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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

#101

Post by givemeethekeys »

InSteady wrote: post #65
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…

Would you consider India to be a wealthy nation? Even in India, it is cheaper to eat healthy than to not.

Perhaps this article only applies to nations suffering from outright famine.

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#102

Post by peteradio »

jgraham wrote: post #83

If you're interested in this topic, I can recommend his book on the subject of food production: Regenesis — Feeding The World Without Devouring the Planet [1]. It tries to look at food production as a global system, the successes it's had in terms of making food more affordable and avoiding global famine, but also the damage it's causing to climate and biodiversity, and possible ways forward given the constraints of…

Free range eaters are hoping to maintain a relationship with their free range farmer if/as the screws get turned. Might not scale for... everyone.

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#104

Post by wizzwizz4 »

smitty1e wrote: post #66
jfengel wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's not happening in “places”. That's the whole point. (If you trawl through my comment history, you'll notice I argue a lot on Hacker News, but that's very much a “hail Mary”: the learning and changing-my-mind is all happening elsewhere – “in the real world”, so to speak.)

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#105

Post by wizzwizz4 »

ruiisnwn wrote: post #57

[flagged]

Retinol, aka Vitamin A1, is found in high concentrations in such foods as cow and chicken livers, butter, cheese and eggs, and cod liver oil. You can get enough by eating certain cooked vegetables, like carrots and spinach (it's hard to digest the Vitamin A found in most raw vegetables, and many vegetables are poor sources of retinol), but you can only really overdose by taking supplements or eating organ meat.

All that has very little to do with autoimmune conditions, and I'm not aware of any effect on intestinal permeability. What are you on about?

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#106

Post by adrian_b »

pfdietz wrote: post #97
adrian_b wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As opposed to the global poor, who have highly energy efficient cooking equipment? That doesn't sound right.

While the maximum energy efficiency for cooking is obtained with modern equipment, like microwave ovens, cooking equipment does not necessarily have to be modern and expensive.

I am pretty certain that the kitchen stove used by my grandparents had a much better energy efficiency than the kitchen stoves that burn natural gas and which are still very widespread now.

That old kitchen stove was a wood-burning kitchen stove, but only a small quantity of wood had to be burned, because it had a huge thermal inertia and after becoming hot enough food could be cooked for hours with minimal wood consumption. The heat transfer from the large hot iron stove (but with a temperature close to that needed for food, i.e. much lower than the temperature of a gas flame) was much better than from a gas burner, which resulted in much less lost heat.

The efficiency of such a wood-burning kitchen stove is likely to have been similar with the efficiency of an induction electric stove.

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#107

Post by spicymapotofu »

kranke155 wrote: post #76
davedx wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t think books with solutions (like the author has written) are useful?

Im sure that some are, but the text that is linked in this particular post - could you explain its usefulness?

A simple comparison might help: while from the outside this likely looks like the famous "leftist yells at leftist" scenario, the alternative - where a single expert has their theories elevated into law, without room for disagreement, looks a lot like Lysenkoism, and usually results in large-scale suffering with no scientific value (due to mistakes, large or small, in individual theories).

I'm not in this field and can't hazard a guess at the exact utility of this dispute, but when I see specialists and the impassioned debating vigorously on their principles, I trust it's because of relevant disagreements in the field, because that's what I observe in my preferred domain. Some amount of slapfighting is inevitable - we're all human - but this is a particularly humane way to hash out differences.

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#108

Post by defsectec »

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…

This reads as extremely tone deaf and relatively privileged. Which isn't surprising given the cavalier attitudes towards impoverished people that I've seen many tech workers hold. I'm very glad that you have access to fresh produce on a regular basis. That is not the reality for everyone around the world, let alone everyone in developed nations.

Are vegetables still cheap when you need to travel miles and/or hours away from your place of residence/work? What about if you don't have own a personal vehicle and depend on public transit? When you need to work 3 jobs in order to not become homeless and then still care for multiple children, is it as easy to justify spending several hours of transit back and forth?

We aren't just talking about people eating fast food. That's only a percentage of the people who rely on "junk food" to survive. There are people who source 100% of their calories from a gas station because all the grocery stores, both small-bussiness and corporate, have closed due to crime and/or economic hardship.

There are places where even the local Dollar Tree shuts down. Leaving only gas stations or service stations some of which even keep many things behind bulletproof plexiglass to reduce theft. Would you really want to bus and walk around with a bag full of fresh produce when everyone else is just as hungry as you? That's if the metro service even still runs in your area.

Food deserts are a reality for many people and you have the luxury to live in an areacode that doesn't deal with this due to your relatively high paying IT job. And before you say "everyone can learn to code", no, they can't. Learning new skills requires free downtime that many don't have the luxury of. Many people spend every waking hour working and even sleep less that is healthy in order to work more.

This is only exacerbated when they don't have the fundamental math/science education that CS requires due to chronic underfunding of school districts in those same areacodes. Or even access to any computers besides mobile devices provided "for free" via a monthly service plan. Regardless of how difficult your upbringing was, it's extremely evident that you don't grasp many of the privileges you have had access to during your lifetime.

I can't find the exact statistics at the moment, but a larger than I would like percentage of the US pet food supply chain is consumed by humans. Are you really saying that people who need to eat dog food to get enough calories to not starve to death are just doing that because they are too lazy to go to a grocery store and cook vegetables into a soup?

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#109

Post by ColonelBlimp »

kranke155 wrote: post #38
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.

Thats exactly how I felt. Do these two people feel important trading jabs through their environmentalist Penguin Books? Is this the environmental movement equivalent of a rap battle? It feels really useless and dead to keep "talking away" like this. I dont know who either of these people are, but have they actually saved an indingenous community or improved the diet of a large group? Finding, promoting and selling go…

>These guys just seem to want to talk. I find this beyond useless.

I'm not sure this is how George Monbiot defines himself, but for me he's an intelectual. There's a place and a value in what intelectuals do. They think, they talk, they discuss. Historically, good intelectuals have helped societies identify problems by asking questions and challenging common assumptions (something very difficult to do well).

And, of course, we need engineers and people with the right technical skills to develop solutions that improve life in practical ways.

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#110

Post by pfdietz »

hollerith wrote: post #96
pfdietz wrote: post #86

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.

>we in the US use more energy cooking food than is used to grow it Do you have a citation or a calculation for that?

Not directly, but various things I google show that in the US food system, only 10-20% of the energy used is on the farm. Much more is in handling (which includes cooking and refrigeration), transportation, and processing.
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