Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution

[Khaldun]

Then consider the labor time involved in prepping fresh ingredients and bundle that into the cost.

You might learn a few things that will surprise you.

Then compare eating that over processed cheaper crap with the increased cost in medical care and the negative impact on quality of life.

I think this mentality is the real problem.  If you are treating your daily eating habits as something that needs to be thought of in terms of labor/cost etc you are doing it wrong.  Part of this entire discussion is that we need to stop thinking about food in terms of pure consumption, and thinking of it in terms of lifestyle.  Lifestyles which relegate food to cost/benefit analysis seem to have all their priorities fucked up to me.

Maybe I'm just the resident hippy dippy guy, but I simply wouldn't adopt a lifestyle that didn't allow me to eat healthy on a regular basis. 

Edit: Yes I realize this isn't always a choice, the poor can't just simply make that choice, but there are two discussions going on here and I don't get the impression Khaldun is worried that he might not make ends meet if he spends 30 minutes a day on food prep.

Nothing I've said is about me. I'm a foodie, I sometimes spend an hour or two making dinner alone for my family, let alone other meals. My idea of a great Saturday is cooking for three or four hours in the afternoon. I'm not the healthiest eater but it's not because of processed food, which I rarely eat in any form.

The issue is really that food crusaders seem to have a difficult time understanding the economics of food production, distribution and consumption on both the large and local scale.

Also, they often seem to lack the ability to imagine the thinking and feelings of people other than themselves in anything but a stereotyped or caricatured fashion. This is a general problem in the United States right now across a broad range of issues, but there's something about food, body image and personal self-righteousness that seems to produce a particularly intense version of that kind of toxic self-regard.

[Mrbloodworth]

The issue is really that food crusaders seem to have a difficult time understanding the economics of food production, distribution and consumption on both the large and local scale.

I'm not sure this is true, but I do see as an excuse not to do anything. Did you know our corn is produced under cost to produce do to subsidies? Did you also know this is a direct impact on hunger in the world. The USA basically bottomed out the commodities market and no other country can even compete, leading to less production overall.

We make it into a syrup that is also produced under cost to produce. Its now in your ...well, everything.


If people start demanding whole foods, farms will produce it. If entire organizations, such as 600k students in one city won't change, it won't change.

[Khaldun]

It's not an excuse to not do anything, but it is an instruction to understand what the trade-offs are, what is immediately possible and what takes serious structural reforms, and so on.

When people start invoking the invisible hand, and say "But if you want great food, then we'll all get great food because supply and demand are magic", that is a case of not understanding or having any interest in trade-offs. A lot of locavore, slow-food and organic food preferences are only possible in the way they are now as middle to upper-middle class consumer choices, and depend on the main "spine" of food production being aimed at much lower and less healthy choices. Organic farming doesn't necessarily scale up to the totality of the US food market, let alone globally. Or at least not if you want to keep access to something like the range and variety of organic and high-quality food presently available in good supermarkets. Now if you want to have a strongly regulated system of food production that dictates much lower meat consumption, much higher consumption of pulses and whole grains and leafy greens, maybe that's more sustainable, though even there, don't underestimate the challenges of scaling up healthy or organic production of even the simplest crop.

And don't forget the tradeoffs involved in having a strongly regulated system of that kind, some of which don't involve food. Most of which don't, actually. Just evangelizing for healthy eating and a bit of modest regulation of factory farming is not enough to shift things so substantially. The trade-offs here are really big and complex. When it comes to it, I don't really want a nanny state telling me or anyone else that buying and preparing baby-back ribs in a three-hour weekend barbecue is going to cost me ten times what it does now because we're disincentivizing the consumption of high-fat meats. Now if there are subsidies which work in the other direction to make those ribs unusually affordable for me, ok, take that thumb off the scale and let's see what happens next. Corn syrup is something you can fix that way to a powerful extent. Though even there, and always, trade-offs: you take a subsidy away from something, you make some part of the economy less rich than it was, and you change pricing that may be built into all sorts of things, with all sorts of potentially unintended effects.

Let's do stuff, sure, but let's not be simpletons or crusaders as we do. I've studied and watched too many well-meaning, self-righteous, self-assured middle-class Euro-Americans set up development projects in Africa that they believe are pursuing common sense goals that are easily to achieve, but turn out to have all sorts of ghastly or unexpected consequences. Or projects that get abandoned because they do a little good insteaad of magically changing everything into utopia, or that cost a fuckton for marginal or ambiguous changes, etc.

