A Seismic Shift in How People Eat | Hacker News Reader

A Seismic Shift in How People Eat

nytimes.com

73 pointsprostoalex77 comments

A fairly rushed conclusion... "Making these changes will require a complete reorganization of these companies' fundamental business models and global supply chains, but, ummm, hey, they have the money! Right? The end."

If only it were that simple.

The government subsidizes corn and soybeans, which is why they're everywhere and in everything. Derivatives from corn and soybeans account for a staggering proportion of the ingredients, 'natural' and 'artificial,' that appear in the staple products offered by most of our biggest food companies. They're also the feed that raises all of our meat. In fact, it's not too much of a stretch to suggest that corn and soybeans are the nation's food supply. They are pretty much the only crops we can grow cheaply at massive mega-scale, and we derive almost all our nutritionally questionable foods from them.

Transforming businesses the scale of McDonald's and General Mills will require nothing short of a complete overhaul of our current agricultural economic policy. Best of luck with that...

For a more insightful article with a deeper look into the issue, I recommend the recent piece about McDonald's in the New Yorker.

The article made a sudden shift away from "how consumer behavior has changed" and toward "this is what big companies must do", and I don't think it handled that shift very well.

Should companies abandon frozen food research? There's not really a compelling argument in this piece for why. There are still large parts of the consumer market that rely on frozen and canned foods because they don't lose as much to spoilage. Research into how to mix "frozen" with "... but still pretty healthy" could actually be a huge step forward for some of these big companies.

Because it's not just agricultural and economic policy, it's also consumer lifestyles that aren't necessarily compatible with a "buy everything fresh 3x per week" approach. Some people have trouble getting to the store that often. Some rely on lunch foods that can be prepared in 3 minutes with the microwave at work. Some rely on foods that can go for a long time without spoiling. While a lot of consumers have shifted away from prepared foods, there are still a lot who have reasons not to yet.

What's annoying about this is that the anchor point the article uses to draw the conclusion that big brands have to change their strategy is the market shift towards "perimeter" foods --- produce, deli, dairy, bakery, prepared food --- and the suggestion that this meant consumers were buying more produce and fewer frozen meals.

In fact, a giant part of Whole Foods strategy is to get customers to treat them like a high-class version of Boston Market --- which is to say like a counter service family style restaurant. That has less to do with what ingredients customers shop for, and more to do with the fact that people aren't preparing meals at home at all.

Later

Also: click through to the report they're citing, and then mentally walk a grocery store and ask yourself what isn't a "perimeter" product? Flour, bottled tomato sauce, chips, dry pasta, canned beans, frozen dinners --- but pretty much every home-cooked meal will depend somehow on the produce section, dairy, the deli, or the meat counter.

> That has less to do with what ingredients customers shop for, and more to do with the fact that people aren't preparing meals at home at all.

I'd say it's a bit of both. It's nice to know that the prepared food at WFM adheres to the same guidelines as the rest of the store (e.g. no HFCS, no trans fat, humane meats, etc). It's pretty hard to find a restaurant anywhere with such standards.

I'm a lot less sure.

Whole Foods sells and uses factory protein. They have to: they're one of the largest grocers in the country. I'm an investor in a very well-known Chicago local butcher, and they have trouble meeting demand --- and they're a store you have to go out of your way to drive to to get local food. I'm somewhat skeptical of Whole Foods meat. I buy it without worrying, and I do actively avoid Tyson and Smithfield and whatnot, but I'm probably not avoiding antibiotics or animal cruelty by doing so.

(WFM discloses this to customers with their 1-2-3-4-5 scale).

General rule of thumb: if you can buy a package of 12 or more chicken thighs, and there's another of the same package of 12 or more chicken thighs sitting right behind the one you bought, you're buying factory chicken.

Most restaurants are eliminating trans fats.

