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Comment by DougWebb | Hacker News Reader

As far as the actual food sales, most of the money winds up in the same small set of hands regardless of which fad is currently popular. They'll resist trends that switch from high-margin to low-margin foods, but only until they've figured out how to alter the low-margin food to make it high-margin.

The secondary money-grab is from the food-fad industry. All of the books, all of the websites, all of the memberships, all churning out recipes and advice and misinformation, depends on constant change in what's considered "good". Without constant change, their markets would dry up to a trickle. It's just like the fashion industry; if we all decided to wear the same SciFi-like jumpsuits all of the time because it's really the best thing to wear, the fashion industry would be destroyed. So instead we have a constant rotation of the fashion trends. (At least the fashion industry isn't killing us, though.)

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The longer I live, the more I value the lessons I learned from my Grandparents:

- Don't listen to the shit you hear in the media, it's all self serving. Do your own research, that way it serves your need, not anyone elses.

- Stay out of the centre aisles at the grocery store. Buy simple ingredients. Make it yourself. If you can't grow it yourself or kill it, you probably shouldn't be eating it.

- Do the research, buy it once, buy it right. Quality will always beat quantity in the long run. Buy something you can repair yourself over something replaceable.

> if we all decided to wear the same SciFi-like jumpsuits all of the time because it's really the best thing to wear, the fashion industry would be destroyed

A few of us got stuck at a moment in time and never really updated... a decent pair of hard wearing jeans and an endless supply of decent t-shirts that last more than a few months of continuous wear and a decent pair of solid, dependable boots. You may be able to tell that the fashion industry doesn't make a whole ton of money out of me. Don't care, lol.

You had a good set of grandparents. Bottle that and sell it.

Not that they weren't awesome, but we pick and choose the advice we follow and I'm sure I've forgotten as much advice that they gave me as I remember - and that I do remember is really only as it slaps me upside the head with a "holy fuck were they ever right about that!" It probably would have helped more if I'd listened 30 years ago when they first told me and stuck to it, but then I didn't have the hindsight to be able to tell which were the good lessons and which were rubbish; so like all 10 year olds, I ran it through my "you have no idea what you're talking about you crazy old wo/man" filter and what came out of the other side was a kid whose lifetime epiphanies are like a list of what I would already have known had I listened to my grandparents.

Hindsight... crazy accurate.

> (At least the fashion industry isn't killing us, though.)

The Bangladeshi children working 16 hours a day sewing dresses for H&M might have a thing or two to say about that.

That's them, not us, but you're right that's a problem with the fashion industry. I don't think it's caused by the fads though; the clothing industry would still exploit the cheapest available labor, even if they were making the same garments all of the time.

The problem here is that Bangladeshi children are cheaper than machines.

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