Food policy is the best place ever to remember: TINSTAAFL.

[Mrbloodworth]

By all means, lets stop advocating, because there is no perfect solution.

Junk is cheep because we subsidize it to make it so. That's it. If not for the subsidies, it would not be. We farm this way because of subsidizing. We raise cattle this way because we subsidize it. We put tariffs and huge fines on products from other countries that stop them even producing because we have them locked out of the largest consumer. You want to feed the world? Open the real competition.

We pay taxes to have cheep foods and to increase profits with little respect for consumers. Naturally grown food is expensive because we make it so. I have no need to tell people what to eat, but I take real issue by others forcing me to eat crap, because they have tilted the market so much, with my own money to boot.

Its even worse to force it on children, and teach that bad habit generation after generation.

[Numtini]

I would be so happy if organic and locavore were removed from this entire discussion (meaning nationally, not just here). They just distract from the real food vs. industrial food issue.

[Mrbloodworth]

between 1981 and 1988, USDA slashed the amount of sugar that Caribbean nations could ship to the United States by 74 percent. The State Department estimated that the reductions in sugar-import quotas cost Third World nations $800 million a year. The sugar program has indirectly become a full-employment program for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, as many poor Third World farmers who previously grew sugar cane are now harvesting marijuana.

The Reagan administration responded to sugar-import cutbacks by creating a new foreign-aid program — the Quota Offset Program — to give free food to countries hurt by reductions. In 1986, the United States. dumped almost $200 million of free food on Caribbean nations and the Philippines. As the Wall Street Journal reported, "By flooding local markets and driving commodity prices down, the U.S. is making it more difficult for local farmers to replace sugar with other crops." Richard Holwill, deputy assistant secretary of state, observed, "It makes us look like damn fools when we go down there and preach free enterprise."

Due to trade restrictions on imported sugar coming into the U.S. at the world price, the U.S. sugar beet producers have a sweet deal, assisted by their government enablers, who protect them from more efficient foreign sugar growers who can produce cane sugar in Central America, Africa and the Caribbean at half the cost of beet sugar in Minnesota and Michigan.

Of course, there's no free lunch, and this sweet trade protection comes at the expense of American consumers and U.S. sugar-using businesses, who have been forced to pay twice the world price of sugar on average since 1982

The info is quite wildly available. Regan made sure farmers with no reason to be farming sugar (Because of climate) , were protected and allowed other nations to suffer economically ( Thuss being unable to feed themselves ), in fact creating the "Drug problem" when those farmers switched to a cash crop.

I don't really want to hear how its "Financially not viable" when we spend BILLIONS a year just on sugar alone. All in the name of the free market?  

Enjoy your kitkat.

This is just sugar, we can talk corn next, the keystone to about 90% of products in the USA.

[Khaldun]

What's real food if not organic? (I'm being devil's advocate: I happen to believe in more or less the same idea, but it's not self-evident).

Just keep in mind (and Oliver should too) when you're envisioning something that has never been. This is one of the things that really gets under my skin as a historian: when people invoke an implicit idea that today, we do something wrong that our sainted ancestors did not do, that we've lost our way, that once upon a time the world ate natural shit, what have you. If you are trying to think of a modern, industrialized state that seriously, deliberately, incentivizes healthy food consumption without being a nanny state, that is totally right-thinking about agricultural subsidies, and so on, seriously, this is way bigger than some well-meaning git telling fatties in West Virginia to stop eating chicken nuggets. I get fucking annoyed when people are having big visions and act like they're little, natural, obvious ones.  That's self-righteousness in a nutshell, when utopians with big dreams act like what they're talking about is the equivalent of getting the 7-11 to carry a different brand of Big Gulp Soda or something.

I have big dreams too, just I don't want to mistake them for my small-minded sneering at the dude I didn't like on the subway last week or for my well-meaning preaching to people who view me as sweetly stupid about their real life situations.

[Numtini]

What's real food if not organic?

The chicken we eat is neither organic nor is it local. It's raised on a factory farm somewhere probably in Arkansas. But it is a chicken. It brings in the problems of factory farming and industrial corn, which is what it ate, but it's still a chicken. In terms of what it does to our bodies, it's pretty much the same thing that chicken did to our bodies 50 or 100 years ago.