I think HFCS is a cosmetic issue. Sugar is sugar, and it's all bad for you. But then: if you make potato salad at home, is it likely to be more healthful than what you get at WFM? The opposite is, I think, true: WFM's is tailored for palatability, and yours is tailored for ease of preparation, because you only have one family to feed, and WFM can amortize palatability over hundreds of families. Palatability means sugar and fat.

Whether or not any of WFM policies pass scrutiny doesn't change the fact many people do visit the store due to these policies and that the prepared foods adhere to them. :)

I am hopeful about the meat, at least. In the bay area, much of the chicken comes locally from Mary's which appears to be a legit operation.

> Sugar is sugar

You seem to be knowledgeable enough about nutrition in general to also know this isn't true. There are different kinds of sugar, so what are you getting at here?

Require large food corporations to become B-corps or non-profits. Wouldn't that solve most problems with food industry comparatively fast?

No, it would just mean that hedge funds would end up owning large portfolios of "small" companies selling crappy food, while staples would get more expensive, so that white people would feel a little bit better psychologically while the South Side of Chicago would remain a food desert where families have to rely on McDonalds to feed their kids every night.

Presumably, you're talking about this article: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/02/freedom-from-fr...

Yes, thank you for the link. :)

If they can be grown at such a massive scale, why do they need to be subsidized? Wouldn't they get grown anyway? Why not subsidize broccoli and quinoa instead?

(Yes I know the question is naive but I still hope for a smart answer.)

Is it the case that farmers grow soybeans instead of broccoli because they're subsidized, or is it rather that broccoli is more seasonal, more specialized, harder to grow, and especially difficult logistically, with a value chain that includes more middlemen that suck out more of the value?

How many different broccoli farmers or farmer-co-ops are there that have nationwide distribution?

Because you can grow soybeans, supply several different industries in doing so, and the commodities markets are more or less set up to directly manage your risks.

That's not a public policy priorities issue, it's a "soybeans are a more fundamental output of the agriculture industry than broccoli is" issue.

They can be grown at scale because they are subsidized. Other products suffer at scale because farmers' economic incentives are heavily skewed towards growing the subsidized crops. They carry high opportunity costs.

Apologies; I should have made the direction of causality clearer in my original comment.

Thanks for clarifying.

Soybeans and corn have many uses and produce many sub-products (oils, tofu, corn starch, corn meal, animal feed, even as raw material for plastics, bio-fuels, etc.) Broccoli is pretty much just something people might eat a few ounces of a couple times a week.

I think cause and effect may go the other way - being grown at scale allows them to lobby/buy politicians hence subsidies.

The US simply produces mind boggling amounts of food.

The United States produces almost 40 pound of wheat per person in the US (58 million tons) 50% of that get exported. Also, 40 percent of US corn ends up as ethanol.

Anyway, subsidies often relate to how automated the process is. Combines are wonderful things, but there also expensive.

I would venture to guess that subsidies also drive our obsession with adding dairy products to everything.

"They're also the feed that raises all of our meat. In fact, it's not too much of a stretch to suggest that corn and soybeans are the nation's food supply. They are pretty much the only crops we can grow cheaply at massive mega-scale,"

Wheat?

What I find most interesting about people caring about the content of their food (which is not a new thing, although I can see it is more widespread lately), is the effect it has on capitalism and how consumers make their choices.

In the beginning, the best products simply functioned properly. They looked good, tasted good, etc. Is the bread white? Does the paint stick to the wall?

At some point we started realizing that what goes into a product turns out to be very important too. Is the bread nutritious? Is the paint lead-free? Does the movie player have DRM? I'd say we are primarily in this phase of consumer awareness, and the nytimes article suggests it has gone mainstream. However I see a third level on the way:

People are now starting to care about the impact of products. In other words, what side-effects are there in production and usage. Were animals mistreated when producing this meal? Is the product recyclable upon discard? Did these bananas come from an exploited third-world country? We're still in the early stages of this phase, but I don't see it slowing down.

