Comment by ClumsyPilot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ClumsyPilot | Hacker News Reader

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> How did we end up in a place where you need to make food in pharma-grade cleanliness facilities unless you want to be sued into bankruptcy.

Wtf is this. The problem is the opposite.

How did we end up in a place where one simple food 'may contain' one million ingriedients where its being made in a giant factory, not a kitchen.

My mother has a lethal allergy to shrimp and crab. Do you have shrimp and crab in your kitchen or not? its a basic question. If we go to a coffe shop the anawer is no. We go to a british pub, answer is no. In fact for 90% pf establishments the answer is no, we have no shrimp on the menu at all.

If you handle every ingredient under the sun in one giant factory, that's your fault. I you put weired additives like shrimp-derives food colorings, thats again your fault. If you put gluten into chocolate bars, even thought it's not suppose to be there, and you call something bread even though it cannot be legally called bread in france and you loose a lawsuit because your chicken nuggets contain less than 50% chicken, thats again on you.

This is an underrated comment. This is a problem of ending up in a world where our food is mass-produced in factories. Food should be cooked in kitchens, not be manufactured in factories with contaminants blowing around. You should be easily able to know what's in your food because you wash it off and put it there when you cook it. There is a federal limit on how much rodent hair, feces, maggots, and mold can be in your food when it comes off the assembly line and it's non-zero[1].

1: https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/04/health/insect-rodent-filth-in...

People buy mass produced because it’s way cheaper

I just watched a video of a candy cane assembly line that made thousands of canes per hour.

If I had to pay a small shop to make that candy cane, I honestly wouldn’t. I don’t have the kind of money for the little things that I may want but not super bad

Of course, you could argue for a lifestyle where you just appreciate a small set of things but it seems people like experiencing more things in life than fewer

It's a chicken and egg problem.

Does industrial production of cheap food make people choose cheap food, or would people rather cook but they only have time and funds to afford the cheap food?

Similar to the agricultural revolution, material need outpaced free lifestyle choices. Nobody chose, either the workers or the factories, but it's where we are.

And when you live in a world with 8 billion people, that’s a lot of food to sell.

There is probably some middleground

The beef is with ingridients, not automation per se.

> If I had to pay a small shop to make that candy cane, I honestly wouldn’t.

Would that be such a bad thing, though? How many candy canes can someone reasonably eat in one holiday season?

You can give them away and make someone day’s better though

This is living in a fantasy world. You’re not feeding 330M people in the US without factory automation handling most of the work.

Well, you can, if you want to pay 3x for your food because of the lack of scale and increase need for manual labor.

No thanks.

Raw ingredients will always be cheaper than food produced in a factory. If not in monetary cost then in the cost to your health.

Of course raw ingredients are cheaper but nobody eats raw ingredients?

most people cook at home? When I buy a whole chicken, or a piece of beef, it doesnt say 'may contain nuts'?

What does factory-produces proccessed food have to do with this?

You're comparing very different things.

One thing is not having shrimp and crab in a kitchen that doesn't cook seafood.

Quite another is not having sesame at a bakery. Sesame is an incredibly common ingredient in most types of breads. I doubt there are many bakeries, whether "factory" bakeries or just corner bakeries, that don't have some bread with sesame, because of how popular it is.

So their choice is either to get rid of sesame entirely, or have to declare it on everything.

> How did we end up in a place where one simple food 'may contain' one million ingriedients where its being made in a giant factory, not a kitchen.

I think we got here this way:

one billion for the first time in 1804;

two billion in 1927, 123 years later;

three billion in 1960, 33 years later;

four billion in 1974, 14 years later;

five billion in 1987, 13 years later;

six billion in 1999, 12 years later;

seven billion in 2011, 12 years later;

eight billion in 2022, 11 years later;

Note that the last six billion happened so fast that probably during your mom’s lifetime

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population_milestones

Population of Ireland today is 5 million, less than in 1941 when it was 6.5 million.

How does population growth on another continent affect food production in Ireland?

Food production has undergone similar changes regardless of population

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