Food Waste is Hard to Deal With.

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

twodot: Aug 7, 2005; You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

Helsing posted:

"Junk food" is absolutely a meaningful description of a lot of fastfood

This is not true. If you think this is true, feel free to give a coherent definition of junk food.

# ¿ Mar 25, 2016 19:10

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 12:26

twodot: Aug 7, 2005; You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

Helsing posted:

Typically "junk food" refers to food that's high in calories and comparatively low in nutritional content. The fact it's a pejorative and colloquial word doesn't mean its either incoherent or useless as a description.

Please define "nutritional content" in a way that doesn't include calories and is a thing anyone should care about in a modern context.
edit:
Also to avoid being Socratic also consider what we should classify junk food that has a multivitamin (or 10) on top of it as.

twodot fucked around with this message at 20:44 on Mar 25, 2016

# ¿ Mar 25, 2016 20:39

twodot: Aug 7, 2005; You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

Helsing posted:

Or you could just lay your cards on the table and explain what point you're trying to make?

I thought this was obvious. My point is ""Junk food" is absolutely a meaningful description of a lot of fastfood" is not true. If I can put a multivitamin on top of a junk food, and it stops being a junk food then "junk food" is simply not a meaningful description.

# ¿ Mar 25, 2016 20:52

twodot: Aug 7, 2005; You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

Helsing posted:

You can freak out over the fact that "junk food" is a colloquialism and not a precise scientific term as much you as like, but that's what most fast food and a lot of instant microwavable meals are: junk food. Now aside from your incredible and misplaced pedantry regarding the term "junk food", do you actually disagree with the doctors in the Lancet who are warning about the dangers of eating too much "cheap, sweet, fatty, salty, or processed foods that need little cooking" at the expense of " fresh fruit and vegetables"?

Eating too much of anything is by definition bad. "processed foods" is another nonsense category, and I'd wager that "need little cooking" is a category that doesn't have any health impact, particularly in the light that fresh fruit and vegetables don't need any cooking. I'd need a better definition for "cheap", less expensive per pound, per calorie, per what? There's already been a pretty good post about the uncertainty regarding salt. "sweet" also describes fresh fruits so that seems out. I'm not sure what classifies a food as "fatty", classifying all of the fats together seems obviously stupid.
edit:
As a meta point, I don't understand when people say "X is Y" and they object when I say "X isn't Y". Like I get you probably don't care whether junk food is a meaningful descriptor (it isn't), but if it doesn't matter why bother replying?

twodot fucked around with this message at 21:39 on Mar 25, 2016

# ¿ Mar 25, 2016 21:34

twodot: Aug 7, 2005; You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

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.

I would classify the stuff you quoted as "not even wrong". You just can't make coherent statements about processed foods, because it doesn't have a coherent definition. Obviously, things like "food costs are rising faster than inflation" are reasonable concerns. I wouldn't say they are fear mongering, but charitably they are trying to engage with unsophisticated people by using terminology which doesn't mean anything, but is a proxy for actual categories that people recognize. I don't really have a problem with people using terms like "junk food" to communicate with people that don't have the training to understand why that doesn't make any sense, the problem happens when you claim it's a real category.

quote:

You're asking me why I'm bothering to reply to the posts that you're addressing to me? I'll be perfectly honest, since you just dismissed actual medical opinions out of hand I am also starting to wonder why i'm responding to you.

I'm asking why you're acting like me talking about a thing you said is irrelevant to what you are saying.

# ¿ Mar 25, 2016 22:16

twodot: Aug 7, 2005; You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

Helsing posted:

Processed food does have a definition, it's just a broad one. And if something is "meaningless" then I don't know how it can be a proxy for an actual thing, since that's just another way of saying it actually does have meaning. You're just slinging words around in an attempt to sound authoritative. Also your whole spiel here seems to be in vein since I'm already seemingly using the term "junk food" in exactly the way you say you're fine with.

