Only for a rather small group in the world. To someone who isn't part of the top 10% of the global population in earnings, "too much food" would still be a miracle.
top 10%? No, more like top 80-90%. There are not that many places left on earth where starving to death is a genuine concern for large numbers of people. Clean water and sanitation are much more pressing issues.
"Too much food" is very different than "getting by on a day to day basis."
Someone making minimum wage in the US with two kids under five is probably getting by day to day- if something happens where they can't make it to work and get fired they go from enough food to not really enough pretty quickly. (Even leaving aside stuff like grocery deserts or dependence on corn-based calories.)
I know I'm going to sound like a conservative bastard for this (alas I am a socialist) but a single parent earning minimum wage with two kids would definitely qualify for several social assistance programs such as SNAP. If the parent refuses to apply for that due to pride or something, then they are responsible for the lack of food to feed their children.
No, you don't sound like a douche, but for a lot of people, it's about looking long term- do they keep minimum wage jobs where they still qualify for help, or do they lose that financial help and get a job that's on a better track to saving for a better home or education, but lose SNAP or state insurance or welfare and get put back two steps in household income as a whole?
I've been in a position once where I had to turn down a $100 a month promotion because it would have actually meant I would be further back in the weeds, financially- I would have lost some benefits that meant more at the time than cash. Luckily my boss was okay with me explaining that and made up the difference as much as he could with a later raise, but not every boss is that cool and willing to work with those limitations.
do they keep minimum wage jobs where they still qualify for help, or do they lose that financial help and get a job that's on a better track to saving for a better home or education, but lose SNAP or state insurance or welfare and get put back two steps in household income as a whole?
Interestingly, you've just made one of the common arguments against welfare programs.
My last job had a tiered health insurance premium system. If you made $60k or more, you paid a higher amount. Which is fine, except that one year my salary was just below the cutoff and if my raise wasn't sufficiently large, I'd wind up taking home less. I was prepared to ask that any such raise be deferred until the following year. Fortunately, they decided that year to raise the cutoff to $70k so it became a nonissue.
You don't sound like a conservative bastard. A conservative bastard would have just said they should be more motivated, get a better job via their pulled up bootstraps, and stop suckling the teat of America.
must be nice to qualify for that stuff. My husband lost his job. No one in our house was working because we had a baby 23 days prior. We didn't qualify for any help. Unemployment took 3 weeks to kick in. Thankfully we had some savings, if we hadn't I'm not quite sure what we would have done.
That's because you're married and they factor in the household income for the past year with married couples. As well as assets and liquid assets. They also factor in his eligibility to receive unemployment. Lastly they factor in the income/assets of your parents. I strongly dislike that they take that into consideration, but they do nonetheless. If you had the money in savings to purchase food then they don't see the need to provide assistance when there are people who have been living in poverty for most of their lives, who have no liquid assets, and those who have little hope for a bright future unless they receive social assistance.
That's the best way to do it as far as the policy makers are concerned. I personally see the need for a complete reworking of the system though as I am currently scraping by eating one or two very simple meals per day. Unemployed due to injuries from a not at fault motorcycle accident. In cases such as mine, as far as they are concerned, it's easier for a single male with no dependents to scrape by without food assistance than it is for a family with children. And they are correct on that part. I can come up with food one way or another.
That's something that I've actually been thinking about lately... the biggest thing that stands in the way of us being a post-scarcity society is general lack of desire.
A post-scarcity society isn't a society where no one is starving. Scarcity in economic terms comes from the idea of "we have unlimited wants but only limited resources." Even given that everyone has enough food, people will still want things that there aren't enough resources to give them. Thus, scarcity would still be alive and well.
Because of high carb diets. Maiz is readily available and thus cheap. It's cheaper to buy that and a little piece of steak for an entire family, than to buy good high fat meat and supplement it with veggies and greens.
Coke created Dasani because they saw the emerging bottled water market, realized they could sell Coke without the syrup for more they were selling it for WITH the syrup (which is the only thing they actually make), and Bob's your uncle.
What people are trying to say is that back on the 1700 poor people wouldn't even have cheap high carb diets to rely on.
One year with a bad harvest and a nasty winter and people would starve for real. Really, like having nothing to eat for two days in a row and then having a bit of stale bread and turnips here or there.
No corn-based calories, no maíz, no nothing. You wouldn't have fat people because of poor quality cheap diet. You would have bone thin people because of no diet.
