Or, instead of having a grand people's subsidized agricultural regulatory capture program, we could just recognize that the open food market has made food so inexpensive and plentiful that anyone in the free world can already afford to eat.
> it's the heavily processed stuff that is dangerous
It's this kind of ignorance that makes me not want some bureaucrat deciding what everyone eats and making me pay for it.
As an aside, did you see the article posted here yesterday about how the FDA just redacted their long-standing advice about cholesterol? The government is operating almost as ascientifically as the general public, making laws and declarations based on extremely weak predictions.
> Once AI removes these jobs we'll have serious problems on our hands with unemployment.
We'll also remove one of the biggest cost centers in food production, so feeding unemployed people will be, remarkably, even easier and we still won't need a state-controlled feeding apparatus.
> If everyone didn't have to struggle with the time and money to feed themselves
No one in the first world needs to struggle to eat. Eating healthy is dirt cheap; many people just don't know how to do it. Instead of bringing back soviet bread lines, we could just teach people practical stuff like how to eat healthily and affordably.
> As an aside, did you see the article posted here yesterday about how the FDA just redacted their long-standing advice about cholesterol? The government is operating almost as ascientifically as the general public, making laws and declarations based on extremely weak predictions.
No kidding. I remember the "old" Food Pyramid. For decades, you saw that everywhere - in school, doctors' offices, wherever. "8-10 servings a day of bread, pasta, rice, corn, cereal. Carbs carbs carbs! Fats are the enemy!"
And now, it's "oh, maybe that wasn't such good advice for everybody, hm, okay....but you can totally trust our New Food Pyramid! Yay!"
The fallacies around dietary guidelines have been known to the scientific community for over 15 years at least. I read that article when it was in the original issue and I was dumbfounded by the slapdash way nutrition guidelines are established with minimal proof.
When I was in elementary school around 15 years ago and we covered nutrition, I remembered being very confused one year when our teacher was outright and honest about the ACTUAL literature on healthy eating, and then taught us the completely contradictory food pyramid after because she was required to.
Yep, it's amazing how long things like that go on. Of course, when the objective is "establish guidelines for the One Best Way to Eat", it's sort of a futile venture from the start.
I think you would still have an issue because people still have to afford to eat. That implies some sort of barrier to entry to eating.
Half of all food in the US is thrown away. We don't have a food production problem, we have a resource allocation problem. Humans are notoriously bad at resource allocation.
Well, most of that food waste is at the consumer/household level. The distribution chain up to that point wastes very little (indeed, when it comes to things like meat scraps and produce trimmings, it's almost too thrifty.) A big part of this consumer waste is because food is cheap enough to not eat all of. So, do we make it more expensive to encourage less waste? It's an inherently hard problem.
I agree, a lot of waste is on households. However, I used to work at the nations largest grocery chain (surprise, not Walmart) and food waste was rampant... particularly in the bakery and produce department. Food that was a little off date was thrown away rather than given to local shelters due to the liability. This happened every day.
Right, but that's not due to what the chain wanted to do, but due to liability. Allow people to waive liability claims for past-due food, and this problem mostly goes away.
I remember working in a produce warehouse, and due to some clever particularities of our non-profit status, we were allowed to give away surplus produce to employees with no liability. I don't think we ever threw out anything except old bananas; it all got taken home.
> it's the heavily processed stuff that is dangerous
It's this kind of ignorance that makes me not want some bureaucrat deciding what everyone eats and making me pay for it.
As an aside, did you see the article posted here yesterday about how the FDA just redacted their long-standing advice about cholesterol? The government is operating almost as ascientifically as the general public, making laws and declarations based on extremely weak predictions.
> Once AI removes these jobs we'll have serious problems on our hands with unemployment.
We'll also remove one of the biggest cost centers in food production, so feeding unemployed people will be, remarkably, even easier and we still won't need a state-controlled feeding apparatus.
> If everyone didn't have to struggle with the time and money to feed themselves
No one in the first world needs to struggle to eat. Eating healthy is dirt cheap; many people just don't know how to do it. Instead of bringing back soviet bread lines, we could just teach people practical stuff like how to eat healthily and affordably.