Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to eat healthily for £1 per day – version 0.2

supplementsos.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 85 posts

Re: How to eat healthily for £1 per day – version 0.2

#41

Post by VLM »

enraged_camel wrote: post #34
VLM wrote: post #6

Lets flag last time's discussion of v0.1 ahead of time, so we can move on and advance rather than rehash. 1) A little too much oil/fat to be politically correct, a bit too little to be nutritionally correct. Canola oil? I wouldn't put that in my car. Eat half as much olive oil if you have to, but don't eat that rot. 2) Carbs about right to be politically correct, WAY too much grains/carbs to be nutritionally correct.…

>>I honestly believe there is some kind of cooking phobia loose on HN. If you think about the main demographic of HN - people in their 20s who have spent more time with computers than anything else - it makes sense. :)

But that's why I like cooking!

All the techniques you learn from simple knife cuts to measuring to cooking techniques like braising and roasting, all those are object oriented development methods that can be applied to objects, objects of food. There's a lot of object oriented analogies between programming and cooking. If you can apply the "Julienne knife cut" method to a potato object, you can do it to an apple object and probably a carrot too.

Its a big linear programming puzzle to scale recipes. Did I mention scaling? Cooking is a whole barrel of square/cube law scalability puzzles to get cooking rates of different ingredients to intersect at one completion time.

There are some pretty interesting software engineering principles WRT recipe and meal design. Do you "waterfall" your holiday dinner design, or "agile" it? There's the sheer queueing theory joy of arranging everything just so, such that its all just-in-time ready to be cooked, when it works its awesome and when you're stuck in the weeds its panic time, just like hacking something before a demo.

Its fun to iterate thru optimization getting the "design pattern" applied to the puzzle better and better. And there's so many design patterns, and if you stay out of pastry work, those design patterns are pretty flexible.

One point where you have me is most programmers hate testing, so I can see an issue with cooking.

I am kinda bummed that most "computer geeky" books about cooking fixate solely on gadgetry like liq N2 or molecular gastronomy, cool as that might be, there's a whole nother world of describing cooking with flowcharts and object oriented methods and development models and algorithms and "real computer geeky" stuff like that.

I have noticed that at least some people cook like they program, across a sample size of about 3. Here's to hoping that cooking something never becomes a technical interview fad stunt, although I suppose worse has happened in the past.

Re: How to eat healthily for £1 per day – version 0.2

#42

Post by Kurtz79 »

enraged_camel wrote: post #34
VLM wrote: post #6

Lets flag last time's discussion of v0.1 ahead of time, so we can move on and advance rather than rehash. 1) A little too much oil/fat to be politically correct, a bit too little to be nutritionally correct. Canola oil? I wouldn't put that in my car. Eat half as much olive oil if you have to, but don't eat that rot. 2) Carbs about right to be politically correct, WAY too much grains/carbs to be nutritionally correct.…

>>I honestly believe there is some kind of cooking phobia loose on HN. If you think about the main demographic of HN - people in their 20s who have spent more time with computers than anything else - it makes sense. :)

In many ways cooking is a form of "hacking" and creating, a form of human ingenuity that has very concrete and practical applications...

You take raw materials, in themselves nutritious but unappetizing, and create a final product that looks and feel completely different, and manages to be satisfying in addition to being functional and necessary to survival.

Making something like bread starting from flour, yeast and water... what a brilliant hack!

Since I have started looking at cooking from this point of view I have been hooked.

Re: How to eat healthily for £1 per day – version 0.2

#43

Post by koide »

juskrey wrote: post #9

Is naive diet rationalisation a new hacker's disease? To die for math that is not working in long period, anyway? Come on, travel to South Africa and settle in savannah, hunting and gathering for free. Anything else will kill you in unnatural and premature way.

Whereas hunting and gathering for free in the South African savanna will kill you in a natural [1] and premature way.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildlife_of_South_Africa#Predat...

Re: How to eat healthily for £1 per day – version 0.2

#45

Post by quantumpotato_ »

Kurtz79 wrote: post #42
enraged_camel wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>I honestly believe there is some kind of cooking phobia loose on HN. If you think about the main demographic of HN - people in their 20s who have spent more time with computers than anything else - it makes sense. :)

In many ways cooking is a form of "hacking" and creating, a form of human ingenuity that has very concrete and practical applications... You take raw materials, in themselves nutritious but unappetizing, and create a final product that looks and feel completely different, and manages to be satisfying in addition to being functional and necessary to survival. Making something like bread starting from flour, yeast and…

Yes, but programming vs cooking maybe has some left brain vs right brain going on?

Re: How to eat healthily for £1 per day – version 0.2

#46

Post by VLM »

mseebach wrote: post #28
ctz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a UK government health recommendation: http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/5ADAY/Pages/Whatcounts.aspx

Yeah, I know. But that's just nanny-language telling me to eat my veggies (and I do and that's all fine) - it doesn't tell me the "why".

Top down you'll get studies with graphs of veg intake vs "illness" and pretty much the more veg you eat, the better. This is an outcome based "why" not a biochemical based "why".

Bottom up there really are no completely ideal foods, but there are foods that specialize in certain things, and much as animal meat specializes in protein, veg specializes in fiber and the micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, etc). This specialization is not absolute. You could get your vitamin A from a meal of liver once a week or so, but it seems easier just to eat a carrot every day or two. Unless you really like liver. Fruits are almost as good as veg other than having lots of sugar.

The "why" for the hair shirt crowd is its pretty easy to F up vegetables such that they taste horrible, therefore they feel better because you're suffering, because you deserve it. Why? Doesn't matter much. They'd probably be really pissed off that I actually enjoy the taste of a salad of proper proportions, or a snack of eating a carrot or whatever.

