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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

#131

Post by fnordpiglet »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #122
fnordpiglet wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Tbh that’s a fairly uniquely Chinese thing I’ll wager

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#132

Post by kranke155 »

spicymapotofu wrote: post #107
kranke155 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Lysenko was elevated in an totalitarian environment. It was also related to science, or something like it.

This text does not appear much related to a lot of science, more like "someone said something about me and Id like to refute it" but its 40 000 words or something instead of just a small text.

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#133

Post by dang »

watwut wrote: post #127
dang wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

It wasn't ok—it breaks the HN guideline against calling names—but we just didn't see it. The problem is that you responded by breaking the site guidelines considerably worse. That's not ok, regardless of how bad some other comment was or you feel it was. The guidelines are clear on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

By the way (this is unrelated) - did you not see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37488716 or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37396401? I've been trying to let you know that there's a problem with your account and I have no other way of contacting you.

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#134

Post by asdff »

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.

Sure other fuels go into it but it also takes in things like sunlight and water pressure as inputs for doing work (from the growing crops perspective at least). Whereas with transporting the goods, you don't have solar powered trucks or things powered from watermills or hydroelectricity moving these tomatoes. 100% of the energy makeup of the transportation side will be from fossil fuels, in contrast to the growing where fossil fuels make up some fraction but not the whole due to the work done by the sun and pressurized water. Likewise with handling and storage. I expect tyson foods has no bulk freeze drying apparatus that is powered independently with its own nuclear reactor, they are probably pulling from the dirty grid.

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#135

Post by asdff »

hollerith wrote: post #129
tormeh wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

I have smelled a tractor before

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#136

Post by watwut »

dang wrote: post #133
watwut wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> How come calling victims "imbeciles" is ok while my response is not? It wasn't ok—it breaks the HN guideline against calling names—but we just didn't see it. The problem is that you responded by breaking the site guidelines considerably worse. That's not ok, regardless of how bad some other comment was or you feel it was. The guidelines are clear on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . By the wa…

I really do not see how my comment is worst then original. Or worst then comments about slavery that are frequent in here when American history appears.

Only difference is that I argued against praise of state farms rather then argued against slavery or what not.

I was not much keen on sending my email and then just forgot about it.

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#137

Post by dang »

watwut wrote: post #136
dang wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How come calling victims "imbeciles" is ok while my response is not? It wasn't ok—it breaks the HN guideline against calling names—but we just didn't see it. The problem is that you responded by breaking the site guidelines considerably worse. That's not ok, regardless of how bad some other comment was or you feel it was. The guidelines are clear on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . By the wa…

I really do not see how my comment is worst then original. Or worst then comments about slavery that are frequent in here when American history appears. Only difference is that I argued against praise of state farms rather then argued against slavery or what not. I was not much keen on sending my email and then just forgot about it.

It doesn't matter who's "worse" - everyone always feels like the other person started it and did worse. This is the most common response to moderation that exists, and it's beside the point.

The point is that if you post things like "The communist propaganda you are spreading here is really something" then you're doing exactly the kind of ideological flamewar we don't want on HN—regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. We need you, and other users, to follow the rules regardless of what other people are doing. Especially accounts like yours which have been around for many years and posted thousands of comments!

If you don't want to email, then I need to ask you here: can you please change your password and confirm that you changed it? There's reason to believe that your account was compromised.

Re: The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

#138

Post by arthur2e5 »

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…

A typical "not-so-poor" country with large scale nutrition problems would be China. A look into the micros shows that ALMOST EVERYONE is short on calcium, riboflavin, a couple of other B vits, and Vitamin A. The current deficiency data by DALY accordingly shows large disease burdens on iron deficiency (somewhat linked to riboflavin), good old protein-energy malnutrition (child stunting and the like), and Vit A deficiency.

A lot of the issues with micros can probably be solved through food fortification, except the public is not known to appreciate the price increase (however small it will be) and the longer ingredients list. You might also suggest switching from white rice to brown or parboiled rice, but economics of scale and (for brown) the need for airtight storage mean that these things are much, much more expensive than a 2-year-old sack of white rice.

Even then you haven’t solved the big protein-energy issue. Sure, push legumes more, but these things still don’t have the price-calorie ratio that rice has, and you might compromise the energy part as you do it.

(For non-kids there’s still a big protein issue. Laborers just want to eat enough fuel to keep working, and good old white rice with Lao Gan Ma wins every time. Tofu is fast to shove down too, but it’s mostly water.)

Micros: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9696081/

DALYs: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9570758/

[Legumes do provide a good amount of B too. Whole-ish beans and TVP are kind of awkward in Chinese fast food though. Maybe we just need more recipes with them as the star, instead of an accompaniment to meats.]

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