Being a consumer takes so much brainpower...

> Being a consumer takes so much brainpower...

Exactly, and this is why I'm a strong supporter of regulation.

I'm not even saying that regulation should be obligatory, or all-encompassing; simply that there should be clear and simple ways of branding foods and/or their contents (e.g. "organic" or "free-range" should have a legally-defined meaning, GMOs should be listed in the contents, ...), and consumers should be getting what they expect (e.g. toilet paper of a certain size/height, and common drugs are not harmful) - but of course, if you want something different (e.g. experimental drugs) you should be able to get it, it might just be a little harder (like hedge funds that can only market/sell to "sophisticated" investors).

You can do that now: you can create a certification program, sell inspections to acquire the cert, and enforce it through contracts. That companies for the most part don't do this suggests that there isn't really that much market demand for it.

There are a couple of these organizations on whose labels I rely.

Non-GMO project: http://www.nongmoproject.org/learn-more/understanding-our-se...

Certified Humane: http://certifiedhumane.org/

Being omnivores our senses help us to distinguish good food from bad. For example we prefer sweet food because sugar in nature is rare, the fruits delivering sugar being a source of carbohydrates, vitamins and other essential nutrients. We avoid bitter plants because that's usually the taste of substances that do us harm. And rotten meat disgusts us. Plus we rely on the wisdom of our ancestors to know what to eat.

But the food industry, in all its wisdom has produced foods that (1) lie to our senses, (2) are rich in calories, but poor in nutrients and (3) are so novel that our bodies aren't digesting it properly.

Being a consumer is actually easy, if you can read the signs. It's the food industry that's feeding you the lie that nutrition is complicated and needs expert guidance. Does the food come in a package? Does it make health claims? Is the list of ingredients containing substances you don't recognize? Is sucrose or high fructose corn sirup one of those ingredients? Does it come from far away? Is it sold in a super market?

All of those are red flags you should watch out for ;-)

Well, that can't be entirely true, because if it was, Kraft would still own the category-killing brand for every frozen and fresh prepared food product. There must be more to it than palatability.

I don't think the effective differentiator is healthfulness, but it's something other than hyperpalatability.

>Is the list of ingredients containing substances you don't recognize?

This is a bit of a bogus argument. If you had to break down meat into its component chemicals, nobody would understand it then either. We just have a guideline that requires man-made things to list the components which leads to the false argument that seeing lower level chemicals in something means it's bad.

Yes, but my ancestors ate meat from chicken, pigs or cattle, they survived and I'm alive as well. Compared to rats, we don't have to do a trial and error for everything we eat, as culture is part of who we are and we've been eating most of the same meat, vegetables and dishes for hundreds if not thousands of years.

You are never going to see meat being broken down to its components on an ingredients label. The only way you're going to see chemicals on such labels is if those chemicals were added by food processors, for various desired effects, like for improved texture, or taste, or for extending shelf life.

It's usually bad because, as I said, it's meant to fool your senses. Why do you think sugar or HFCS is in everything these days? It's also bad in the case of health claims and fads because reductionist science is applied.

I mean let's be specific. This article calls out Hershey for moving away from polyglycerol polyricinoleate (PGPR) to friendlier-sounding emulsifiers. In exactly what way does a consumer benefit from reduced consumption of PGPR?

Your ancestors also ate a lot of meat roasted over open fires, or in comparatively primitive ovens. Within the next 20 years we're going to come to understand exactly how carcinogenic that millennial-old practice is (cooking, it is going to turn out, is basically carcinogenic), and it's going to make us feel silly about caring about PGPR --- and, I hope, about looking to micronutrients in the food supply as an answer to most of our public health concerns.

I'm dimly aware that that wonderful black and brown crust on the meat I've grilled is carcinogenic, and I try really hard not to think about it.

>Yes, but my ancestors ate meat from chicken, pigs or cattle, they survived

But they died from cancers, heart disease, and a myriad of other disorders. Some of my ancestors smoked tobacco, which was completely 'organic', and it didn't do them any good.