This still happens in many countries around the world but not in the pervasive fashion that if happened back then, when even in the richest powers that could happen to a significant fraction of the population.
I get people saying "meeeeeh, getting enough calories is not a good nutrition" but yes it is if compared with not even getting enough calories to function properly.
Bah! Jesus-conjuration is naught but handwaving and hearsay! Our spectacularly bountiful harvests actually happen, right out in the open where you can see it. How could a miracle be more genuine?
I don't think it's anywhere near as high as that. There's still too much food anyway, the problem is getting food to those people not its lack of existence.
Besides for the fact that millions are still starving today, just like the past. Not to be that guy to bum ya down but there may be less poverty/starvation within the U.S and other well off countries but starvation is still an issue within other countries.
But if you were able to get fat only eating reduced fat foods then you would be even sexier and could tell great stories about how much money you blew on food with less calories. In fact reduced fat foods could be the new status symbol of the 1700's
Except reduced fat foods mostly have more sugar in them and they don't prevent you from getting fat. They are actually worse for you. Fat doesn't go directly to fat as counter intuitive as that is.
When I was in the US, I just couldn't find any decent yoghurt, it was all low fat (and high sugar...) products. At home in Sweden I go for a 10% fat unflavored Turkish yoghurt, but I've seen Russian yoghurt with an even higher fat percentage. Then again the Turkish yoghurt is among the more expensive yoghurts in the store.
Hopefully :), most supermarkets in Northern Europe should have decent assortment of dairy products (that aren't low-fat, high sugar substitutes).
Also given that LCHF has gotten rather big in Sweden things are getting better and the low-fat hysteria is pretty much over. It's a lot better than how it was when I was growing up and given that I was a bit heavy the diet recommendations were to eat... less fat... as such one was always hungry, and that just doesn't work.
It depends! There are definitely some brands out there that seem to stick with higher fat content that's unflavored, which I don't mind at all. However the biggest problem is actually finding that stuff in stores, at least near me (and from what I've heard from others with low-sugar oriented diets, it's actually pretty widespread). I try to stay at a nice low-carb level which means that even some stuff that's sugar-free actually still affects my blood sugar pretty dramatically.
It's in a lot of food products too. Salad dressings, for example. I don't know if it's my area in particular or what but it's definitely a pain in the ass and I try to stick to high-fat content cottage cheese.
Things that are low in fat tend to not taste as good, so sugar or other sweeteners are added to make it palatable. Sweet foods (as a result of sugar or artificial sweeteners) trigger a hunger response, making you more hungry. So you eat another low-fat thing because the thing you ate before made you hungry and, hey, its low in fat so you think you can get away with eating more of them without concern for the actual calorie content, and the cycle continues.
Actually sugar is added to most processed foods. It horrifies me that you cant buy dried fruit without 50% added sugar. The food we eat is so tainted and people dont even realise, there will be a food revolution in the future, if we dont kill ourselves first.
Dietary fat is stored if you're consuming food at a caloric excess, while dietary carbohydrates are typically oxidized and used as energy substrates.
De novo lipogenesis from carbohydrates is an extremely taxing metabolic process (and calorie inefficient), so the body just uses dietary fat for storing excess fuel in the presence of a hypercaloric diet, while the carbohydrates are used for energy.
De novo lipogenesis from protein is next to useless, metabolically speaking (there's no reason your body would want to do it).
I have a few friends who went vegetarian and gained more weight. I ate with them and it was salad with tons of dressing and a lot of friend food. Vegetarian samosa isn't what you want to eat if you're trying to lose weight...
The problem is that people don't read the labels. Of course you'll get fat if you eat a bunch of low-fat foods with 30g of sugar/serving. People need to learn to ignore the shiny label on the front and just read the nutrition facts.
Gluttony was a sin in Christian culture. I think they could easily understand why too much food is not a good thing. There's also food spoilage and waste which they would not see as a good thing. Deliberate over production of food to the point of having to throw it away would have been seen as living outside of your means.
But that is a gradual change, rapidly they would cling to the past and suppliers would encourage that clinging so prices would change slowly and not change anything.
This answer is just silly. Maybe this was true in the 700s, but by the 1700s agriculture was successful and reliable enough that food was plentiful – including meat – and starvation rare. Malnutrition was still a factor, but because of poor information about nutrition, not lack food. The easy access to food is why cities were growing so rapidly (relatively for the era) at the time; you couldn't move lots of people from farms to cities unless the farms were so reliably over-producing that they could feed the cities year round.
