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The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

monbiot.com

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Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#61

Post by picture »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #60

Great TFA but I partially disagree with this: > A healthy, nutritious diet is much more expensive than a calorie sufficient one. As a result, three billion people cannot afford a healthy diet. Is that so? My wife is the kind to obsess on healthy eating and always tells me it's cheaper to cook healthy than to cook unhealthy stuff. She's the kind that forces me to eat soup as dinner and that's it. It's not expensive to…

While eating healthy can indeed be cheap, I think systemically there are other costs like having the free time and free energy (which both might be depleted after a long day of hard work), other issues like the need to have some sort of transit to a grocer with fresh goods. For many parts of the United States, there's only Dollar General within accessible distance, and many people cannot afford to own or rent cars, and public transportation likely don't exist in their area. I think it's unlikely that prominent statistics of lower income being correlated with lower quality diets can be explained just by "poor people are lazy"

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#62

Post by jowdones »

watwut wrote: post #56
MichaelRo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not talking about today's Germany. I was referring to post-war Eastern Europe where land property was so fragmented that famines would still happen because individual peasants didn't have enough land to meet MVP (minimum viable produce of anything should anything go awry and it always did). And 1900s Germany doesn't require state farms precisely because commercially viable land was already concentrated enough (th…

[flagged]

Yeah well my grandpa wuz a hero. Narrowly escaping being shot on the spot for carrying a firearm (he was a partisan), got 16 years in the Romanian gulag, reckoned after 11 that noone's coming to the rescue as it happened to the West before USSR good a chance to "rescue" them.

What you are regurgitating is spoken precisely from the vantage point of a well fed ignoramus.

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#63

Post by araes »

infecto wrote: post #41
photochemsyn wrote: post #15

The main thesis of the article is that famine due to crop failure (as opposed to famine due to war) has largely been eliminated by two modern technologies: industrial agricultural methods (synthetic fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, equipment) and global trade (air and ship transport managed by markets). This generally appears true - some time ago I tried to discover if total land area under agricultural production…

Upvote for the fellow techno-optimist. I am pretty excited with some of the startups I have seen in the electric farm equipment space. https://www.monarchtractor.com/ I don't own a farm so I don't have industry insight but it's exciting because I think this is a problem at least appears solvable. I realize large combines are probably an issue but if you can automate the process perhaps smaller machines workout becaus…

A story I found interesting on the farm equipment development, was the effect that games like "Farm Simulator" are having as feedback on the actual industry. [1]

Especially the "actual" gamist stuff. Like, "we need actual 3m tractors, they can't all be 9m $multi-million sales. How are we supposed to start out farming?"

Except the industry does not "natively" think this way. Which is so crazy. They all just wanna make the big sales and ignore the little guy. Note the quote below.

> Players need to be able to buy a three-metre cultivator early on, or a nine-metre version later.

> “The really interesting stuff is above nine metres, and that’s what everyone wants to advertise,” Seidel said. “It’s up to me and my colleagues to be patient and negotiate.”

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/games/2023/mar/25/flight-simulat...

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#64

Post by mplanchard »

goda90 wrote: post #3

This debate just feels like a useless distraction from what the people on the ground of sustainable farming are saying. We should be talking about how we can get high yield without destroying the ecosystem.

I thought that it seemed clear that the article's author also holds this position

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#65

Post by InSteady »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #60

Great TFA but I partially disagree with this: > A healthy, nutritious diet is much more expensive than a calorie sufficient one. As a result, three billion people cannot afford a healthy diet. Is that so? My wife is the kind to obsess on healthy eating and always tells me it's cheaper to cook healthy than to cook unhealthy stuff. She's the kind that forces me to eat soup as dinner and that's it. It's not expensive to…

He's talking in global terms here. This isn't directed at people from wealthy nations. He's talking about places where the majority of calories come entirely from grain, not because of dietary preferences or convenience but because of economic realities:

>The global definition of an affordable diet is one that costs 52% or less of average household expenditure. Using this definition, 3 billion people – over one-third of the global population – cannot afford a healthy diet. In other words, buying adequate food would mean spending more on it than on housing, energy, education, health, transport, clothing and all other items put together.

