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The Slow Web

jackcheng.com

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Re: The Slow Web

#21

Post by UweSchmidt »

ZenPro wrote: post #9
dasil003 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's amusing in the least. Have you looked around recently at people's diet and health? It's not just fast food, but convenience foods in general are huge business, and it's people largely bought into the marketing simply because they offer ever increasing taste and convenience. There are huge margins to be made by processing the same mono-culture grains into ever more refined and perfected addictive fo…

Spoken truly like someone who has no idea what they are talking about. At present industrial countries spend between 9-11% of their annual income on foodstuffs and less than 5% of their time gathering said foodstuffs - the lowest in time/money expenditure for food in the history of the world.[1] If we die slightly earlier due to a possible rise in cardiovascular disease then it was a small price to pay for saving yea…

A surprising comment! I thought it was clear with all the obesity, diabetes and definitive rise in cardiovascular disease that there must be something fundamentally wrong with our food, one way or another.

Imagine that: people eat until their arteries clog, literally stopping the flow of blood so they die.

Oh but the branded, and yes, overpriced food-product was oh so satisfactory for the senses, the sugar, the fat, the flavoring, all carefully designed to overwhelm instincts and to create little addictions.

Re: The Slow Web

#22

Post by weland »

aethertap wrote: post #10
ZenPro wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spoken truly like someone who has no idea what they are talking about. At present industrial countries spend between 9-11% of their annual income on foodstuffs and less than 5% of their time gathering said foodstuffs - the lowest in time/money expenditure for food in the history of the world.[1] If we die slightly earlier due to a possible rise in cardiovascular disease then it was a small price to pay for saving yea…

There's more to food than nutrition. The process of growing, preparing, and eating food has been a major source of social connection and "quality time," which is in my opinion the most significant value of slow food for well-being. You can get the nutrition you need with a pittance today in terms of economics, but as a society I think we've failed to fill the social gap that was left open by our liberation from the w…

> There's more to food than nutrition. The process of growing, preparing, and eating food has been a major source of social connection and "quality time," which is in my opinion the most significant value of slow food for well-being.

Have you ever been involved in the process of growing food? A workday on the farm is substantially longer than any office job, the only way to talk to people is to scream because they're at least thirty meters away from you most of the time. At the end of it you're drained and people who have been doing it all their lives get to live the last years of their lives with terrible back pains and having to rely on the young folks for, um, growing food, because it turns out doing manual labour for twelve hours a day isn't so easy when you're eighty. There's anything but quality time in that.

Edit: It also turns out that, with foodstuffs having to be so cheap, this kind of work was also very badly paid, which meant that except for people who owned huge amounts of land (and generally didn't work all, or more commonly any of it), people who had to do this were, if not dirt poor, in any case poor enough not to be able to afford too much. It's the fact that we lost all this chance to have "quality time" that allows us to heartily debate such matters through silicon stuff that shoves charge carriers through really thin glass tubes.

Re: The Slow Web

#23

Post by Illotus »

aethertap wrote: post #10
ZenPro wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spoken truly like someone who has no idea what they are talking about. At present industrial countries spend between 9-11% of their annual income on foodstuffs and less than 5% of their time gathering said foodstuffs - the lowest in time/money expenditure for food in the history of the world.[1] If we die slightly earlier due to a possible rise in cardiovascular disease then it was a small price to pay for saving yea…

There's more to food than nutrition. The process of growing, preparing, and eating food has been a major source of social connection and "quality time," which is in my opinion the most significant value of slow food for well-being. You can get the nutrition you need with a pittance today in terms of economics, but as a society I think we've failed to fill the social gap that was left open by our liberation from the w…

It's all well and good if you want to have the social connection while fiddling with your food. However nowadays you don't have to if you don't want to. I for one would not like to spend a lot of my waking non-eating time preparing my food.

