91–100 of 138 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understood this comment about as well as I understood the article.
TL;DR Modern farming is extremely bad. Old farming was insufficient. Some guy wrote a book that misunderstands why I say that.
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.
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 t…
I should really experiment with slow cooker recipes, though I am (probably overly) worried about the fire risk of leaving a cooking appliance on unattended (either while away or asleep.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Even if one technically has time, cooking is a considerable commitment and so it’s easy to end up having little to no downtime after working it into a schedule, especially in a family situation. It’s hard to keep that kind of tight schedule up for long periods while maintaining sanity. Even if you start out cooking regularly and eating healthy it’s easy to burn out and wind up in a funk which then causes a spiraling…
Until three or four years ago, I was cooking traditionally. Because that required many hours, I could not do that daily, so I was cooking for the entire week during one day of the weekend, which was mostly lost to this activity.
Then I have switched to cook everything in a microwave oven (which I had previously used for decades only for reheating food), including things like baking home-made bread. This allows very short and perfectly reproducible cooking times. Many kinds of food, typically those with high water content, like potatoes or meat, can be just roasted in closed glass vessels without adding anything to them and they are much tastier than when they are boiled, without needing to fry them in cooking oil. Other vegetables are better boiled in water with salt, but regardless of the method all vegetables require less than a quarter of hour in the oven.
Since then, I am cooking every day what I eat just before I need it, which takes less than half of hour from start to finish for all operations, when cooking vegetables.
Meat required less preparation time but more time in the oven (at reduced power levels), depending on what kind of meat it was, e.g. up to 30 minutes, so when I was eating meat I was cooking it separately, in amounts sufficient for several days, and I was cooking everything else just before the meal, when it was combined with the precooked meat.
So with some experimentation, it is possible to find ways to cook your food without wasting too much time and energy with that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if one technically has time, cooking is a considerable commitment and so it’s easy to end up having little to no downtime after working it into a schedule, especially in a family situation. It’s hard to keep that kind of tight schedule up for long periods while maintaining sanity. Even if you start out cooking regularly and eating healthy it’s easy to burn out and wind up in a funk which then causes a spiraling…
One thing to note here: although industrial agriculture in the US is criticized for using too much energy, we in the US use more energy cooking food than is used to grow it (including all energy used to fuel farm equipment and make agrochemicals.) So don't think that cooking is somehow a trivial problem, especially for the world's poor.
Everything that I eat is cooked by myself from raw ingredients and for that I consume around 0.6 kWh of electric energy per day.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if one technically has time, cooking is a considerable commitment and so it’s easy to end up having little to no downtime after working it into a schedule, especially in a family situation. It’s hard to keep that kind of tight schedule up for long periods while maintaining sanity. Even if you start out cooking regularly and eating healthy it’s easy to burn out and wind up in a funk which then causes a spiraling…
One thing to note here: although industrial agriculture in the US is criticized for using too much energy, we in the US use more energy cooking food than is used to grow it (including all energy used to fuel farm equipment and make agrochemicals.) So don't think that cooking is somehow a trivial problem, especially for the world's poor.
Do you have a citation or a calculation for that?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing to note here: although industrial agriculture in the US is criticized for using too much energy, we in the US use more energy cooking food than is used to grow it (including all energy used to fuel farm equipment and make agrochemicals.) So don't think that cooking is somehow a trivial problem, especially for the world's poor.
That happens only because most people use energetically inefficient methods of cooking, not because it is something intrinsic to cooking. Everything that I eat is cooked by myself from raw ingredients and for that I consume around 0.6 kWh of electric energy per day.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People today scorn at the idea of state farms but my father comes from a family of rather wealthy peasants from before collectivization and always told me that productivity was shit before modern cultivation methods, mechanization, chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides were used. “Modern cultivation methods, mechanization, chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides” don’t require the use of state far…
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…
it was in fact this very experience that made me realize that i can live in other countries without having to learn the local language before going there.
Starts out so wrong. I live in Spain, traditionally good food still a staple. Most of the world I have visited is like that too. OK USA has screwed it's food chain, but that does not apply outside. People generally value traditions, and specifically food traditions, highly. It's a long way from financially difficult to keep these alive. People just have to decide they want to and spend time, not money. People round h…
N.b., the author is British not American. Argindustry isn’t a uniquely American thing, it’s global and pervasive, specially for protein and animal feedstock. A lot of vegetable in a global context is grown locally and purchased at local markets (outside the US and urban settings globally, which are end to end industrialized), but most people don’t raise artisanal pigs for slaughter. Most people buy their meat from a…
This is really the crux of the issue.
Farming sucks. Farming at small scales really sucks. There is a massive incentive to consolidate. Even when left alone, farmers tend to form co-ops in order to mitigate risk.
I had a long talk with a local producer of "Hormone free, antibiotic free, grass fed, grass finished" beef (need it because of family member with corn allergy). The economics are brutal. Corn finishing a steer nets you 3x (or more) the weight. Grass is highly dependent upon rain. etc.
Basically, the best thing I could do was commit to buying a whole steer every 6 months and let them sell what I can't deal with. Effectively, I gamble that they can sell the extra meat or I eat the loss. It generally works, but how many people can float a $5K-$10K loan every 6 months? And, even if they can get enough customers to float the loan, it will quickly saturate the number of customers who can buy the "extra". It's really a tough problem.
Everybody talks like farmers don't know what they are doing. Go talk to one and prepare to be surprised--you'll find out really quickly that most farmers know their business extremely intimately and can tell you how every single dollar is put to work.
"In fact, and horrifyingly, it’s likely that, as a result of environmental disaster, rural life in many parts of the world will collapse before urban life does, as suggested by a highly disturbing recent paper in Nature, showing how and where the “human climate niche” is likely to shrink. If anything, we are likely to become more reliant on long-distance transport to deliver our food – a prospect no one, myself inclu…
That paper you mention mostly highlights subsistence farmers - folks who definitionally don't have excess calories. More generally, urban folks are more resilient because they're more flexible - as long as you're importing food, you're not reliant on one locale; you can always import as long as one place hasn't collapsed.
Canning, freezing and other forms of long term food storage are vital, otherwise you have 50lbs of okra for a month and 0lbd the rest of the year.
Once you have those processes down, it's not hard at all to scale up even 50% and can a few more tomatoes. There is all sorts of informal barter for veggies and meats here, and the excess gets sold at farmers markets.
The urban folks do have slight end of chain distribution advantages. The imported food is consolidated at the grocery store or wherever. The price will be high, but you can pick new sources as they are available.
The city folks will be reliant on diesel for production transportation of the food. While the rural folks rely on diesel for production of food and for buying the rest of the goods they need.