A chicken nugget is not a chicken. It's a mixture of HFCS, artificially modified trans-fats, flavor enhancers, and chicken from god only knows how many birds mixed into a soup and extruded from a machine and coated with equally artificial "bread crumbs." That's not real food. It's an industrial product. And it's an industrial product specifically designed to be "craveable" in order to promote eating more of it, which on behalf of the corporation is simply to enhance sales, but on a consumer basis can be traced directly to health problems from both the contents and the amount consumed.

Look at the humble Dorito. One of the few non-real food things I eat. The things are designed to push buttons in your brain to make you eat more more more. I love corn on the cob and I slather it with lots and lots and lots of real butter, but I challenge anyone to tell me they would eat as much corn on the cob in pure volume as they do Doritos.

[Ironwood]

Elena might.

 

[Nebu]

A chicken nugget is not a chicken. It's a mixture of HFCS, artificially modified trans-fats, flavor enhancers, and chicken from god only knows how many birds mixed into a soup and extruded from a machine and coated with equally artificial "bread crumbs." That's not real food. It's an industrial product.

Do hotdogs next!   

[Xanthippe]

Right now, Schools are teaching bad eating habits. Those of you who keep saying its the parents role ( Its both ), have the schools going against anything you are trying to do.

It depends upon the community in which you live.  In my hippy dippy community, the schools are going against everything the parents are doing - by providing fresh healthy food, much of which ends up in the trash in favor of the snack bag of Doritos and candy bar brought from home.  Parents who care about their kids' nutrition pack their kids' lunches.  The free-lunchers don't complain about the food.  The vast majority of them are either illegal immigrants or the children of illegal immigrants.  (Roughly 35% of our elementary school population).

In the US, the National School Lunch Program has come a long way from its inception a hundred years ago or so, when kids actually did not have enough to eat and suffered from malnutrition due to a lack of food.  We, as a country, as so rich now that our poor suffer from being too fat.

How do you teach people about food if they just don't care?  There are some parents who don't qualify for the NSLP but they also don't provide a lunch for their kids or lunch money for them.  (Fortunately they are few but unfortunately they do exist). 

Further, are we creating a culture of entitlement?  The more people depend upon others to provide, the less they depend upon themselves.  (Going even further off tangent, I've noticed a difference over the years in the type of illegal immigrants we're getting in my community, since we became a sanctuary city for illegals.  People who don't even speak Spanish; they speak their native language.  Illegal immigrants no longer keep a low profile, and sign up for whatever free help they can get. Not only are they coming to the US for employment or the chance to get ahead, but coming here to take advantage of social welfare problems.  This represents an enormous cost to the state - billions each year in medical costs, educational costs, and so on.)

[KallDrexx]

Right now, Schools are teaching bad eating habits. Those of you who keep saying its the parents role ( Its both ), have the schools going against anything you are trying to do.

It depends upon the community in which you live.  In my hippy dippy community, the schools are going against everything the parents are doing - by providing fresh healthy food, much of which ends up in the trash in favor of the snack bag of Doritos and candy bar brought from home. 

That's true too.  I knew kids whose parents packed them fruit and they would sometimes throw it out cause they didn't want to eat it, or threw away their whole lunch because they would rather have the pizza in the lunch line.

In the end it's up to parents, not schools.  If parents don't teach their kids to eat healthy and to like eating healthy then nothing the school system is going to do is going to change the kid's health, and instead will just waste money.  So many parents have to force their kids to eat vegetables against their will, and they do it badly to the point where the kids feel liberated when out at school and they have the freedom to eat anything they want. 

[Mrbloodworth]

They are kids.

If parents don't teach their kids to eat healthy and to like eating healthy then nothing the school system is going to do is going to change the kid's health, and instead will just waste money.

This is wrong. 

[KallDrexx]

If parents don't teach their kids to eat healthy and to like eating healthy then nothing the school system is going to do is going to change the kid's health, and instead will just waste money.

This is wrong.  

Care to elaborate?  Most parents I have seen punish their kids for not eating their vegetables instead of reward them (You must sit here until you finish your plate, etc..) instead of rewarding them for eating them on their own accord.  Them, being kids, will then go to school where they have complete freedom to choose which of their options they are going to eat and they are going to avoid the foods that their parents force them to eat and eat the foods they want to eat because they have no repercussions for doing so outside of parental supervision.  If parents aren't teaching their kids to want to eat vegetables and other healthy food, it doesn't matter what schools do.