It takes a lot less brainpower when costs are actually included in prices. Instead of everyone deciding on their own which products contribute the most to global warming (and being misled by advertising and getting it wrong most of the time), a carbon tax automatically adjusts the price of each product based on its impact. Then you can make decisions by comparing prices.

I think a water use tax would also be sensible here, and maybe more straightforward to design and implement.

McDonalds needs to do more than use antibiotic-free chicken. The back of the house for its 36,000 restaurants currently looks like a mini-factory serving fried frozen patties and french fries. It needs to look more like a kitchen serving freshly prepared meals with locally sourced vegetables and grains — and it still needs to taste great and be affordable.

I would have to disagree. Nobody has ever gone to McDonald's for healthy food. McDonald's growth was fueled by its reputation for quick service, clean (usually) restaurants, tasty food, consistency (a Big Mac is a Big Mac in New York or California) and low price.

IMHO McDonald's needs to dump about half of its menu. Focus on basic, good-tasting fast food, and making it fast again. Bring back the beef tallow for frying, those french fries tasted great. Chasing the organic, vegan, whole-grains market is a losing strategy. The McDonald's customer is not part of the market segment that cares about any of that.

"freshly prepared meals with locally sourced vegetables and grains"

I will never understand this obsession with "local". Local is not safer, local does not embody less CO2 (it actually has more), it does not mean more nutritious, it does not mean less pesticides.

Pretty much the only argument that ever made even a bit of sense to me is cultivating a relationship with the farmer - but what difference does that make when you buy the food from a chain restaurant (as described in the quote above), or even a grocery store?

Is this author just trying to load up the article with as many buzzwords as possible? I noticed they didn't mentioned "organic".

It doesn't necessarily mean more nutritious or fewer pesticides, but if you are optimizing for attributes like that, your best bets are going to end up being a local producer.

Not all local is good, but the best producers usually are.

> Not all local is good, but the best producers usually are.

Wait, so you are saying, if I live far away from the farm the exact same produce suddenly tastes worse?

Yes. It's not the exact same produce. The very best produce doesn't travel at all.

If you live in a major US city, go to one of the top restaurants in it sometime for dinner, and ask your server a lot of questions about where the vegetables come from. Chances are they don't come from big purveyors; most will come from farms with names you can write down, and probably buy direct from --- but not from your supermarket, and definitely not from a supplier anywhere more than 150 miles away.

Sometimes these are gold-speaker-cable kinds of differences, and sometimes they're real differences that you'd have to train your palate to detect (and so why would you want to do that?), but sometimes they are huge differences, products you simply have to live in the region and buy at the right time of year to get.

If we want to get nitpicky about locale of food sourcing, some things simply don't grow in a lot of places in the U.S. so you can't get them locally. At least not year round.

And arguably, they probably shouldn't be. Modern agriculture has obliterated native plants, and even the microbes supporting the correct soil conditions for those plants. Eating environmentally sound and "locally" means eating native plants, and when that's not possible, it means eating the animals that do eat those plants.

Ask people to do that. It's not very practical.

That's all well and good until we realize that means Floridians and Californians will pay $15 for a loaf of sandwich bread and $30/lb for ground chuck, while people in the midwest will be eating turnips and potatoes all winter long.

Local is great but it seems like it's pretty clearly a marginal phenomenon.

Your list of benefits missed taste. Local produce is picked closer to peak ripeness because it doesn't have to survive as much shipping.

People might believe that, but it isn't actually true.

If anything the opposite is true because when your only market is local you can't be sure to sell everything right away, so you pick it earlier to give yourself extra time to sell it.

It's hard to tell if we're eating better or just being duped in a new way. "Fat free" is bullshit, "Organic" is bullshit, "Gluten Free" is bullshit (unless you actually have celica's).