You guys in the UK are pretty lucky to have science based guidelines, in the USA our govt enforced guidelines are based solely on who paid politicians election funds, so we're stuck with "eat as much grains as you can" and stuff like that, designed to make us fat.

Re: How to eat healthily for £1 per day – version 0.2

#47

Post by AlexDanger »

VLM wrote: post #35
dagw wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to Google Canola oil as I'd never heard of it, but it seems to be a product name for rapeseed oil. If so what have you got against rapeseed oil. It's a great oil and every bit as 'valid' as olive oil and I use both when cooking all the time. Sure you can buy shit rapeseed oil, but you can also buy equally shit olive oil, and I fail to see why you would think one better than the other. Or is it just that the Can…

It has a few issues. 1) Depends on what you're using it for. Personally I think it tastes foul in salad dressing type applications. Olive oil is the gold standard for homemade salad dressings. I would imagine if you're frying donuts or potatoes or something, you'd want the more neutral flavor of canola instead of olive. 2) Rancidity issues lead to three problems. First is massively excessive processing which turns th…

I'm going to call bullshit on pretty much everything you've said here.

As I understand, Canola oil is a cheap, neutral oil with decent nutritional properties and an excellent range of cooking temperatures. Its a great alternative to olive oil. Its better than olive oil if you're frying a steak or using high temperatures.

Can you provide sources for what you've said?

I'll start: http://www.snopes.com/medical/toxins/canola.asp

Also, to address your claim about 'heavily processed' canola oil - the more refined/processed it is, the less contaminants are left in the final product. Its unrefined canola oil that is potentially dangerous.

Your claim about rancidity is also bogus. All oil goes rancid. Canola oil stored correctly (ie in a closed bottle in your cupboard or fridge) will last a year. Olive oil will last about the same time.

Re: How to eat healthily for £1 per day – version 0.2

#48

Post by ars »

VLM wrote: post #35
dagw wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to Google Canola oil as I'd never heard of it, but it seems to be a product name for rapeseed oil. If so what have you got against rapeseed oil. It's a great oil and every bit as 'valid' as olive oil and I use both when cooking all the time. Sure you can buy shit rapeseed oil, but you can also buy equally shit olive oil, and I fail to see why you would think one better than the other. Or is it just that the Can…

It has a few issues. 1) Depends on what you're using it for. Personally I think it tastes foul in salad dressing type applications. Olive oil is the gold standard for homemade salad dressings. I would imagine if you're frying donuts or potatoes or something, you'd want the more neutral flavor of canola instead of olive. 2) Rancidity issues lead to three problems. First is massively excessive processing which turns th…

> I would imagine if you're frying donuts or potatoes or something, you'd want the more neutral flavor of canola instead of olive.

Don't deep fry with canola - it smells nasty after a bit. It smells sort of like old fish. I like corn oil for deep frying.

Re: How to eat healthily for £1 per day – version 0.2

#49

Post by kaybe »

VLM wrote: post #41
enraged_camel wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>I honestly believe there is some kind of cooking phobia loose on HN. If you think about the main demographic of HN - people in their 20s who have spent more time with computers than anything else - it makes sense. :)

But that's why I like cooking! All the techniques you learn from simple knife cuts to measuring to cooking techniques like braising and roasting, all those are object oriented development methods that can be applied to objects, objects of food. There's a lot of object oriented analogies between programming and cooking. If you can apply the "Julienne knife cut" method to a potato object, you can do it to an apple obje…

At least when I test the code it's not like half of it is gone afterwards like all the cake dough.. and everyone else crowding in to test it too. Cake dough requires rigorous testing, it does.

Re: How to eat healthily for £1 per day – version 0.2

#50

Post by maratd »

columbo wrote: post #37
VLM wrote: post #6

Lets flag last time's discussion of v0.1 ahead of time, so we can move on and advance rather than rehash. 1) A little too much oil/fat to be politically correct, a bit too little to be nutritionally correct. Canola oil? I wouldn't put that in my car. Eat half as much olive oil if you have to, but don't eat that rot. 2) Carbs about right to be politically correct, WAY too much grains/carbs to be nutritionally correct.…

> 3) The guy from a culture where the average TV viewership per capita is 4 hours and 38 minutes per day (per Neilson 2012) could never have spare the five minutes to throw some beans in a slow cooker. Also all home cooked meals take 8 hours to prepare because he says so. Finally multitasking has not been invented (serious, HN?) so time spent stirring a pot must be spent 100% focused on the stirring never a single br…

> Here's a real case study; a mother, two children under six years old, mid-twenties, high school dropout, only has a bus pass and foodstamps.

This is just as disingenuous as the parent and isn't even close to representing the most common situation. The majority of people don't live next to a market that has proper fresh produce, but demand drives supply and there's a reason they don't.

Most upper and middle class families have largely abandoned the concept of fresh produce. When the poor become not so poor, they follow the same pattern. Not because they don't have a choice, but because they choose to.

My parents live a very affluent area. Whole Foods, Trader Joes, Pathmark (large local grocer), Mitsuwa (large Japanese market). Four choices within 1 square mile. All walkable. Not a single one of them has any significant fresh food selection. Not one. Oh, they have a ton of prepared food that you can buy by the pound, but not a whole lot if you want to make it yourself.

I live in a less affluent area (putting it mildly) and there is a farmer's market 5 minutes walking distance from my house that has only fresh produce, absolutely no prepared food. It has more fresh produce than all the the other 4 combined. Why? Because the people who live here can't afford prepared food. It's that simple. They would, if they could.

Post reply on HN