[Mrbloodworth]

I disagree with the notion that the school has influence at all. I don't disagree that kids are kids. I believe both must be working together, your example was simply the reverse of what I said earlier.

Anything you are trying to do will be reversed by what schools are teaching kids about food in the cafeteria.

[KallDrexx]

I disagree with the notion that the school has influence at all. I don't disagree that kids are kids. I believe both must be working together, your example was simply the reverse of what I said earlier.

Anything you are trying to do will be reversed by what schools are teaching kids about food in the cafeteria.

Do you mean you disagree in the notion that the school does not have any influence at all?  Cause I'm arguing that the school's influence is negligible in this regard.

[Mrbloodworth]

Yes, typo on my part.

[Goumindong]

A chicken nugget is not a chicken. It's a mixture of HFCS, artificially modified trans-fats, flavor enhancers, and chicken from god only knows how many birds mixed into a soup and extruded from a machine and coated with equally artificial "bread crumbs." That's not real food.

chicken nuggets don't actually have any HFCS in them.The sauce does of course, but not the actual nuggets.

In the US, the National School Lunch Program has come a long way from its inception a hundred years ago or so, when kids actually did not have enough to eat and suffered from malnutrition due to a lack of food.  We, as a country, as so rich now that our poor suffer from being too fat.

This actually has nothing to do with the amount of consumption that you do. Your body regulates your energy use based on the types of foods that you eat. In short, if you eat worse foods you will both use less energy AND get fat without increasing your caloric intake.

[Xanthippe]

I disagree with the notion that the school has influence at all. I don't disagree that kids are kids. I believe both must be working together, your example was simply the reverse of what I said earlier.

Anything you are trying to do will be reversed by what schools are teaching kids about food in the cafeteria.

The child will decide what to eat.  It's one thing almost entirely in a kid's control.

One of my kids is an extremely picky eater.  (Fortunately, the other is not, so at least I know that I didn't make him a picky eater by my actions, just my genes, I guess).  He has never eaten any school lunch.  The list of things he will eat can be counted on one's fingers.  It's maddening and challenging to deal with, and he has been this way since he was about 3 (he's now almost 15).

With such a child, all a parent can do is provide healthy food choices, but a child will decide what to eat, when to eat, and so on.

I think that what schools ought to be doing is the same thing.  Provide healthy choices.  If it ends up in the trash, then tough. 

[Mrbloodworth]

I believe we are saying the same things Xanthippe.

A chicken nugget is not a chicken. It's a mixture of HFCS, artificially modified trans-fats, flavor enhancers, and chicken from god only knows how many birds mixed into a soup and extruded from a machine and coated with equally artificial "bread crumbs." That's not real food.

chicken nuggets don't actually have any HFCS in them.The sauce does of course, but not the actual nuggets.

You may wish to look again, its in the breading of most low dollar nuggets. Fuck, its in like 90% of foodstuffs now.

[Nebu]

Your body regulates your energy use based on the types of foods that you eat. In short, if you eat worse foods you will both use less energy AND get fat without increasing your caloric intake.

The first part is mostly correct in that the complexity of the carbohydrate dictates insulin spikes and digestion time.  I'm confused about the second statement.  BMR is complex and determined by a number of factors including muscle mass, endocrine signalling cascades, and level of activity (mental and physical).  Biochemically speaking, how will eating "worse" foods cause you to use less energy?  What do you mean biochemically when you say "worse foods"?

[Goumindong]

Your body regulates your energy use based on the types of foods that you eat. In short, if you eat worse foods you will both use less energy AND get fat without increasing your caloric intake.

The first part is mostly correct in that the complexity of the carbohydrate dictates insulin spikes and digestion time.  I'm confused about the second statement.  BMR is complex and determined by a number of factors including muscle mass, endocrine signalling cascades, and level of activity (mental and physical).  Biochemically speaking, how will eating "worse" foods cause you to use less energy?  What do you mean biochemically when you say "worse foods"?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

[Trippy]

That guy is an idiot.

[Nebu]

That guy is an idiot.

The guy may be arrogant and working a bit to push his research interests, but he's certainly no idiot. 

Thanks for the link.  While he abbreviates a few things and (grossly) oversimplifies others, his message largely rings true. 