I think you're doing yourself a disservice by saying organic is bullshit. Food isn't always about what you put in your body, but is also about how it affects the environment we live in, and in that sense, organic is definitely not "bullshit". However, I will say that the label of "all-natural" posted forefront and proud on products is misleading. All-natural does not equate to healthy, yet it seems many consumers believe this. Anecdotal of course.

Organic isn't bullshit however, asking for organic worldwide exclusive of anything else, would let people starve.

So, it's baby steps. We've learned to hybridize to improve yields and learned how to fertilize to improve yields. Both of these innovations have allowed to world to grow without widespread malnutrition (as we used to have).

Now we have an opportunity to innovate farming methods to rely less on poisons while improving yields on traditional farming (non-modern farming). It's one of those things where it's difficult to impossible to achieve without the ugly stage (given the parameter of a world not starving to death in the meantime).

Organic is bullshit from the perspective that it is just a luxury product that does not scale and therefore is completely unsustainable as a way of eating for the world population.

Well, if you're going to be realistic about it, humanity does not scale either. We need a negative growth rate to get it back to sustainable.

People have been saying that for 50-60 years now, and history seems to have taken a bar bet to see how many different ways it can make those people end up sounding dumb.

We're not going to have a negative growth rate, and we're going to feed everyone.

And by everyone of course you mean first world and developing countries.

I said "everyone" because I meant "everyone".

It's only bullshit because the definitions aren't enforced by law. If "organic" meant what people expect it to mean (grown without artificial fertilizers/chemicals), it wouldn't be bullshit.

Can people please stop calling gluten free a fad or "bullshit". The reactions to gluten are autoimmune not some simple thing only to do with the walls of the intestines. Classic intestinal Coeliac reactions while the most common are only one of the manifestations. We've known for ages that it can also cause problems with the skin (Duhring's disease, discovered in 1967 and also still not fully understood) and there is a growing body of work showing connections to the nervous system.[0] The bottom line is it's an autoimmune disease and we simply do not know the full extent of the interactions and effects when the immune system is going wrong so people like you, who don't know what you are talking about to the extent you can't even spell the name of what you are talking about properly, are the real purveyors of bullshit.

That's to say nothing of the fact that even in your world where there are only people with classical Coeliac those people have to put up with the implication from the people mocking and sneering that they aren't genuine, and have to put up with waiters and waitresses who don't properly handle food or disclose its ingredients because they think it's a fad.

[0]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?linkname=pubmed_pubmed_ci...

On the other hand, as an article I read recently pointed out, there is a faddish "why not ask for gluten-free" component to the phenomenon, and while full-service restaurants can often (and at great inconvenience) accommodate the small part of the population that has true and significant reactions to ingredients, they're not equipped to handle a huge percentage of their customers asking for changes (which will often require them to use totally separate prep, storage, and mise en place) just because it's a trendy thing to ask for.

The concern then is that restaurants will stop accommodating (because they simply can't afford to) altogether, and people with serious health issues will just have to eat elsewhere, which sucks.

I know a Coeliac who is diagnosed properly - with the genetic test showing the relevant genes, then a blood test showing the antibodies and then finally a biopsy showing damage to the gut - and they are older and travel quite a lot. The change over the last decade has been wonderfully beneficial for them. I've seen that observation repeated many times online as well, pleasure at having so many more options than just a few years ago. It's not just about restaurants either, I don't remember there being a gluten free section in the supermarket growing but now they are everywhere (Australia). I've never seen a comment suggesting the other way.

Huge numbers of people have problems with modern diets, you can see it if you dig into any report on work absenteeism. It makes perfect sense if you reason evolutionarily that there would be a far greater number of "low level" allergies/problems than "high level" ones like those that cause people to go into anaphylaxis from nuts or shellfish. If allergies that can kill you quickly from fairly common things exist, i.e. not everyone suffering from them has died, then it would be suprising if lower level allergies to even rarer things were less prevalent. That's to say nothing of how little we actually understand our gut flora, i.e. not an allergy but just an unsuitability at that present moment, and how diverse it is across populations.

