For most people across the world, life is getting better but diets are getting worse.
How can anyone actually be so damn stupid? The current generation is the best fed one there’s been since the invention of agriculture. At least.
Yet there are people who believe this drivel.
‘diets are getting worse’
Worse than what?
If they are still alive, their diets are acceptable.
A good varied diet contains a lot of stuff that the health fascists say is bad for you. Therefore a good varied diet is a bad diet.
Coming next:
The fact that we eat out more is evidence that we’re not getting fed properly at home.
Care home fees are so expensive because farming isn’t subsidised enough.
Chocolate from Africa doesn’t really taste good, it’s just relative to home-produced turnips and venison tasting bad.
You can link any two things you like if you try hard enough.
The point being made is that most all varieties of everything is now grown or produced for yield or convenience of processing rather than for its organoleptic qualities. I know this comes across as a bit reactionary luddite Grim Up North London artisan bakery and craft beer, but it’s true, especially in Germany, where food consumers buy almost exclusively on price. And it is the one thing that even I hate on the EU for.
Partly it’s because the modern fakery is so good, and some of the old ways genuinely unnecessary. But, even with practice, it can be difficult to tell apart, on the shelf, which cheese was still in a cow last Friday and has been speed matured (rind included) with a ton of salt, from something that is made the same way as it always has been, and has sat around going tastefully off for a while. With things like meat, pace the fact I practice almost Hitlerian levels of vegetarianism, when I do eat meat, I can’t ruin my dinner with supermarket pork or chicken any more. The good stuff is there, but involves a lot of effort to get hold of.
It is a global phenomenon. Try “stinky tofu”, a Taiwanese staple (I hate it by the way), now processed in about 24 hours rather than fermented. Or the Korean soy and spice sauce “gochu jang”, now made cheaply with millions of tons of unwanted subsidised American HFCS rather than rice malt, because the latter is more expensive. If you can find me a straight wine vinegar that is made in more than 48 hours, let me know.
British cuisine suffered immensely from the war and rationing, and the privations of decades of economic socialism only a few steps removed from what the Soviets were inflicting on the east. Arguably took until the ’90s to just get back to where it had been, at its best, in an earlier age.
So if you think stuff doesn’t taste like it used to, it isn’t just that you’re getting older!
One simply cannot allow the hoi polloi to eat what they wish to eat.
“So if you think stuff doesn’t taste like it used to, it isn’t just that you’re getting older!”
How frightfully English middle class you are, BiG . old chap. But true. Those of us who are older remember that not that long ago chicken didn’t taste like it does now because one rarely got to taste chicken. Chicken was a luxury one rarely tasted at all. As was any meat more than two or three times a week. So now everyone gets to eat meat whenever they want it? Even Germans? The horror!
BiS,
Buy a French free-range chicken that’s at least 80 days old at slaughter.
Buy a €3 supermarket chicken.
Roast and compare.
Then repeat with a piece of dry-aged beef from a proper meat breed, and a grey lump of dairy cast-off labelled as “beef” in the supermarkets.
Nothing against hoi polloi having cheap food (we all rely on it at times, some more than others), it is the crowding out that annoys me.
I remember my dad, mum, sister and I would each have 1/4 of a Fray Bentos steak and kidney pie for dinner occasionally .
Now occasionally I eat one on my own. Strangely, although they are crap and nothing like as good as they used to be with hardly any meat, I like them due to the pastry.
We all have a finite income and choose to spend it in different ways – priorities. To me food and booze is important, and accordingly it receives a disproportionate percentage of my pocket money. Am happy to spend £16 on a chicken, where other will buy three for a tenner. My local Morrison’s sells very good fruit and veg for pennies; you can eat well for relatively little. I have well-heeled friends that eat shite and are happy with a £6 bottle of wine because they don’t value these things. I try not to criticise them…each to their own.
The problem seems to be that ordinary people are wealthy enough and educated enough to make such decisions for themselves. How dare they not eat the stuff that their betters have told them is good for them?
If there is a connection then one must conclude that a worse diet makes life better.
Of course there may be a difference of opinion as to what constitutes a better or worse diet.
@Bloke in Germany March 16, 2019 at 3:49 pm
+1
Nutritous food cheap & plentiful, but lacking flavour vs expensive & scarce, but good flavour.
Give me the former any day – chicken grown in six weeks which is nice every day vs a chicken every month/year with great flavour, but potatoes every day.
@Bernie G. March 16, 2019 at 7:08 pm
…each to their own.
