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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

#121

Post by FabHK »

teknopaul wrote: post #17

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…

> People generally value traditions, and specifically food traditions, highly.

The author specifically discusses how, for example, the production of regional traditional French cheese is, in fact, highly industrialised:

"Meanwhile, to keep pace with gastronomic demand, farming relentlessly intensifies. In the famous cheesemaking regions of France, you will scarcely see a dairy cow. Instead, vast tracts are cultivated for maize. Passing tourists romantically assume it’s sweetcorn for human consumption – the French must eat a lot of sweetcorn! No, it will be turned into silage to feed the cattle stalled in the vast steel sheds – cow factories – that have sprung up from Brittany to Savoie, a business as brutal and industrial as any other. Milk is trucked across hundreds of kilometres, trade fairs market the cheese from Dubai to Shanghai."

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#122

Post by thaumasiotes »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #31
teknopaul wrote: post #17

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…

> even if individuals raise some amount of animal for extra money or protein in their diet.

It happens more often than I expected, but of course it's still not common.

A friend of mine living in an apartment in Shanghai once complained to me that her neighbors were keeping a chicken in their apartment and she was irritated by the daily crowing.

But she took the philosophy "soon enough they'll eat it and the problem will go away".

Hard to imagine something similar happening in the US.

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#123

Post by petre »

adrian_b wrote: post #94
jwells89 wrote: post #80

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…

Cooking with modern methods can take much less time than with traditional methods. 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 fo…

Yes, that. Yay to ovens and electric appliances where you just set the power and the time and go do something else until the food cooks itself. I stopped boiling most vegetables, I steam process them over a pot with a strainer on top.

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#124

Post by petre »

asdff wrote: post #115
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe in USA, not in europe. 40 hours is pretty much the max, maybe 48 for some professions. Random independent contractors (electricians, painters,...) are an exception, but they're far from poor. Having to work multiple jobs and many hours and low access to food (stores) is pretty much a uniquely US problem.

Depends on where you are in europe. Germany, probably better than the U.S. Romania, far worse.

Depends where you live and work. I'd totally pick Romania or even Bulgaria over Germany. Healthier and tastier food for one, and I'm not talking restaurants, but farmer's markets. Cities are probably worse, more cars parked eveywhere, more annoying drivers operating them, more pollution, more chaos. I've also met people from Moldova and Ukraine telling me food is way less expensive there. They also eat tastier and more healthy food: borsch, fish, salads but lack EU regulation for big agriculture, so grain, and industrially grown vegetables and meat is probably laced with chemicals banned or regulated in the EU. In Germany the traditional food is quite boring. I won't venture to say awful, because it's still eatable, but doesn't have much variety or taste, like South or East European food. Czech Republic and Poland were also very pleasant food wise: great pickles or cabbage based foods. Hingary? They're eating too much meat. But the goulash and sausages ate usually quite good.

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#125

Post by vijayr02 »

javajosh wrote: post #71

The solution is obvious, though: wealthy individuals, or collectives of such, should pay folks to live an authentic, poor, impoverished life, protect it as an island of authenticity, for some set period of time, and that person is forbidden from accessing their new wealth personally for X amount of time. I'm not joking. This deal would appeal to many people who both want a hands-on life but who also want to retire to…

In Europe, this exists at scale and is called the CAP

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#126

Post by youngtaff »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #82
youngtaff wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor people often have to work multiple jobs and often work many more hourse than 8 hours a day. The stress of worrying about how you’re going to feed your kids, pay energy costs, rent etc soon eats time too

Maybe in USA, not in europe. 40 hours is pretty much the max, maybe 48 for some professions. Random independent contractors (electricians, painters,...) are an exception, but they're far from poor. Having to work multiple jobs and many hours and low access to food (stores) is pretty much a uniquely US problem.

Certainly happens in the UK and some of the Eastern European countries

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#127

Post by watwut »

dang wrote: post #116
watwut wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Please don't post ideological flamewar comments or personal attacks, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

I reacted to claim that people who opposed state farms were "imbeciles behind the time". That is an actual communist propaganda point person I responded to promoted. If they can say that, I should be allowed to respond.

How come calling victims "imbeciles" is ok while my response is not?

Also, creation of state farms happened through actual violence. Property was taken away from people and owners were put to jails or forcibly moved. I do not call it stealing as insult, I call it stealing because that is what it was.

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#128

Post by watwut »

MichaelRo wrote: post #23
Someone wrote: post #14

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…

My response was flagged, but what this person says about creation of farms is just communist propaganda.

Sparkled by insults to victims.

And no, they were not performing better then western alternatives nor an improvement. These states could make liberal reforms, but choosen to go dictatorship way and people pay the price.

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#129

Post by hollerith »

tormeh wrote: post #120
asdff wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No surprise, farm is powered by the sun and water pressure.

I hope you're trolling, because that's definitely not how that works.

He thinks farms don't use a lot of fossil fuels because he experiences positive feelings when he thinks about farms :)

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#130

Post by neurostimulant »

adrian_b wrote: post #94
jwells89 wrote: post #80

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…

Cooking with modern methods can take much less time than with traditional methods. 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 fo…

Get an air frier and you'll have more option to cook dishes previously not possibly using microwave alone.
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