[Trippy]

http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/01/29/the-bitter-truth-about-fructose-alarmism/
http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/02/19/a-retrospective-of-the-fructose-alarmism-debate/

[Samwise]

 

[Ingmar]

So two science-y people both saying plausible-sounding things and supplying reasonble-sounding studies to back them up, and disagreeing with each other totally. I think I am just going to stick with "less calories = less pounds" since that seems to work.

[Xanthippe]

After recalling the hysteria over butter and eggs that started in the 70s, and how if you ate them regularly you'd keel over dead by 50 of a heart attack, now only to find that butter is better for you than margarine (but good to limit since it's a fat) and eggs are very good for you and dietary cholesterol doesn't translate into high cholesterol for everybody, I take new theories about diet and food with a grain of salt.

Reminds me of this scene from Sleeper (old Woody Allen movie):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yCeFmn_e2c

[Nebu]

http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/01/29/the-bitter-truth-about-fructose-alarmism/
http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/02/19/a-retrospective-of-the-fructose-alarmism-debate/

I agree that Lustig's work has holes.  I also agree that Lustig's talk is a bit sensational.  It has to be if he wishes to continue to fund it.  Keep in mind that successful science is every bit as much about marketing your work as any other venture.  Saying that obesity has multiple contributors is easy.  Proving which and by what proportion, well... that's harder and takes a considerable amount of capital. 

I enjoyed Lustig's talk because it reminded of the complexity of systemic versus hepatic metabolism.  He covered many of the primary pathways for the handling of fructose and hit on several key connections that make sense scientifically.  Is it alarmist?  Sure.  Scientists have been making a big deal about their work for decades.  It gets them press time which garners notariety and often funding.  If nothing else, it pays him to fly to universities and do his dog and pony show.

[lamaros]

http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/01/29/the-bitter-truth-about-fructose-alarmism/
http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/02/19/a-retrospective-of-the-fructose-alarmism-debate/

I agree that Lustig's work has holes.  I also agree that Lustig's talk is a bit sensational.  It has to be if he wishes to continue to fund it.  Keep in mind that successful science is every bit as much about marketing your work as any other venture.  Saying that obesity has multiple contributors is easy.  Proving which and by what proportion, well... that's harder and takes a considerable amount of capital. 

I enjoyed Lustig's talk because it reminded of the complexity of systemic versus hepatic metabolism.  He covered many of the primary pathways for the handling of fructose and hit on several key connections that make sense scientifically.  Is it alarmist?  Sure.  Scientists have been making a big deal about their work for decades.  It gets them press time which garners notariety and often funding.  If nothing else, it pays him to fly to universities and do his dog and pony show.

I like you Nebu, but I no longer feel like you are truly interested in my well being since you got that new avatar...

[CmdrSlack]

So, basically, science is doing its job by having two reasonably logical hypotheses duke it out?

[NowhereMan]

I think more that's what's happening but dressed up in large blinking neon signs to attract attention from the media and thus funding.

I think the basic point Lustig makes, that high quantities of fructose combined with a more sedentary lifestyle could be a much more significant contributor to obesity rates and associated health problems than the calorie levels alone would suggest. The whole 'fructose is toxic and will kill you dead' stuff seems pretty dubious but then that's the part that gets attention.

[CmdrSlack]

Well, there's big trouble in River City.

[Goumindong]

http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/01/29/the-bitter-truth-about-fructose-alarmism/
http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/02/19/a-retrospective-of-the-fructose-alarmism-debate/

If you read that and think that Lustig is an idiot then you have got issues of your own. The complaints are not that the science is wrong, but that its presented in a way that isn't parsimonious.

But parsimonious presentations are only good for scientists. The people that this talk is aimed at are not scientists (yes, even with the biochem, the idea is to go over the broad strokes of the process and why its bad, not to talk to scientists about biochem) it is aimed at people who otherwise say "oh hey, its totally bad for me to eat meat but this spaghetti is just fine."

[Mrbloodworth]

Flavored Milk Banned In LA Schools

LAUSD joins a growing number of school districts nationwide, including in the District of Columbia, Boulder Valley, Colo., and Berkeley, Calif., that serve only plain milk because of the added sugar contained in flavored versions.

The proposal by Superintendent John Deasy came after popular British TV chef Jamie Oliver criticized the district in recent months for serving flavored milks, saying they contain the sugar equivalent of a candy bar.