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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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?

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