You said junk food is a meaningful description, it is not. In certain audiences, "junk food" may correlate with ideas in their head you want to poke at, but that doesn't make it a coherent category, it just means your audience hasn't thought about the term long enough to realize it doesn't make sense. Clearly my preference is to avoid doing that in the first place, but I don't think someone noting a problem is necessarily fear mongering if they use nonsense terms. I've already pointed out two problems with the definition you gave.
edit:

DARPA Dad posted:

So what exactly makes fresh vegetables more nutritious than frozen ones?

I wouldn't be surprised if freezing vegetables had some sort of nutritional effect, it would just be an effect that can't possibly matter for almost everyone in the US.

# ¿ Mar 25, 2016 23:32

twodot: Aug 7, 2005; You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

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.

So now that you've repeatedly aired your grievances with the term junk food do you have any substantive comments on nutrition? At this point I'm morbidly curious to know what you actually think about the foundations of a healthy diet.

If your definition is dumb because you haven't fully thought out the definition, it is still dumb. I have no comments on nutrition, it is a complex science that is still in its infancy, my entire point this whole time has been that you said junk food is a meaningful description, and that's not true. (Tangentially there are some other words you quoted which aren't great, but may have better definitions)

# ¿ Mar 26, 2016 18:22

twodot: Aug 7, 2005; You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

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.

"Eating a lot of junk food is bad for your health"
"False! there's you have no exacting technical definition for the category 'junk food', this cheeto dust is fulfilling my daily dairy requirement!"

Right, but I don't attempt to call those fuzzy words meaningful descriptions. Helsing seems to be about substantive comments, but "too much junk food is bad" is not one.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2016 19:01

twodot: Aug 7, 2005; You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

Helsing posted:

Here's a proposed definition for 'junk food' ripped straight from wikipedia. I don't see what's wrong with it as a starting point for discussing nutrition but I'm genuinely curious to hear your objections:

Just to start the definition directly contradicts itself. It can't decide whether high protein foods are junk or not, whether all fats should be treated equally or if specific fats need specific consideration. The definition has several other problems with regards to whether it's useful, but we can't even use it to classify things in the first place.

quote:

Obviously you couldn't use this definition to formulate an actual policy response.

Yeah this seems like a problem.

quote:

But if we're discussing how to maintain a healthy diet then the advice "limit your intake of junk food", using this definition of junk food, then I don't see why that's bad or remotely controversial advice to give. [...] But again, "avoid eating unhealthy food" isn't bad advice, it's just advice that needs to be complemented by more specific instructions or nutritional guidelines.

This is specifically bad advice if you are relying on people's existing understanding of unhealthy food, because the population is manifestly not as healthy as we would like. Any plan that begins with "Step one: Tell people to be healthier" is better off just taking that out of the plan. How did you end up in a place where you thought saying "avoid eating unhealthy food" is a good idea?

quote:

I also do not understand why people are so upset at the idea that someone might recommend that a grocery shopper "eat a variety of fresh foods and vegetables (in particular green cruciferous vegetables), try to make at least half the grains you consume whole grains, and try to limit your intake of processed meats" is such terrible advice? Even the guidelines posted by Discendo Vox linked to a food eating guide with exactly that advice. What, specifically, is wrong with it?

"Processed meats" doesn't make any sense as a category, there's no health related reason to prefer fresh foods over frozen, canned, or otherwise preserved foods, half your grains being whole grains is obviously arbitrary, and I'd wager your average shopper isn't capable of evaluating that ratio anyways. It's not that this is bad advice necessarily, people following this advice will probably end up ok, it's just advice that displays a fundamental ignorance about what words mean.

twodot fucked around with this message at 20:17 on Mar 28, 2016

# ¿ Mar 28, 2016 20:15

twodot: Aug 7, 2005; You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

Helsing posted:

And the health related reason for being cautious about processed foods, which has been explained to the point of tedium by now, is that processed foods are vastly more likely to contain high levels of sugar, sodium, trans-fats, etc. Why are you even bothering to post in this thread if you're not going to try and reply to the actual arguments being made there? You haven't even tried to refute that argument.

Why would I bother to refute that argument when my argument is that "processed foods" as a category doesn't make any sense? There's an arbitrary number of processes that get applied to food. If you're concerned about a particular process you should name it, being concerned about all processes is like being concerned about all GMOs.

quote:

And maybe you can at least explain why so many doctors and nutritionists are using "processed food" or "processed meats" as a heuristic for evaluating health if, as you claim, it's so utterly worthless a category that only a charlatan would apparently try to use it.