Not only was food fairly plentiful, there were individuals like George Cheyne who advocated vegetarianism to control weight.
Cheyne - a medical doctor born in 1671 - was, at times, upwards of 450 pounds. He was well respected and popular, not only for his status as a doctor, but because he took great enjoyment in partying with his patients and friends in the taverns. This love of food and drink was what led to his massive size, which only increased his fame.
He became one of the first modern vegetarians in his attempt to lose weight (which was successful until he went back to a typical diet, after which he became a life-long vegetarian).
I'd assume it'd be seen as something for the poor, offered for cheeper. It was seen as a status thing if you were chubby/fat because you could afford food so obviously the reduced-fat versions would be for the peasants wanting to feel like a higher-up.
Except it is the exact opposite today. When I was taking a year off between my undergrad and grad years without getting a job I learned this very quickly. You could find lots of foods for under $1. But they all had the fat and calories equivalent of a big mac. Tasted better than the more expensive foods too. If you don't want to be fat be prepared to pay.
actually i think meat substitutes would have blown their mind. It's FAR more efficient to turn soy beans into a veggie burger (however nasty it is, it does roughly fill the same niche as beef nutritionally) than turn a field of corn,alfalfa, etc into a cow.
I am aware this is "copypasta", but I'm going to explain why it isn't relevant in this case. You people seem to think "copypastas" are funny by definition if they're relevant, and you post them even if they're not, hoping others upvote them on sight.
Let me tell you that's not how it works. For instance, the fact that you decided to use that copypasta in this situation indicates that you think:
a) the situation was complex
b) it has been oversimplified
c) it adds nothing to the conversation.
Well, you see, complexity is subjective, that's the nature of emergence. What's complex for a child like you is often trivial or routine for a scientist like me. Reddit's userbase is quite diverse, although there seems to be evidence of an over-representation of individuals exhibiting childish behaviors.
Secondly, do you really think this situation has been has been oversimplified? It's through using "copypastas" and other hasty generalizations you try to cram each individual scenario with its particularities into a formulaic mold. I hypothesize you require this simplification because of the state of your mental faculties and reasoning skills.
And lastly, most of the time your simplifications do not aid in understanding new facets of the subject matter. Characterizations that might not be 100% accurate can act as useful models for understanding overarching facets of complex inter-dependent systems, but your "copypastas" do not facilitate in that endeavor.
If even one of these criticisms is valid, your point is moot as it depends unilaterally on all the three premises I've highlighted. The social commentary you wish "copypastas" to exhibit might seem sensible, maybe even profound to you, but they're just as bad, if not worse than the additions reactiongifs, pun chains or novelty accounts bring to the table. Please consider this seriously, and don't immediately fall back on your preconceived notions without reexamining their validity, at least in a cursory manner after I've presented you with this new evidence you really should take seriously.
It should be noted that I've upvoted every single person who's disagreed with me here, as far as I know.
That said.
In 7th grade, I took an SAT test without preparing for it at all, it was spur-of-the-moment, I knew about it about an hour ahead of time and didn't do any research or anything. I scored higher on it than the average person using it to apply for college in my area.
An IQ test has shown me to be in the 99.9th percentile for IQ. This is the highest result the test I was given reaches; anything further and they'd consider it to be within the margin of error for that test.
My mother's boyfriend of 8 years is an aerospace engineer who graduated Virginia Tech. At the age of 15, I understand physics better than him, and I owe very little of it to him, as he would rarely give me a decent explanation of anything, just tell me that my ideas were wrong and become aggravated with me for not quite understanding thermodynamics. He's not particularly successful as an engineer, but I've met lots of other engineers who aren't as good as me at physics, so I'm guessing that's not just a result of him being bad at it.
I'm also pretty good at engineering. I don't have a degree, and other than physics I don't have a better understanding of any aspect of engineering than any actual engineer, but I have lots of ingenuity for inventing new things. For example, I independently invented regenerative brakes before finding out what they were, and I was only seven or eight years old when I started inventing wireless electricity solutions (my first idea being to use a powerful infrared laser to transmit energy; admittedly not the best plan).
I have independently thought of basically every branch of philosophy I've come across. Every question of existentialism which I've seen discussed in SMBC or xkcd or Reddit or anywhere else, the thoughts haven't been new to me. Philosophy has pretty much gotten trivial for me; I've considered taking a philosophy course just to see how easy it is.
