakes/dri-nutrient-reports
http://www.nap.edu/search/?term=dri

Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 18:43 on Mar 26, 2016

# ¿ Mar 26, 2016 18:39

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

Helsing posted:

If you want to actually reset the conversation now and have a sane, non-pedantic discussion of what a balanced diet would look like (from the perspective of a normal person walking into the average grocery store) then go ahead.

I've given you three different links to contemporary nutrition standards. "Processed" is not a valid heuristic for the health impact of food, and neither is "junk". The primary cause of negative dietary outcomes is excess calories in comparison with exercise. The breadth of safe and nutritious diets is broader than you are comfortable acknowledging. You've fetishized home cooking and constructed a mental image of others in the thread as incompetent man-children eating Twinkies on the couch.

Stop using "fresh", "slow", "home-cooked" as proxies for "good". Stop using "fast", "processed", "prepackaged" as proxies for "bad". Stop using the phrase "junk food", it's obfuscatory garbage you're projecting your beliefs onto, a term that provides no information about why the food would be bad. Stop complaining about "additives" and "preservatives" when you don't know what they are. Stop raising salt, sugar or fat when you don't know the details of where they're placed or used. If you want to make nutrition claims, cite to research, not an open letter in Lancet. Above all else, stop saying home cooking is innately healthier than other food sources. That isn't a remotely valid claim.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2016 19:35

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 08:25

Discendo Vox: Mar 21, 2013; We don't need to have that dialogue because it's obvious, trivial, and has already been had a thousand times.

The research that was the basis of that set of guidelines are extremely controversial, as I discussed already.

Discendo Vox posted:

This gets even messier, because the sodium DRI is one of the most contentious metrics in nutrition science. People have been arguing about it for decades. There's basically no question that increased sodium intake past a certain threshold increases likelihood of hypertension (high blood pressure), but what that threshold is, if it varies for different people, why and when it varies, and whether the hypertensive effect causes other negative outcomes, are all basically questions without solid answers. This is made worse because extremely(as in hard to do unintentionally) low sodium diets have clearer and fairly severe negative health effects.

The current guideline is seen as too restrictive, based on promising but overextended results from the second wave of the DASH study (Separately, it's very frustrating that the CDC is citing raw demo mean scores from NHANES-that's completely invalid). "Processed" continues to be an overbroad term for classification purposes, just like "junk" and "home-cooked". It's not meaningful for nutritional outcomes.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2016 23:10

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