This faux-masculine "just toughen up and eat your veggies and that thing that's making you not feel well" hides behind a mask of intellectual superiority. It sneers down its nose at people who are trying to improve their health and pretends changing your diet to alleviate symptoms of various kinds is exactly the same as homeopathy. I think it's bled over from the criticism of fad diets for weight loss that pretend to get around the laws of thermodynamics, but diets can address health in many more ways than just weight loss so not all diets should be grouped together as somehow intellectual bankrupt.

It's absurd in the case of gluten where there are numerous non-classical symptoms associated with it and the only rational scientific response is to keep funding university research at the randomised double-blind peer reviewed research level. While we wait for the researchers to exhaust that research area, which will likely take decades given how, difficult it is to do studies on diet that are totally blind it will probably come through greater research into genetics and the immune system, people suffering symptoms should not be castigated for experimenting in a non-blind way on themselves. Of course that's subject to placebo and all the rest, but it's not remotely near anything like "my fad diet can defy the laws of physics".

I have no idea who you're responding to, but it's not me. My point is not that there aren't people with serious gluten intolerances, nor did I ever tell anyone to "toughen up and eat their veggies".

It's only really the first paragraph directed at you and your point, I suppose I should have made that more clear. The rest is more generally blasting out at an extremely annoying trend I've seen online which is more to do with siliconc0w.

>while full-service restaurants can often (and at great inconvenience) accommodate the small part of the population that has true and significant reactions to ingredients, they're not equipped to handle a huge percentage of their customers asking for changes (which will often require them to use totally separate prep, storage, and mise en place)

This is technically true, but nothing requires "asking for changes" to done with the same painful effort as avoiding allergens. You don't need separate prep and storage to skip an ingredient, and 1% cross-contamination isn't going to hurt someone that just wants a different taste or nutrient balance.

The point of the article was that the restaurant can't always tell whether customers are asking because they have real problems, so that 1% contamination is going to be a huge problem, or just a preference. If they're going to serve someone who says they have a food allergy, they often have to err on the safe side.

Are we looking at the same article?

Is asking too hard, or are there really that many people lying about allergies?

While we're linking to the NIH: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24026574

"Recent randomized controlled re-challenge trials have suggested that gluten may worsen gastrointestinal symptoms, but failed to confirm patients with self-perceived NCGS have specific gluten sensitivity. Furthermore, mechanisms by which gluten triggers symptoms have yet to be identified. "

So, yes, there is a lot we don't know - about a lot of things but there really isn't any evidence, even in your linked search, that people without wheat allergies or celiac disease should care about gluten. Not enough to justify slapping gluten-free on everything - which makes it a fad.

Thanks to whoever downvoted me. Seems I am arguing against people who downvote against the spirit of the rules and who can't even spell the thing they are talking about..

Regarding your point siliconc0w as I say in my other comment diets are experiments. Let's not conflate "my diet can defy the laws of thermodynamics" regarding weight loss with a diet directed at a different part of health. Nor should we forget that people can experiment with diets knowing the limitations of self-experimentation whilst simultaneously supporting double-blind peer reviewed work. Conflating people on a diet for the relief of symptoms with people on a diet because they think it suspends the laws of the universe is stupid, suggesting people with symptoms aren't allowed to experiment on a personal level while science grinds away at more solid conclusions is also stupid.

The second point is one of elementary reasoning. If someone points to a pile of papers with some published in 2014 and 2015 then a paper from 2013 with includes a couple of trials of ~30 people and ends inconclusively isn't a trump card. The paper, if you actually read it, makes no bold claims at all and is more of a meditation on how to methodologically advance our understanding, i.e. how to design experiments to exclude hidden coeliacs with better tests for them, the question of how gluten and gluten-free diets testing for NCGS need to control for FODMAPS, dairy and the like. They literally end with "Non-celiac gluten sensitivity is an entity awaiting validation, better diagnostic criteria, and, if it does exist, pathogenic mechanisms". And the studies they cite had mixed results on small n, again it's about more and better designed studies which I am sure those authors would agree on. But they were all just looking, as far as I can tell I didn't go to the studies they themselves cite, at basic symptoms. The MRI brain data came along in 2014, after all this.