+1
Yep; for me one is Digestive biscuits – nothing comes close to the oral satisfaction of McVitties, I do without rather than buy alternative brand
I think that we are hitting the bottom of the cheap factory made food curve though. Many people are starting to notice that paying a bit more gets much better quality, and so we are seeing the return of slow grown chickens and beef etc. From where we are now, things will improve as producers can’t out-compete each other on cost, and will start to do so on taste.
It’s already well advanced in some areas. Modern coffee, even the chain store stuff, is light years ahead of what you could buy thirty years ago. People are prepared to pay, it seems, for better product.
I am reminded how the scare about “forced obsolescence” went. We would all have cars that lasted only three years, as manufacturers all raced to provide the cheapest possible product. Except that’s not how it worked at all, because consumers started to deliberately factor in life-span. So now modern cars can run for ten years without a single malfunction of note. Manufacturing a cheap car that lasts only a couple of years might still work in the 3rd world, but it would be a suicidal strategy in the rich world.
“One simply cannot allow the hoi polloi to eat what they wish to eat.”
If you are gonna speak forrin, do it right. “hoi” is a definite article already. No need for two of them.
I’ve noticed that brands sold as “organic” are often better quality than the cheaper stuff. I wonder whether they are really selling on quality while giving the purchaser a chance of a bit of virtue-signalling.
P.S. The Chilean Carménère at the Co-op is a decent drop at £7a bottle.
“Buy a French free-range chicken that’s at least 80 days old at slaughter.
Buy a €3 supermarket chicken.
Roast and compare.”
Curiously, I did exactly that today. Bought the latter rather than the former. Roasted with Jamaican jerk seasoning. Delicious. 2.34€ the kilo. Made a pleasant change from the campo (country) chicken the girls insist on buying which is yellow & tastes suspiciously like you’d image rat might taste if cooked straight from the sewer. It’s also about 3 times the price.
Maybe we’re just fortunate with supermarket chicken, here in Spain. Unlike Tesco’s, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose or M&S it does actually taste like chicken & doesn’t have 1/2 litre of added water per kilo.
– “The current generation is the best fed one there’s been since the invention of agriculture.”
Only in the sense that it’s never been easier or cheaper to get fat.
Life expectancy and quality of life in Western countries are propped up by billions in healthcare spending to counter the products of bad diet: diabetes, heart disease, dementia, cancer etc.
“Life expectancy and quality of life in Western countries are propped up by billions in healthcare spending to counter the products of bad diet: diabetes, heart disease, dementia, cancer etc.”
Brilliantly inaccurate. There’s no evidence worth tuppence that heart disease, dementia or cancers have anything much to do with diet.
Diabetes: decades of government propaganda, to the effect that one should spurn fats and wolf carbohydrates, has no doubt contributed massively to the problem. Other government contributions include moving the goalposts that define diabetes and paying the doctors a financial incentive to diagnose it.
“I think that we are hitting the bottom of the cheap factory made food curve though. Many people are starting to notice that paying a bit more gets much better quality, and so we are seeing the return of slow grown chickens and beef etc. From where we are now, things will improve as producers can’t out-compete each other on cost, and will start to do so on taste.”
A Kuznets Curve is hardly a surprise now, is it?
– “There’s no evidence worth tuppence that heart disease, dementia or cancers have anything much to do with diet.”
From everything I can glean nutrition is vastly determinative in deciding who gets the chronic conditions and who does not. Alzheimer’s, for example, is increasingly being referred to as Type 3 Diabetes linked, like type 2, to a diet high in processed carbohydrates resulting in hyperinsulinemia aka Insulin Resistance aka metabolic syndrome, which is also the primary driver of cardiovascular disease.
I’m not going to boor everyone further by posting links, but I will say I enjoy the informative Youtube videos of Ivor Cummins and his evidence-based engineering approach to the subject. Well worth checking out. While you’re there, investigate “vegetable oils” (seed oils) and their effects on health.
“Nothing against hoi polloi having cheap food (we all rely on it at times, some more than others), it is the crowding out that annoys me.”
I’m not sure what it’s like in Germany, but out here in Wiltshire I have organic veg box deliveries (the real benefit is the varieties used, not that it’s organic), butchers that hang meat for longer and in most supermarkets there’s longer matured cheese.
“I think that we are hitting the bottom of the cheap factory made food curve though. Many people are starting to notice that paying a bit more gets much better quality, and so we are seeing the return of slow grown chickens and beef etc. From where we are now, things will improve as producers can’t out-compete each other on cost, and will start to do so on taste.”
