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One of the funny things about this topic is that for all of the flak frozen TV dinners get for being a sign of some cultural deficiency in modern society (because there isn't a The ones I buy come in paper trays or thin plastic bags, too, so plastic waste isn't as much of an issue. Just another piece of evidence for my growing belief that the sanctity of household cooking is an invention of people who were/are rich enough to have others do it for them.
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Mar 23, 2016 18:49
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 21:32 |
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Mirthless posted:Agricultural subsidies make TV dinners and other convenience food artificially cheap, IMO, and are part of the problem. You'd think farm subsidies would have a positive impact on hunger, but it just encourages waste and overproduction (hence why corn is in loving everything) and masks the actual problem of "real" food being completely unaffordable for some people. It is a problem if it's legitimately cheaper (and sadly these days it often is) to feed your family a product that someone had to research and develop and package and market than it is to just feed them fruits, vegetables and a protein 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? I feel like the stigma and negative connotations attached to the term "convenience food" aren't particularly helpful, least of all for the working poor. Is the frozen broccoli with cheese sauce that I eat as a staple too high in sodium and artificially cheap due to agricultural subsidies? Perhaps - but good luck convincing me that I'll be better off devoting an extra 1000+ hours a year to shopping, cooking and cleaning because I'll get less sodium and fat in my diet (and also less enjoyable food and probably more getting thrown in the trash because so much more can go wrong and ruin the entire batch when cooking from scratch).
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Mar 23, 2016 20:09
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Helsing posted:I'm honestly pretty confident that after some transition costs you and just about anyone would be better off watching less TV and eating more meals they prepared themselves with fresh produce. There's something supremely goony about a post that amounts to "maybe I'm better off eating disgusting cheesy poo poo because it gives me more time to also watch television." Jesus Christ. Did you just use the term "goony" unironically, in a D&D thread? You know what else is "goony"? Posting on these loving forums at all, you holier-than-thou prick. Do you think I would have posted what I did if I wasn't completely anesthetized to being labeled "goony" or "autistic" or whatever?
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Mar 23, 2016 20:44
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Jarmak posted:You just posted how eating broccoli with processed cheese sauce as one of your staples is healthy for you because the alternative of cooking real food is so stressful it would lead you to start smoking. Broccoli with cheese sauce, a food who's "real" alternative is literally just buying real cheese and throwing it on top during cooking so it melts. 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. If something has no concrete definition (or at least, none that you would personally meet the purity test for), maybe it's a stupid shibboleth and you should stop using it to lambast people with.
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Mar 23, 2016 21:01
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Helsing posted:I'm not trying to hurt you're feelings. I use the term "goony" because it bears connotations of being mentally and physically unhealthy, socially isolating and aesthetically depressing. All of those are descriptions I'm comfortable using regarding a post that amounts to "I prefer unhealthy prepackaged foods they let me maximize my TV watching time." Sorry but I'm going to go ahead and say you should buy some rice, some veggies, and some dry pasta, familiarize yourself with the stove and oven, and maybe leave the TV off for the evening and crack open a book when you're all done. I am perfectly aware of how to cook. I grew up with a (mostly) stay-at-home dad who was downright obsessed with gourmet cooking and made drat sure I knew how to do it, to the point that he eventually trained me into doing most of it. Risotto, fried chicken from scratch, casseroles, brussels sprouts in vinaigrette, vegetable stew, shrimp with panko breadcrumbs, spaghetti with homemade cream sauce, home-made pizza (making even the loving dough from scratch), oven baked carrots with herb du provence, and a dozen other frou-frou things he saw watching the cooking channel. Now he's dead, I'm living on my own, and I never cook unless I'm basically forced to, and hearing the occasional finger-wagging by self-satisfied assholes like you does not fill me with one ounce of shame over that fact. (Edit: Oh, and to get on the thread topic: we always cooked with fresh ingredients and produce and threw out tons of poo poo, all the time, because it's almost impossible not to get a little bit more than you actually need for a recipe, and people who are really into cooking tend to also consider themselves too good for leftovers) PT6A posted:If you're stressed out and miserable, what could be nicer than throwing on some music, pouring a glass of wine, and cooking a lovely quick meal? I get way more testy when I can't cook at home, for the most part. Be careful you don't break your arm patting yourself on the back there, that'll put a cramp in your cooking flair for sure!
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Mar 23, 2016 23:29
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PT6A posted:Yeah, boy, I'm just so proud of myself for being a functional adult who manages to prepare their own food on a regular basis. Newsflash: ~30% of all American adults are nonfunctional and should be ashamed of themselves - especially black people. I'm PT6A, and I've always held that urban black populations just don't receive enough public shaming in the media.
