The WWI Starch Solution for Denmark (2012) | Hacker News Reader

The WWI Starch Solution for Denmark (2012)

drmcdougall.com

52 pointsfpoling24 comments

> "Our principal foods were bran bread, barley porridge, potatoes, greens, milk and some butter. Pork production was very low; hence the farmers ate all the pork they raised, and the people of the cities and towns got little or no pork. Beef was so costly that only the rich could afford to buy it in sufficient amount.”

This makes sense, as opposed to what the meat industry is currently[0]. It encourages deforestation for growing feed (and to a lesser extent grazing) and requires significantly more energy to produce, process and store than cereals or most edible things. Yet, often meat in a supermarket is as cheap as the economically (in the holistic sense of the word) cheap products.

The way I see it, this phenomena is caused by oil prices not accounting for the inevitable running out of oil[1]. The way we are going right now, you'd say we have a source of unending nourishment[2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil#Discoveries [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornucopian

Cheap fuel is only a part of the problem. Another is disproportional subsidies that goes towards meat industry. In Norway this became ridiculous to the point when soy products in a shop may cost more than pork from pigs feed with bigger amount of soy.

Isn't oil just getting more and more expensive to find and extract? We won't "run out" of it, it'll just become too expensive to use as fuel eventually.

Yet oil is cheaper now than it was ten years ago, in raw dollars (before even factoring for inflation). The technology to extract oil keeps getting better.

There is a finite amount of oil in the world.

There is a finite amount of everything in the world. What's special about oil?

The term you want is EROEI. Energy return on energy invested. It has been dropping consistently for decades, in the case of oil.

Price does not necessarily reflect cost to extract, because it also depends on market demand. Read "The Underground Economist".

But yes, it is getting more expensive to extract, and yes there is a tremendous shift away from oil as an energy source taking place right now. Crude oil production peaked around 2005 and will be continuing to fall from here out.

Brilliant macro-structural/societal breakdown of why we should consume less animal protein.

Upvoted for the fancy words.

Why less? No animal protein consumption is necessary for optimal human health at all.

Prohibition seldomly succeeds. But yes, I would not mind it dropping to zero if alternatives are 100% doable (glycoproteins contained in beans needs LOTS of processing before they stop affecting gastrointestinal health (many indigenous tribes have ways to threat pulses that work but we tend to ignore the problem completely from industrial perspective) and things like soy has oestrogenic properties which can be bad news in the long run). Quorn is a "new" protein which has better profile than soy and relatively little allergenic potential.

In the 1990s, the USDA food pyramid recommended people base their diet on breads and starchy foods (note the base of the original food pyramid). Over the last twenty years, they have backed away from this recommendation. While most Americans eat too much meat, it turns out that eating too much starch isn't an improvement. The current USA recommendation appears to be "eat more fruits and vegetables" ( choosemyplate.gov ).

But since this recommendation came with a change in the graphic used (from a rainbow pyramid to a plate) people focused on the graphic and missed the new dietary advice.

It's kinda apples and oranges here though. The USA of 1990-2017 (and beyond) is overall wealthy and doesn't really need to think about its citizens starving. WW1 Denmark had slightly different set of health issues.

I don't think this is being presented as a sort of solution to any health issues the USA might have

You have a point. I just didn't want anybody reading this and thinking "I should eat like that." Modern nutritionists say that a high starch diet isn't a good idea.

Ahh I see - it's a good point so worth making anyway

(your point i meant!)

Great article. I've read a different figure for blockage deaths in Germany in WWI. After factoring in the notion that most deaths from malnutrition end with a disease that healthy people could fight off, the figure was 11 million, believe it or not. In part because nutrition was badly understood (the shrewd Mikkel Hindhede aside), and many popular erzatz foods were unhealthy or not food at all.

The same is true of Vietnam War American prisoners, they actually had longer lifespans than average (whereas the truly starved prisoners from WWII Hong Kong had much shorter lives.) This may in part because the Vietnamese prison did not include artificial light, however.

This is from [2012]...

When I was in teh college, I certainly didn't get enough protein, on account of my unconventional diet. I later figured out that protein deficiency was certainly the cause of the oddly-clear urine I experienced during those years.

This article does have a good point about the wastefulness of growing grain crops for animal feed. Pigs and chickens are better fed kitchen scraps and spoiled fruit/food. Cattle are better grazed on hillsides that are not suitable for mechanical agriculture.

I think potatoes are much better starches for humans to eat than grains.

> When I was in teh college, I certainly didn't get enough protein

Did you try? Or were you just ignorantly eating ramen every day?

Getting enough protein shouldnt be hard, even on a tiny budget, if you just know what you are doing.

> I think potatoes are much better starches for humans to eat than grains.

Thats what tfa said.

> "Our principal foods were bran bread, barley porridge, potatoes, greens, milk and some butter

Nearly every Dane lives within an hour walk from the ocean and even from the center of the country you are only 70km to the ocean. How is fish not the principal food, especially during war time.

This omission is so glaring that it undermines the credibility of the article.

The north sea was a warzone, fishing ships were highly likely to be attacked and sunk.

The entire reason there was a food shortage was that the allies were attacking any ships leaving/approaching the european mainland. Thats what a blocade IS.

if the worst drought in 1/2 a century occurred in 2012, then why is that a trend upward if a worse one was in 1962?

Please add (2012) to the title.

Well, the article focusses on 1917... Was still interesting and valuable though.

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