How is organic bullshit?

Apart of other replies, there is also no evidence that is any better for than conventionally grown produce.

I'm not from the US, but from Romania. My grandparents lived on the country-side, working the land and during the communists Romania did not have much access to the vast quantities of pesticides and fertilizer that the US was left with after WWII, due to a large surplus of ammonium nitrate and of various poison gases. Our animals were not fed and grown on cheap, subsidized corn and kept alive with antibiotics. Our diary products were not low fat. Our white flour was given for export. Etc, etc.. And guess what, after 1990, after the revolution, when we started importing food and adopting the "western diet", we ended up with the same shock like everybody else ... people getting fatter, increased rates of type II diabetes, increased rates of coronary artery disease, etc. And most importantly I think - our food is losing its taste, because vegetables grown with pesticides and artificial fertilizers have shallower root systems, grow faster and thus are unable to gather the same amount of nutrients as vegetables grown normally and in season. Same goes for animals, like cattle or pigs or chicken, raised on corn and kept alive with antibiotics.

In regards to your statement, organic food is the conventional way to produce food, and note that I'm not talking about any standard, but about how people have been growing food before we discovered what fossil fuels are good for.

There's actually plenty of evidence to go around, plenty of studies, showing links between the western diet and type II diabetes, heart disease, obesity, cancer, with my father's PhD thesis being one, evidence that has been ignored because it flies in the face of the low-fat bullshit we've been fed, plus it goes against a multi-billion dollar industry. Artificial fertilizers are also known to be responsible for the destruction of our environment, leading to such effects as water pollution with nitrate or acidification of the soil.

But 'organic' only covers a third of that. You can make horrible junk food with organic ingredients.

True. We need a new word I think.

Well "USDA Certified Organic" doesn't really mean what you would think it means. You'd think it means no pesticides, no herbicides, no fungicides, and no fertilizer. That's precisely what nearly everyone thinks it means.

http://lifehacker.com/5941881/what-does-organic-really-mean-...

The reality is that "Organic" doesn't mean anywhere near what people think it does, sadly. It's fairly watered down. It's a bummer.

Depends on if the bull eats grass from a pesticide-free pasture ;)

There is no standard dictating what organic means. Many 'organic' products use processes and methods that most people would not recognize as organic. A consumer buying an organic product has little to no knowledge of whether the producer is being faithful to the concept. Add a huge price markup for organic products and many producers are incentivized to mark products organic even if they really aren't - and many are doing so.

There are attempts to standardize, but none have the recognizability needed by the majority of the populace to make them effective.

I know it's asking a lot, but I wish people's eating habits were driven more by environmental and humanitarian factors, than what they like or even what's healthy (though I believe none of these are mutually exclusive). I find the current state of things horrifying.

1. The changes in the lede of this article --- no more artificial colors, no antibiotics in poultry, emulsifiers with friendlier names --- are marginal. Many of them, like the food colorings, are probably there to satisfy a market demand in the first place (not for the additives, but for the shelf-stable properties they impart on the food) --- if the market would rather have white cheese rather than radioactive orange, why spend the extra 0.5c per package to make them orange? By and large, these aren't "seismic" changes. Marked changes in macronutrient content would be, but that mostly hasn't happened.

Great example: shifts from high-fructose corn syrup to "natural" sweeteners (an almost entirely cosmetic change that puts minimal disruption on the supply chain), or to "gluten free" products.