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Mar 23, 2016 23:41
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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. To which I say, thank god I live in a modern society founded on principles of individualism and I don't have to subscribe to your definition of a "fulfilling lifestyle". I would be perfectly happy to have the government come along and tell me, in an impersonal way, that I can no longer eat foods x, y, or z (or will have to pay a prohibitively expensive premium for them) - but to have people like you be able to physically come knock at my door, demand my attention, and tell me that I'm wrong for enjoying the things I enjoy would be a never-ending hell for me. And this does really get to the crux of the food-waste issue, as well. Modern western society puts a high premium on individual choice and a person's right to define their own life. It is my opinion that the best solutions for the health issues (physical health, because I refuse to grant anyone else the right to judge my moral health, which is what people actually mean when they say "mental health") are those which are impersonal, technocratic, and large in scale - like the suggestion to force supermarkets to donate their overstock instead of throwing it in the dumpster. But no - almost immediately the conversation shifted to how it's the choices of individuals that are the problem. And the real thrust of many posters' criticism becomes clear when I, who have not thrown anything edible in the trash for weeks if not months, am singled out as a sinner by the latest incarnation of the cult of domesticity.
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Mar 24, 2016 00:11
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Discendo Vox posted: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. The nutritional content of a hypothetical frozen dinner is irrelevant in this discussion: posters like Jarmak and Helsing see not wanting to cook/choosing food products based on convenience as a moral failing. When what's wrong with American/western/whatever diets is discussed in media, the lion's share of the blame is usually placed at the feet of the "uneducated" (sometimes they'll drop the pretense and just say "lazy") individual consumer. Which is why this thread almost immediately devolved into clucking of tongues about such people even though it was pointed out almost immediately that food waste from supermarkets is the most easily preventable and thus makes the most sense to focus on. 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. Putting taxes on those commodities, or at least stopping the subsidies flowing to them, is a capital idea. But please, for the love of god, stop talking about food choices and cooking choices with all this moralistic language; it is equally unwelcome regardless of whether it comes dressed in the clothing of the priest or the psychologist. Cooking is not a loving sacred ritual that heals the mind and body; stop trying to turn it into one. A person could easily be far unhealthier and far more wasteful by following the Paula Deen philosophy of cooking, and spend a lot more time doing it, than eating a bunch of frozen tofu dinners and poo poo. When all of these convenience food technologies were new, consumer demand was enormous and people were ecstatic to be able to buy them for the first time. It wasn't because those people were stupid and didn't know what "real food" tasted like, or how to make it. It's because people didn't consider cooking complex meals to be a fulfilling use of their time, and you (meaning the thread as a whole, not Discendo Vox) don't get to say they were wrong or mentally unhealthy for making that choice.
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Mar 24, 2016 03:48
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 21:32 |
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PT6A posted:The fact that supermarket food waste is a bigger source of waste than personal food waste is no excuse to behave as a loving child that can't be bothered to cook for yourself. So... this seems to be you conceding that your objection to habits of avoiding cooking is not based on any specific issues with the products themselves as such - certainly not that they promote waste, which is the topic of this thread, nor because of any inherent health benefits or detriments (since it would be similarly easy to harm oneself eating nothing but home-grilled steak, home-baked bread and home-scrambled eggs); rather, your objection stems from what you see as a moral deficiency. (The reason this subject was on my mind is because a week or so ago, Time Magazine or whoeverthefuck ran some story on how cereal sales are supposedly declining because millenials find having to wash the bowl afterwards too much work, or something to that effect. Predictably, this has set off another round of Baby Boomer kvetching about millenials failing to live up to (a slightly modernized version of) the Ward and June Cleaver home life that they themselves roundly failed to live up to. Discendo Vox posted: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. This is all a good point; I acknowledge my mistake, and realize that I fell prey to the insidious meme of "processed sugars" without consciously realizing it. Perhaps closer to what I meant is that highly processed foods are likely to have more sugar added, and it is certainly true that people should be taught to carefully read the nutritional facts of everything they buy and have a frame of reference for how much sugar or calories is too much. Corn syrup is simply the most infamous because it has a reputation (rightly or wrongly) for being inserted into products which you wouldn't expect to have any added sugar. In the case of red meat, it's more a matter of the ecological impacts - beef is in a league of its own even among other meats when it comes to being unsustainable. Pork is fairly bad too, as I understand it, as are some types of seafood. Anyway, I think that we can all agree that the MOST unsustainable practice is huge percentages of perfectly edible food which might otherwise be made available getting thrown out. Since the thread seems hell-bent on discussing consumer-level wastage, I'd just like to add that probably the most immediately effective remedy (aside from rationalizing the system of use-by dates which is obviously screaming to be done) would be a garbage tax. Charging people a premium based on how much they throw out, by weight. Many garbage cans are lifted and dumped by mechanical arms anyway, would adding a scale be difficult? Sure there might be collateral problems of public dumping or sneaking things into neighbors' trash cans - but solutions like those would probably be more trouble than they're worth for most households
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Mar 24, 2016 05:29
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