It's going to be a mix of strategies, some of them are definitely charlatans. Some of them might have a ends justify the means approach and if they make noises about processed foods they might be able to convince their patients on things that actually matter like smoking or drinking. I don't know, ask them.

quote:

Because every single actual food guide then gives some actual examples of junk food. So yes, I would say that warning consumers against "eating unhealthy foods, such as the following" is a good starting point.

The words that follow "such as the following" are the only words in that sentence matter, and are also the only words you didn't write down.

quote:

This is almost as dumb as the argument that that advising people to eat fresh vegetables might be interpreted as saying that they can exclusively eat potato and remain healthy. By the time someone has gotten to the point of actually following a food guide I am pretty sure that they can take the additional step of distinguishing between steel cut oats and wonder bread.

This seems in direct contradiction with your earlier assertion that educating people that you can eat too many Cheetos is a reasonable thing to do.

quote:

I would also like to know why you, some random internet poster on the Something Awful forums who hasn't presented any obvious qualifications, are so comfortable declaring that food guides put together by actual health organizations and medical professionals are displaying "a fundamental ignorance about what words mean". Like, you're not just saying "oh this is a bit simplistic" you're actually apparently claiming that these food guides must have been prepared by people who are vastly less qualified than you are. That's a pretty serious claim that might require some actual positive proof.

What? This isn't a thing that your prove through empiricism, someone either has a nonsensical definitions of "processed" or "junk food" or they don't. You do, you posted a definition that is contradictory, and I haven't seen one from you for processed. It may be that actual health organizations and medical professionals have some good definitions stashed away somewhere, but I haven't seen it.

# ¿ Mar 28, 2016 21:51

twodot: Aug 7, 2005; You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

Helsing posted:

You're not in an argument not with me but with what appears to be the received nutritional wisdom of almost the entire medical establishment. I've presented multiple different nutritional guidelines that use the term processed food. Your quarrel is now with a large number of doctors and health professionals. Go quote from their studies and then critique them and explain why your own perspective is superior.

I'm not someone who thinks that a layperson should never argue with an expert, because even experts can be wrong. But when the expert consensus is against you it becomes your job to explain why you know better than them, and until you put at least a tiny bit of effort into doing that I'm going to start treating you like some crank who claims that the scientific consensus on global warming is totally wrong because you say it is for reasons you don't feel like revealing.

Ok from your guide:

quote:

Processed meats and processed poultry (e.g., sausages, luncheon meats, bacon, and beef jerky) are products preserved by smoking, curing, salting, and/or the addition of chemical preservatives.

While sausage making was traditionally a preservation process, it is not intrinsic to making, so we've got an expert that is contradicting themself in the same sentence because for some reason they thought saying "processed" was smart when they clearly actually meant "preserved". This is a workable definition of processed, but why in the world would use processed in this context when it's just an obfuscation of preserved? If this person is an expert at nutrition, they are surely not an expert at composition. Processed remains a garbage word. This guide is also suggesting people eat less meat generally, and doesn't seem to state that processed meats are any worse than other meats, so it seems further unnecessary.

If you think processed is a good word to use, you should have a good definition available, I can't prove the negative that there are no good definitions whatsoever, just observe I've yet to see one.
edit:
For fun, contrast that definition with my top search result for processed food:

quote:

More generally, virtually every food that has a label is processed. Virtually every food that comes in a box, bag, jar, or can is processed.

twodot fucked around with this message at 23:07 on Mar 28, 2016

# ¿ Mar 28, 2016 22:31

twodot: Aug 7, 2005; You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

Helsing posted:

Do you have any familiarity with these debates at all? The definition of "Processed food" isn't exactly obscure and the fact you're acting like it's some kind of ambiguous or airy word is making me suspect that you don't have even a passing familiarity with basic nutritional guidelines. You also don't appear to know what a "contradiction" actually is (you're accusing him of being redundant, not contradictory, but that's a whole other issue).