2. One seemingly enduring and significant change in the food industry is the move away from "liquid calories". Low-fat, Atkins, Paleo, juice cleanse, whatever: regardless of the fad, the conclusion that sweetened soft drinks are practically toxic has probably stuck. "Americans are drinking less soda" makes for a less sexy lede, though.

3. The major shift I see isn't in how people eat, but rather in how the same stuff we've always eaten is marketed to us. Maybe it's gotten easier to handle distribution logistics, or to bring new products to market, but there are a zillion more brands. Where in 1980 we might have had one or two category-killing brands for any given snack, frozen meal, or beverage, we now have 100 different brands --- most of them owned by one of a few major companies.

But again, that's got less to do with "how people eat" and more to do with market segmentation: given a roughly stable COGS for, say, microwaveable frozen dinner entrees, customers today get to choose based on things like loyalty to childhood favorite brands, or "organic" labeling, or "low-carb", or "ancient grains".

Multiply serving size by calories/fats/carbs/proteins/fiber per serving, though, and my guess is that it mostly doesn't matter which one you choose.

4. If that (3) is the case, it doesn't really much matter that consumers are shunning iconic American food brands. They're substituting them for niche brands that are now or soon will be owned by PepsiCo or Kraft.

Any discussion of how Americans buy food they prepare at home probably has to include a discussion of Whole Foods, which has in the last decade gone from a specialty store to one of the largest grocery store chains in the country. But look around at a WFM next time you visit, and notice what percentage of the store is allocated to produce, dairy, and meat, and what percentage is allocated to frozen meals, snacks, and prepared foods. The biggest difference between a WFM and a Safeway isn't the size of the produce section (many "conventional" grocers have bigger produce sections), but rather the size of the prepared foods section, where you can stop in and buy a pizza, a pre-cooked chicken, or a deli of potato salad.

I don't believe we can say there completely has been a move away from "liquid calories," particularly when you look at the calories in a typical Starbucks order. Your drink can easily have 400 calories, more than the chocolate croissant you are eating with it.

Sweetened carbonated beverages are over (for now), but their non-carbonated equivalents- Vitamin Water, Odwalla smoothies, "coffee drinks," etc are not.

Starbucks is unhealthy, but it is nowhere near the public health problem that PepsiCo is: as Dave Arnold points out sometimes on Cooking Issues, people use sweetened soft drinks as a complete hydration solution, often drinking nothing but. There are people that do that with Frappucinos, but not a lot of them.

People are paying more attention to what they eat, but you've missed the biggest driver... the desire to look good and/or be healthy.

Society as a whole has nearly always rated appearance highly, but that's more true today than its ever been in recent memory. Whilst it's true that all body shapes will look attractive to someone, the general consensus is that a healthy body is an attractive body, and you're not going to get that by filling it with food that's full of empty calories.

It's not good to be too obsessed with being healthy, but even people who are only casually interested in health will still make decisions to cut out/down on certain food and drinks. For example, I started avoiding cow's milk after I learnt about the increased risk from cancer. The more you learn about food, the more you know what to eat more of and what to avoid, even if you don't make a health-based choice every time.

I haven't missed it. I don't believe it's there. I don't believe people are eating more healthfully. I think they're buying packaged food that claims to be more healthful but isn't.

I do believe people are drinking more healthfully: they're buying less soda, and I think they're going to continue doing that. I think that will make a major dent in public health. But that has little to do with whether Nestle should continue investing in frozen food research.

> "I haven't missed it. I don't believe it's there."

Consider the following growth in health club memberships in the US between 1987 and 2005:

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/3Vy1wJ3JNxuPxxEUbj5wJocQWE...

If you have increased desire to get fit, do you believe that people are only going to do that by drinking less soda and going to the gym, and aren't going to adjust their eating habits? Speak to any gym member who attends reasonably regularly (at least once a week) and you'll find they think more about what they eat because eating badly makes exercise harder.

It will be interesting to see whether (or when) this will be followed by a decrease in obesity rates.

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