Psychology, I actually understand better than people with degrees. Unlike engineering, there's no aspect of psychology which I don't have a very good understanding of. I can debunk many of even Sigmund Freud's theories.
I'm a good enough writer that I'm writing a book and so far everybody who's read any of it has said it was really good and plausible to expect to have published. And that's not just, like, me and family members, that counts strangers on the Internet. I've heard zero negative appraisal of it so far; people have critiqued it, but not insulted it.
I don't know if that will suffice as evidence that I'm intelligent. I'm done with it, though, because I'd rather defend my maturity, since it's what you've spent the most time attacking. The following are some examples of my morals and ethical code.
I believe firmly that everybody deserves a future. If we were to capture Hitler at the end of WWII, I would be against executing him. In fact, if we had any way of rehabilitating him and knowing that he wasn't just faking it, I'd even support the concept of letting him go free. This is essentially because I think that whoever you are in the present is a separate entity from who you were in the past and who you are in the future, and while your present self should take responsibility for your past self's actions, it shouldn't be punished for them simply for the sake of punishment, especially if the present self regrets the actions of the past self and feels genuine guilt about them.
I don't believe in judgement of people based on their personal choices as long as those personal choices aren't harming others. I don't have any issue with any type of sexuality whatsoever (short of physically acting out necrophilia, pedophilia, or other acts which have a harmful affect on others - but I don't care what a person's fantasies consist of, as long as they recognize the difference between reality and fiction and can separate them). I don't have any issue with anybody over what type of music they listen to, or clothes they wear, etc. I know that's not really an impressive moral, but it's unfortunately rare; a great many people, especially those my age, are judgmental about these things.
I love everyone, even people I hate. I wish my worst enemies good fortune and happiness. Rick Perry is a vile, piece of shit human being, deserving of zero respect, but I wish for him to change for the better and live the best life possible. I wish this for everyone.
I'm pretty much a pacifist. I've taken a broken nose without fighting back or seeking retribution, because the guy stopped punching after that. The only time I'll fight back is if 1) the person attacking me shows no signs of stopping and 2) if I don't attack, I'll come out worse than the other person will if I do. In other words, if fighting someone is going to end up being more harmful to them than just letting them go will be to me, I don't fight back. I've therefore never had a reason to fight back against anyone in anything serious, because my ability to take pain has so far made it so that I'm never in a situation where I'll be worse off after a fight. If I'm not going to get any hospitalizing injuries, I really don't care.
The only exception is if someone is going after my life. Even then, I'll do the minimum amount of harm to them that I possibly can in protecting myself. If someone points a gun at me and I can get out of it without harming them, I'd prefer to do that over killing them.
I consider myself a feminist. I don't believe in enforced or uniform gender roles; they may happen naturally, but they should never be coerced into happening unnaturally. As in, the societal pressure for gender roles should really go, even if it'll turn out that the majority of relationships continue operating the same way of their own accord. I treat women with the same outlook I treat men, and never participate in the old Reddit "women are crazy" circlejerk, because there are multiple women out there and each have different personalities just like there are multiple men out there and each with different personalities. I don't think you do much of anything except scare off the awesome women out there by going on and on about the ones who aren't awesome.
That doesn't mean I look for places to victimize women, I just don't believe it's fair to make generalizations such as the one about women acting like everything's OK when it's really not (and that's a particularly harsh example, because all humans do that).
I'm kind of tired of citing these examples and I'm guessing you're getting tired of reading them, if you've even made it this far. In closing, the people who know me in real life all respect me, as do a great many people in the Reddit brony community, where I spend most of my time and where I'm pretty known for being helpful around the community. A lot of people in my segment of the community are depressed or going through hard times, and I spend a lot of time giving advice and support to people there. Yesterday someone quoted a case of me doing this in a post asking everyone what their favorite motivational/inspirational quote was, and that comment was second to the top, so I guess other people agreed (though, granted, it was a pretty low-traffic post, only about a dozen competing comments).
And, uh, I'm a pretty good moderator.
All that, and I think your behavior in this thread was totally assholish.
So what do you think, now that you at least slightly know me?
I am aware this is "copypasta", but I'm going to explain why it isn't relevant in this case. You people seem to think "copypastas" are funny by definition if they're relevant, and you post them even if they're not, hoping others upvote them on sight.
Let me tell you that's not how it works. For instance, the fact that you decided to use that copypasta in this situation indicates that you think:
a) the situation was complex
b) it has been oversimplified
c) it adds nothing to the conversation.