Author claims sausages are in the category of processed food, but also claims processed food is defined by being preserved, these are not compatible claims. It's not a big mistake, but I'm illustrating that using nonsense terms leads to easy mistakes. If we're defining "processed food" as "all preserved foods", then that is just a dumb definition.

quote:

You don't appear to have anything of interest to say about the actual science of nutrition and frankly even your language games are subpar.

This is correct, I'm merely pointing out that you are using words you don't have good definitions for, and that's a problem. My expertise here isn't knowing about nutrition, it's about knowing English.

quote:

Well, first of all, I really admire your willingness to stake out a position that amounts to: "we're stuck in a veil of radical ignorance and can't really make any strong or binding statement about nutrition". I'll point out that nobody else has been honest enough to say anything like that. Instead twodot and Discendo Vox are implicitly presenting themselves as higher authorities than actual medical professionals and I find that quite silly. If they were simply saying "you know the science of nutrition is in it's infancy and we just can't know much about healthy eating" then I'd have more respect for them, even if I didn't entirely agree. What I find ridiculous is that they're doing this very typical form of nerd-arguing where you take on an authoritative tone and hope the other person will be intimidated enough to stop arguing, even though there's very little substantive argument to support any of your points.

Have you considered any reasons for why I might be more willing to engage in English oriented arguments and not in nutrition science arguments? I literally posted that the science of nutrition is in its infancy.

quote:

And one thing that the data seems to repeatedly reveal, and which I don't think any serious experts dispute, is that you should be very diligent about what kind of additives are contained in the processed food that you purchase. If the processed food in question is just a bag of chopped and frozen veggies for a stir fry or pasteurized milk then you're fine but if you're buying canned food or microwavable meals or various types of meat then you should really pay attention to what is on the label. In other words: because of everything we know about how food companies make and sell food, anything processed should make you stop for a moment and examine the label. This is totally reasonable and sound advice.

You appear to have switched definitions of processed mid-post.

# ¿ Mar 28, 2016 23:55

twodot: Aug 7, 2005; You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

Helsing posted:

Processed foods is a simple but useful way to indicate any kind of food that has been altered from its original natural state. Because of the way that the modern food industry works it's important to give extra scrutiny to processed foods, and as a general rule of thumb.

If you think this is a good definition for processed, please explain to me what you think an unprocessed meat is. (edit: Also please note this definition contradicts the definition your guide provided)

Helsing posted:

Notice all those horribly unscientific statements like [...] "Eat less red and processed meat".

edit2:
Also the only way you can know that any random tomato is just a tomato and hasn't been processed in some way is to scrutinize it. Doesn't this just reduce down to "scrutinize all food"?

twodot fucked around with this message at 20:10 on Mar 29, 2016

# ¿ Mar 29, 2016 19:56

twodot: Aug 7, 2005; You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

Helsing posted:

There's no contradiction, I've explained my definitions at some length, "scrutinize all food" is indeed one of the implications of the warning against processed food (though again, the purpose is to provide consumers with a heuristic for doing their shopping) and I'm not going to waste any more time debating someone who thinks that being an English speaker is somehow an excuse to make sweeping judgement on debates (judgement massively contradicted by top experts in the field) without having any knowledge whatsoever of what is actually being discussed.

I don't understand how you can conclude I'm making a sweeping judgement. I'm specifically saying certain words aren't useful. Your definition of "processed" is so overly broad that you're just suggesting people think more about their food. That's not bad advice, but it's just as effective as your earlier advice that people eat less unhealthy food. Your insistence on using underspecified terminology is leading you to uninteresting conclusions. You've acknowledged that humans can do a thing that leads to creating food you think is bad, why aren't you talking about that thing rather than using a term that covers that thing and also safely produced milk?

# ¿ Mar 29, 2016 20:33

twodot: Aug 7, 2005; You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

Helsing posted:

Because, for most consumers, the vast majority of their intake of sugar, trans-fats, sodium, etc. comes from processed foods which is why nutritional guides almost universally use 'processed food' as a category for pedagogical purposes (even though they also immediately qualify this advice by explaining situations where processing doesn't matter, such as buying chopped and frozen vegetables or pasteurized milk). It gives people a framework for understanding healthy eating and then after they've spent more time learning on their own they can move beyond that simple heuristic and develop a more sophisticated view of nutrition. Like with most educational programs you start with a simplified but helpful guide to action and then build upon it, gradually adding additional nuance and context as appropriate.

