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Comment by comrade1 | Hacker News Reader

Since moving to Switzerland I've learned how much better the basic old-fashioned foodstuffs are. Mayo made with egg, oil, vinegar, lemon, and mustard. No preservatives. Bread made the day you eat it, no preservatives. Amazing cheese. Amazing, but expensive, meat. The same ingredients in the u.s. are disgusting - flavorless chicken and pork, sour beef, horrible bread...

This stuff that's popular in s.f. right now seems like a step backwards to 1950s 'high-tech' food. First slurm or whatever that gray goop was, and now mayonnaise made with peas. Yeah, sounds great.

Edit: wanted to mention the sausage/salami too. Sausage made with raw pork and non pasteurized is just incredible. They've been making it this way for a thousand years. There no need to pasteurize it. Sausage in the u.s. is a pale comparison.

And also the flour is different here too - gives better croissants and bread.

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> The same ingredients in the u.s. are disgusting - flavorless chicken and pork, sour beef, horrible bread...

Of course. Most of the mass produced stuff is horrible. Think about pork for example. They even put on the "other white meat" branding. Pork isn't supposed to be white. Now if you want to say that about a lot of the beautiful heirloom-y meats and produce in the farmers markets in the US, you're absolutely incorrect.

> This stuff that's popular in s.f. right now seems like a step backwards to 1950s 'high-tech' food. First slurm or whatever that gray goop was, and now mayonnaise made with peas. Yeah, sounds great.

Actually, the just mayo is fairly decent. I make my own mayo most of the time, but I can see where they're coming from with it. It's got some nice acidity and is smooth like homemade. They're also having some of the best chefs in the world working with the stuff to make sure it's up there from a quality perspective. Also, they're trying to attack things from a sustainability perspective which is pretty interesting. Is it worth it that the 6 eggs you used to make mayo cost around 300 gallons of water to make? Combine that with the fact that most factory farmed eggs taste horrible to begin with. I'm happy some place is looking at the quality _and_ sustainability.

Where does the 50 gallons of water/egg figure come from?

I've got chickens, they don't drink that much water and they don't eat that much food.

I've seen numbers from 30 to 120. I think GRACE says 53 per egg. American water says 120. Orange county water says 36 gallons, etc. It's all over the board and it depends what they're including. For straight up water, I've heard an individual hen is probably a bit less than a pint of water per day. They then start including things like how much water is used to grow the grain they feed the birds (about a half cup day per). It all depends on what's _actually_ included (as well as things like egg laying / lifetimes (hens don't get into the thick of it until probably around 6 months in)).

Unfortunately I've never been able to find a _real_ number which is indicative of the food cycle, etc.

I was curious about this, based on a cursory search it looks like the water claims are because the grain that most megafarm chickens are fed is a water-intensive grain.

It looks like one loaf of bread is supposedly 288 gallons of water due to the wheat.

What's popular in S.F. right now isn't that, it's hipster food with locally-sourced ingredients. It's pricey and complicated, but well made. The people doing it care about their craft. It does lack the old-fashioned quality you're talking about, though.

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