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#66

Post by smitty1e »

jfengel wrote: post #36
smitty1e wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no debate in the sense of dispassionately presenting facts; sincerely seeking to understand the merits of the opposing view; being willing to own fault where factually based; accepting compromise, &c. Unless I've missed, like, a lot.

There's plenty of it. It is fairly quiet and mostly happening well away from the places people go for "debate". Often, conclusions are reached and the people drawing them move on to the next thing. The people seeking "debate" don't find answers because they don't know how to look.

By all means, please link these (non-)famous places.

Social media is so much Argument Clinic[1] crammed into the vastness of cyberspace.

[1] https://youtu.be/uLlv_aZjHXc?si=5rmU6k71lJvJnhro

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#67

Post by ajsnigrutin »

picture wrote: post #61
TacticalCoder wrote: post #60

Great TFA but I partially disagree with this: > A healthy, nutritious diet is much more expensive than a calorie sufficient one. As a result, three billion people cannot afford a healthy diet. Is that so? My wife is the kind to obsess on healthy eating and always tells me it's cheaper to cook healthy than to cook unhealthy stuff. She's the kind that forces me to eat soup as dinner and that's it. It's not expensive to…

While eating healthy can indeed be cheap, I think systemically there are other costs like having the free time and free energy (which both might be depleted after a long day of hard work), other issues like the need to have some sort of transit to a grocer with fresh goods. For many parts of the United States, there's only Dollar General within accessible distance, and many people cannot afford to own or rent cars, a…

Poorer people are fatter in other countries too, and in most countries (at least the developed ones), very few people work more than 8 hours per day (so enough time to cook), and grocery stores are easily accessible.

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#68

Post by spywaregorilla »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #60

Great TFA but I partially disagree with this: > A healthy, nutritious diet is much more expensive than a calorie sufficient one. As a result, three billion people cannot afford a healthy diet. Is that so? My wife is the kind to obsess on healthy eating and always tells me it's cheaper to cook healthy than to cook unhealthy stuff. She's the kind that forces me to eat soup as dinner and that's it. It's not expensive to…

you live near a local farmer that sells low cost produce. you have the time to prepare meals. you have either good refrigeration or the time / accessibility to purchase produce on a frequent basis.

Soups are great. But they take a long time to make. A lot of poor people's situation is that they can only get groceries from the dollar tree that prioritizes non-refrigerated goods and they have a very limited amount of time to do any of this. So you can make your cheap carbs (ramen/rice/pasta) + condiment or instant foods which suck or you can get some fast food which is very rewarding. Neither are healthy.

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#69

Post by EliRivers »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #60

Great TFA but I partially disagree with this: > A healthy, nutritious diet is much more expensive than a calorie sufficient one. As a result, three billion people cannot afford a healthy diet. Is that so? My wife is the kind to obsess on healthy eating and always tells me it's cheaper to cook healthy than to cook unhealthy stuff. She's the kind that forces me to eat soup as dinner and that's it. It's not expensive to…

> A healthy, nutritious diet is much more expensive than a calorie sufficient one. As a result, three billion people cannot afford a healthy diet.

Is that so?

Yeah, could be. Plain white rice is a very cheap calorie sufficient diet. It's certainly cheaper than a healthy, nutritious diet.

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#70

Post by InSteady »

goda90 wrote: post #3

This debate just feels like a useless distraction from what the people on the ground of sustainable farming are saying. We should be talking about how we can get high yield without destroying the ecosystem.

>We should be talking about how we can get high yield without destroying the ecosystem.

If you read his blog, which features hundreds of well thought out and thoroughly researched articles, he talks about this constantly. Someone wrote a book talking shit about him specifically (while making wild and often absurd claims about society and food systems).. I think we can allow him to spend a few paragraphs thoroughly refuting it.

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