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Comment by stakhanov | Hacker News Reader

That reminds me of the episode that Jamie Oliver did, where he tried to prove that he could make healthy and delicious (to him) school meals, while staying inside the budget, at scale, as an alternative to fishsticks with chips (as in french fries) and peas, which he considers unhealthy. He succeeded with his culinary mission. And then, none of the kids actually chose his lunch. They wanted the fishsticks.

Personally, I don't think there's anything wrong with fishsticks, chips, and peas. (It also doesn't meet the criteria for ultra-processed, if I correctly understand the term, so it's a bit off topic here). The chips are just potatoes and oil. The fishsticks are actual fish (cut into stick form while frozen) with breading. The peas are ...well, peas.

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> Not that there's anything wrong with fishsticks, chips, and peas. It's actually not ultra-processed, if I correctly understand the term. The chips are just potatoes and oil. The fishsticks are actual fish (cut into stick form while frozen) with breading. The peas are ...well, peas.

Some chips are re-hydrated mechanically digested potato flakes with a dozen different binders, preservatives, and stabilizers, and most budget fish sticks are half miscellaneous whitefish scrap and half breading made from stripped grain and a dozen different binders, preservatives, and stabilizers.

So mileage does vary a little on that.

So? Is that like dihydrogen monoxide? If it is actually bad, ban it everywhere and not just school lunches. Otherwise, the nutrition seems like a much more important issue than "rehydrated".

Aren't there pretty stringent rules on what they have to list as ingredients on the packaging? At least where I live (in Germany), I would have thought so.

And when I buy chips, the ingredients list lists exactly two things: potatoes and sunflower oil.

The fishsticks that I buy ("iglo", the procter & gamble brand, and I get the gluten-free ones) list a specific species of fish, then rice flour, chickpea flour, salt, corn flour, canola oil, water, potato starch, starches from peas. Plus MSC certification. That doesn't really sound objectionable to me.

Deep-fried foods are pretty much inherently unhealthy. The oil, often cheap and having a poor fatty acid profile to begin with, is repeatedly heated to high temperatures and reused for up to weeks at a time. It oxidizes, forming free radicals that increase oxidative stress and cellular damage. I'm sure it's fine to indulge now and then, but it's bad, bad stuff to build a diet on.

You just wrote "inherent", and then you gave a reason that's not inherent to the process of deep-frying. If the use of poor quality oils, and their repeated use are problems, then let's write those into the fda rulebook (and international equivalents), but let's not just say that "deep-frying is bad for you", and condemn the whole enterprise of industrial food processing along with it.

There is a lot of "assuming the worst" going on in this thread and surrounding the topic of "processed foods" in general.

My concern is that turning our backs on industrial food processing is a luxury that many of us simply can't afford, either financially, or in terms of the practicalities of making our lives work.

There may be a lot of things that frequently happen in the processing of foods that lead to bad health outcomes, and the consumption of a diet rich in processed foods may strongly correlate with bad health outcomes, but saying "processed foods are bad for you" is doing a lousy job of identifying in a causative sense what exactly it is that's bad for you, and it's also a "luxury belief" in the sense that Rob Henderson has been talking about [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33547954

Healthy deep frying (if it’s even possible) would be very expensive due to the high waste/use of oil, and I’m not sure most customers would like the taste of foods fried in avocado or olive oil (which, also, are more expensive).

Children don't get to decide what they want to eat otherwise it would be pancakes and french fries every day.

Children may not get a choice in whats on their plate, but they do have a choice in what goes in their mouth. Schools cannot force a child to consume anything, and the kids are free to toss all the food given to them into the trash, and they do, but not totally, some of that food appears in places other than the trash.

So now what?

Kids, who as a category have no income, have a Hobson's Choice: eat or go hungry.

The UK also has (or recently had, I no longer follow news from there) a significant poverty rate such that lunch was some school kids' first meal of the day, and free school meals was a significant political issue.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/01/number-of-uk...

Kids, who as a category have no income, have a Hobson's Choice: eat or go hungry.

The problem is that if kids don't eat lunch and go hungry that will negatively affect their ability to learn. As such offering less healthy food that they actually eat might very well be better than healthy food that they don't eat.

This is a problem for society, it doesn't enter the minds of the kids.

If the only meal is literal dog food, hungry kids will eat it direct from the container — a fact I know thanks to a real-life experience of an ex-girlfriend who was trying to be helpful and charitable but had a fit of middle-class naïveté after finding a puppy in a school in Kawangware.

My point was a lot simpler than that, namely: Food/nutrition snobs are made, not born.

And having seen some videos... I am not entirely sure Jamie Oliver knows exactly what is delicious...

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