In what sense is lumping all foods altered by a human together a simplified or helpful framework? The government mandates labels that track sugar, trans-fats, and sodium. If you think people should reduce those why not just say that? Why are we using a term where we have to add "actually pretty much all processing that is done to food is done for good reasons, there's just this subclass of food I'm concerned about that happens to have been processed at some point, and I'm concerned you can't understand the concept of reading the word "sugars" on a label"?

quote:

I'm really not going to waste any more time with this. You're claiming that because you speak English you're perfectly qualified to attack the language used by an expert in epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. It's a testament to my own idiocy and stubbornness that I've indulged your ridiculousness for this long.

I would also be happy to tell her if she finds that meat with added sodium constitutes a health risk, then she should just say that and drop the "processed" bit, because it can only lead to confusion. The processed adjective is not offering any extra explanatory power. Any time you're using the word "processed" you either have a set of processes in mind, in which case just say that, or you don't know what processes you care about and you are saying nonsense.
edit:

BarbarianElephant posted:

I think we can all imagine what "processed food" is. If someone is described to you as "a beautiful blonde" do you immediately request her exact measurements, focus group surveys, and the pantone colour for her hair in order to precisely quantify whether this is accurate or not?

I guess another way of saying it would be "food with more than one ingredient."

"Beautiful" is subjective, if people were saying "Don't eat food that tastes good" I wouldn't be complaining we can't know the true nature of taste. The "come on you know what I'm talking about" nature of processed is exactly why it's not useful, it deliberately obfuscates the process that matters. The fact that we have multiple people offering different definitions of processed should make this clear. I suspect you will have some difficulty defining what an ingredient is.

twodot fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Mar 29, 2016

# ¿ Mar 29, 2016 21:06

twodot: Aug 7, 2005; You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

Helsing posted:

I don't know why processed meat is fine but processed food is somehow bad in your mind, but I'm honestly just glad you're willing to acknowledge that "processed meat" is a useful category for analyzing food health. No one else on your "side" or this debate has actually been willing to acknowledge that up to this point.

"Processed meat" where processed is defined as exactly equivalent to preserved, such that we can replace all instances of "processed meats" with "preserved meats" is a class that at least be reasoned about (which is a thing I've said before). In that scenario, using "processed meats" is still stupid, because you're deliberately obscuring the thing that actually differentiates the group.

# ¿ Mar 30, 2016 22:09

twodot: Aug 7, 2005; You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

PT6A posted:

In what world in 1750 calories per day representative of average? I need 2700 calories per day to maintain my weight, and I'm skinny (6'2", 165 lbs).

I mean children exist, but even if those numbers are off by a factor of 2, the result is still "There's clearly no economic reason why any person in the US should be food insecure".
edit:
To be clear, by which I mean that government programs should just provide for a basic amount of food to everyone, either by directly giving them cash to buy food or by distributing food generally.

twodot fucked around with this message at 19:14 on Mar 31, 2016

# ¿ Mar 31, 2016 18:49

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 12:26

twodot: Aug 7, 2005; You are objectively correct that this person is dumb and has said dumb things

Helsing posted:

3b. The dreaded use of the word "junk food" Those dastardly nutritionists should really consult somebody with a proficiency in the English language the next time they presume to make any statements about health. (Even worse, later in the article they also use they irresponsibly use the term "processed" as though it's an incredibly common and uncontroversial way of describing food!).

1) This was written by a CNN article writer 2) What explanatory power do you think "processed snack cake" offers over "snack cake"? This is just obviously sloppy writing. Words aren't people, you don't have to be sad if a word isn't good to use. There are many common and uncontroversial usage of words that's sloppy, bad, and unnecessary.
edit:
I also hope we aren't taking "Dude who ran an experiment with sample size 1 and no control group who also said we shouldn't take the experiment seriously" seriously.

twodot fucked around with this message at 20:30 on Apr 14, 2016

# ¿ Apr 14, 2016 20:27

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