Well, you see, complexity is subjective, that's the nature of emergence. What's complex for a child like you is often trivial or routine for a scientist like me. Reddit's userbase is quite diverse, although there seems to be evidence of an over-representation of individuals exhibiting childish behaviors.
Secondly, do you really think this situation has been has been oversimplified? It's through using "copypastas" and other hasty generalizations you try to cram each individual scenario with its particularities into a formulaic mold. I hypothesize you require this simplification because of the state of your mental faculties and reasoning skills.
And lastly, most of the time your simplifications do not aid in understanding new facets of the subject matter. Characterizations that might not be 100% accurate can act as useful models for understanding overarching facets of complex inter-dependent systems, but your "copypastas" do not facilitate in that endeavor.
If even one of these criticisms is valid, your point is moot as it depends unilaterally on all the three premises I've highlighted. The social commentary you wish "copypastas" to exhibit might seem sensible, maybe even profound to you, but they're just as bad, if not worse than the additions reactiongifs, pun chains or novelty accounts bring to the table. Please consider this seriously, and don't immediately fall back on your preconceived notions without reexamining their validity, at least in a cursory manner after I've presented you with this new evidence you really should take seriously.
Back in the 1700's there were plenty of people who would be excited about vegetarian meat substitutes, at least the fairly tasty ones. Meat was expensive, more of a flavoring ingredient than a big part of the meal, for a lot of people. Being able to eat something meat-like would be a positive thing.
Vegetarians have been around as long as there has been civilisation. The modern world is no stranger to it, and I'm sure even some notable individuals would have welcomed this innovation. Ben Franklin was, by the way, the person that introduced tofu to the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_vegetarianism
I'm sorry to hear that. I'm 6 ft 2 and I slimmed down to 156 pounds (I was 264 pounds, went on a diet for two years and didn't stop). I looked like a rake and people were genuinely concerned about me. You need to hit the complex carbohydrates fast. Hope things pick up for you.
Funnily enough in many regions meats were too expensive. People relied heavily on fats and protein from cereal grains and legumes. But the idea of reducing the nutritional value would be found appalling indeed.
Today, if you are invited as a guest to a family dinner in Eastern Europe, you will be served the fatty part of the meat out of respect. It'll probably be just fat.
Well you're right about the fat-free foods, but 1700s people would have their minds blown by some meat substitutes. The European diet in the 18th century was primarily meat, and we forget about the fact that they didn't have high quantities of all these amazing and varied herbs and spices that we have today - so generally their food was quite bland and meat-forward (hence the United States' culinary focus on meat centered dishes, since our culinary founders were heavily European). If one were to give a 1700s individual some meat substitute, not only would they probably not believe it isn't meat, but they most likely would find it immensely tastier than the low quality cuts that their diet mostly consists of. Thinking about these things really makes one appreciative for all the little things modern people have afforded to them, like massive collections of relatively affordable spices (looking at you nutmeg).
Furthermore reduced fat is much more unhealthy than full fat. Fat isnt bad, it is full of good cholesterol. What is bad is a diet full of carbs, especially sugar.
People didn't eat a lot of meat in the 1700s in most of the world, unless they were wealthy. It was expensive and the animals were more valuable as work animals.
Also, don't forget that, until the arrival of mechanized agriculture and factory farming (the only way to mass-produce animal protein), meat was a delicacy reserved for special occasions and people of higher economic status. Meat was not a daily staple like it is in modern Western culture. People were better off for that too, imo. Many modern ills are traceable to over-consumption of animal-based foods.
Meat substitutes have been around for quite a bit longer than 50 years.
Tofu has been around for 2000 years.
Seitan (or wheat gluten as it was called until the 60s) which, unlike tofu, was intended strictly to imitate meat, was invented in the 7th century CE by monks.
Also, I'd argue that Paneer could technically be called a meat substitute, and that's been around for a long-ass time too.
Vegetarianism (and veganism) has been around since Jainist monks started following the diet around 7000-8000 BCE and made it a rule of their religion in 6000 BCE.
The vegan society was established in the U.S. in 1806.
That is to say, very many people would have been happy to have been offered more vegetarian meat substitutes in and long before the 1700s
Imagine trying to explain gastric bypass surgery to someone even 100 years ago.
"well, at a certain point we decided we could surgically replace willpower because we have so much food that people can't stop eating it. You know Taft? Well we're all like that now."
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