Re: The Slow Web

#24

Post by dasil003 »

ZenPro wrote: post #9
dasil003 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's amusing in the least. Have you looked around recently at people's diet and health? It's not just fast food, but convenience foods in general are huge business, and it's people largely bought into the marketing simply because they offer ever increasing taste and convenience. There are huge margins to be made by processing the same mono-culture grains into ever more refined and perfected addictive fo…

Spoken truly like someone who has no idea what they are talking about. At present industrial countries spend between 9-11% of their annual income on foodstuffs and less than 5% of their time gathering said foodstuffs - the lowest in time/money expenditure for food in the history of the world.[1] If we die slightly earlier due to a possible rise in cardiovascular disease then it was a small price to pay for saving yea…

I don't have time to refute this kind of wrong-headed thinking in detail. Suffice it to say that I'm not just talking about fast food per se, I'm talking about the entire way that modern industrially prepared foodstuffs are processed, the huge proportion of grain that goes into it, and the way flavors are extracted and re-added while completely separating them from the nutritional value that said flavors would normally signal to our organism. Spraying on vitamins is not the same as eating a fresh vegetable or animal meat that is known to contain those vitamins.

Simply put, we are in the nutritional dark ages right now. You exemplify my point perfectly by looking at the issue through an economic lens, and ignoring the difficult to pin down issues like the explosion of obesity and diabetes. Now you claim that I have no idea what I'm talking about, and I claim the same about you, but mark my words in 100 years people will look back on the diet of today with the same horror that they look back on bloodletting as medical practice.

Re: The Slow Web

#25

Post by hellbreakslose »

comparing the web to food is like comparing an apple to an orange, you can't really compare them.

I liked your article but hmm fast food - slow food? I guess in my mind is fast food or healthy food, a salad can be created faster than fast food but still its healthy. I don't get what you are trying to compare there. Fast food has the meaning that if you are bored you just go and in 2-3 mins you can have something to eat rather than spending the time to cook or pick the items you want to cook.

Re: The Slow Web

#26

Post by gbog »

Like the idea and the article, but was astonished by this:

> daily things that improve your life in small but beneficial ways, like flossing, meditating, or tracking your weight

Ok for meditating, maybe. But flossing? Tracking weight? I'd say obsession with hygiene and fitness is very detrimental to one's quality of life. I'd find hundreds more relevant ways to improve one's life in small steps: Eating good unprocessed food, Having an aimless walk once a week, Gardening, Reading books written more than 50 years ago, Listening to the music you like, etc.

I don't know what to do with this remark. Maybe our Amercanized civilisation has an exagerated focus on body hygiene. Something that once saved lives (doctors and nurses washing hands often) became an obsession the makes many people miserable (brushing teeth trice a day, removing any form of pubic pilosity, flossing, weight-watching).

Re: The Slow Web

#27

Post by petercoolz »

While I was reading about the daily emails, I couldn't help but think that the slow web was just marketing speak for their chosen technical infrastructure. Ie. they run a midnight CRON job that parses all the emails because that's easy/cheap.

Re: The Slow Web

#28

Post by ZoFreX »

gbog wrote: post #26

Like the idea and the article, but was astonished by this: > daily things that improve your life in small but beneficial ways, like flossing, meditating, or tracking your weight Ok for meditating, maybe. But flossing? Tracking weight? I'd say obsession with hygiene and fitness is very detrimental to one's quality of life. I'd find hundreds more relevant ways to improve one's life in small steps: Eating good unprocess…

Obsession is unhealthy. Brushing your teeth twice a day is not. Some people struggle to get the basic important things done without reminders!

Also: Tracking weight is far from "obsession". If you need to lose (or gain) weight, tracking is one of the simplest and most effective things you can start doing. You can't improve what you aren't measuring!

Re: The Slow Web

#29

Post by ZoFreX »

programmer_babu wrote: post #15

Would anyone use an email service which delivers email and updates inbox at one specific time of the day and doesn't allow any alternatives? My friends found this idea ridiculous. But I'd love the peace of mind. I used to love writing letters and waiting for days for a reply.

I actually like the sound of that idea.

Re: The Slow Web

#30

Post by aethertap »

weland wrote: post #22
aethertap wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's more to food than nutrition. The process of growing, preparing, and eating food has been a major source of social connection and "quality time," which is in my opinion the most significant value of slow food for well-being. You can get the nutrition you need with a pittance today in terms of economics, but as a society I think we've failed to fill the social gap that was left open by our liberation from the w…

> There's more to food than nutrition. The process of growing, preparing, and eating food has been a major source of social connection and "quality time," which is in my opinion the most significant value of slow food for well-being. Have you ever been involved in the process of growing food? A workday on the farm is substantially longer than any office job, the only way to talk to people is to scream because they're…

I own a farm, and work on it every day with my family, so yes, I do have personal experience with it. It turns out that working together on something you value seems to build relationships, at least in our case.
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