I’d like to think so, but try selling a 30 month Aberdeen angus v a 26 month Limosan. I can tell you which would get the better price, and which cost more to raise.
Alzheimers, heart disease etc.
I blame the rise in diseases of old age to people not dying younger in quite the same numbers as but a few decades ago.
It really is a zero-sum game – don’t die of malnutrition or disease or industrial accident before your 60’s means you’re living long enough to develop a chronic condition of old age.
So more people dying of diseases of old age is in fact the result of us living on average longer, healthier lives.
“Which would get the better price, and which cost more to raise.”
There’s probably a reason why ‘rare breed’ pork, lamb, etc. isn’t widely available: the figures don’t stack up.
dearieme,
“I’ve noticed that brands sold as “organic” are often better quality than the cheaper stuff. I wonder whether they are really selling on quality while giving the purchaser a chance of a bit of virtue-signalling.”
It’s because there’s certain “premium” aspects built into the organic standards. For example, pigs have to be free range and to roam. If you’re producing premium bacon, you’re probably already doing that. The extra hurdle of not using organic fertilisers or avoiding antibioitics aren’t a large extra leap.
People never understand this. They think organic stuff tastes great, but that’s correlation. Premium producers seek “organic” because it’s not much of a step and gets them extra customers. But I seriously doubt that you could taste the difference between wine grown with or without inorganic pesticides.
“But I seriously doubt that you could taste the difference between wine grown with or without inorganic pesticides.”
It’s a source of some considerable amusement that one of the more renown Bordeaux reds comes from a field, back of a Total service area by a major road, that’s perpetually shrouded in diesel fumes.
Speaking as someone who used to flog the stuff, UK side, there’s little more entertaining than listening to people displaying their expertise on wine. I’m regularly complimented on what I serve at home. Of course, it helps if one knows a dodgy wine supplier who’ll label cheap Spanish plonk as as anything you like providing you buy enough to be worth the printing.
@wat dabney. Then you glean wrong. The “evidence” is largely absurd rubbish. Mostly the researchers don’t even know what the subjects eat – they rely on self-reports. Mostly they follow up for at most a few years. Almost entirely they don’t do controlled studies, but rely on observational studies, so that whatever they measure – morbidity, mortality – will be hopelessly confounded by a potentially infinite number of unmeasured variables. It’s largely junk science.
@ dearieme… Chilean Carménère
Shop around all you want, but at the end of the day you are buying a £7/bottle that contains barely 30p’s worth of wine.
BoM4,
You can get good stuff but it takes some effort, or you have to go to wholesalers and buy meat in huge, often ready-frozen packs that you need to partially defrost, butcher, and re-freeze.
The German attitude is that food is fuel, not fun. A necessary evil. A combination of factors contribute to this – the country being sodding agrarian poor while the rest of Europe industrialised, isolated from the world through its own fault from industrialisation through 1945, a terrible confluence of stern protestant asceticism with catholic insistence on abstinence from worldy pleasures in general, and regional near-monopolies on supermarkets (with a genuine monopoly on the supply chain) combined with 1950s-era laws that stop them using more than a fraction of floorspace for fresh foods (ostensibly to protect the nonexistent little grocers and butchers).
Most German food consumers buy on price alone.
@bis,
It’s probably all that CO2 in the exhaust, plus the urban heat island effect, making the grapes so great.
Better make that £1.30.
First World problems. No one else cares how old their damn dinner is.
– “It’s largely junk science”
“Studies show” is of course the bane of modern science (and journalism.)
If you look at the evidence presented by the likes of Ivor Cummins you’ll find he is very careful to examine the quality and methods of the studies he cites. Which is precisely why he’s so good.
– “more people dying of diseases of old age is in fact the result of us living on average longer, healthier lives.”
It’s a fair hypothesis, but turns out not to be the case. There is nothing inevitable about these chronic conditions.
Okay, Wat, if you are going to play it that way:
“Life expectancy and quality of life in Western countries are propped up by billions in healthcare spending to counter the products of bad diet: diabetes,”
The cause of diabetes is unknown. UNKNOWN. YOU ARE FULL OF SHIT TO ATTRIBUTE IT TO DIET.
is nothing inevitable about these chronic conditions.
Indeed not. I expect we all know people in their 90s who are hale, hearty and have retained their mental faculties. Similarly, we all know people who smoked 40 a day all their lives and never got lung cancer, but that doesn’t prove that there’s no link with smoking.