A Public Option for Food | Hacker News Reader

A Public Option for Food

currentaffairs.org

62 pointslxm116 comments

I think both options together are good. Both capitalist and government-planned economies have inefficiencies, but at different areas.

If you have some service provided by government, then it's sometimes inefficient. These inefficiencies can only be reduced by better governance, i.e. people actually getting involved politically and forcing the management to straighten it out.

If you have some service provided by only private companies for profits, then perhaps the production is efficient, but this efficiency can become lost for the end customer in the form of profits. In theory, this shouldn't happen due to competition but in practice it happens a lot (almost no private company operates at marginal costs).

So if you have a choice of both options, in theory you should get optimal results. In practice, it is difficult for societies to keep both options, for reasons:

1. If the public option is too good (too efficient), no private companies want to compete (no profit). For example, look at some state-owned European companies, such as Swiss post or railways.

2. If the private option is too good (only decent profit), then there is no reason to have the public option. People want to avoid governance, if possible. The people who pay for private option will question if they actually need to fund the public option from taxes if the private ones are comparably good.

So I think the big problem is that system with both (the best one) is unstable.

Worst case scenario is that the private's solution is too good and the state thus regulates the private competition to be as bad as the public.

Do you have some examples? I can only see the obvious extreme example of communism, which forbade private competition at all.

But I am not clear who (which party) would push for such a regulation. The benefit to the public is obviously bad, and the private industry would certainly oppose it.

I have the opposite example. In the Czech Republic, the national railway was sued by the private railways for being too cheep. And the private railways won in court!

Similarly: in Germany you used to bed able to watch the entire back catalog of public broadcasting companies. They got sued by private broadcasters and now are only allowed to show two weeks back. I think it's ridiculous, since the tax payer paid for and owns the content.

I am thinking of Outbox, a former US tech startup that digitalised mail, and that was shut down by the U.S. Post Office.

> Food companies such as Procter and Gamble, Kraft, and Campbell Soup were also curious about Lands’s work and invited him to give presentations. “But they didn’t want to touch the idea that they might be selling foods that were harmful to people with a ten-foot pole,” says Lands. “Bill, we sell foods that people ask for,” Lands recalls one executive explaining. “We don’t tell the people what to eat. If you convince the public that our food should have a different balance, we’ll change it.”

- The Queen of Fats by Susan Allport

Corporations are not guilt free in this mess, but they are not the root of the problem. The high carb, high omega 6 guidelines that have caused our health crisis were instituted in haste and ignorance by the government. The government corn subsidies have distorted the market and make junk processed corn products cheaper than healthy food. Guidelines to reduce saturated fat and cholesterol have caused people to move to industrial seed oils, causing a overconsumption of omega6 fatty acids and consequential inflammatory disease. Corporations have simply provided what we have asked for. The author of this argument is ignorant of the real causes of disease and chooses to blame cheese and salt for our problems. I'm much happier with corporations and the ability to make my own, well informed health choices than government interference.

Yes. Government guidelines are bogus. The article actually scares me a little bit, that people think the gov't should be deciding what the individual should do. That is not America and I hope it never is.

Please. You really think the government hasn't decided anything in your life? The very infrastructure of the USA and why it is an oil-guzzling, car-crazy country is thanks to government design. The ghettoisation of urban neighbourhoods, resulting in poor education and high crime rates came about thanks to government legislation.

Unless you have a very comfortable income so you can buy your way into a relatively "government-safe" situation (which is made available to the rich thanks to more government intervention btw), then you are very much at the whim of the government (or powerful corporations, which are essentially the same thing) for much of your basic day-to-day operations.

The USA developed the way it has because there is tons of open space available and as shocking as it may be to some of the current generation, people like owning their own home and little plot of land and a car. FTA: Discover what consumers want to buy and give it to them with both barrels explains almost everything.

Note that "what they want to buy" isn't necessarily what they like the best or without influence. As you've noted, governments and other lobbyists can have an impact.

McDonalds used to fry their french fries in beef lard. It made for crispy fries and it tasted good. The government and their subsidized agitators such as the CSPI got involved and started telling everyone that animal fat was bad. McDonalds switched to a vegetable/seed oil blend that is actually worse for you to eat and also produces an inferior product -- but so strong was the "no saturated fat" activism that they gave consumers what they were asking for even when blind taste-tests showed that they liked something else better.

Yes, and if the writer of this article had their way it would be far worse.

The guidelines created by the USDA have always been and continue to be the product of corporate lobbying, not science. https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/7/10726606/2015-us-dietary-g...

I believe there is likely a lot of truth to this. I'm sure we can all agree crony capitalism is awful. However, I do not agree with this article that red meat is a cause for health concern. Such claims tend to be based on weak associations from flawed epidemiological studies, which cannot prove cause and effect.

TBH it was a quick citation for the general allegation of lobbying and the USDA, not endorsing any part in particular, just noting that it's a real thing.

I think there is very strong evidence that replacing "red meat" in the Standard American Diet is healthier, and that is as far as the Verge is going to dive into that particular argument.

I do agree the red meat in the Standard American Diet is a health concern, but that's because the healthiest options to consume red meat in our collective dietary preferences are still going to be laden with sugary dressings or carbohydrate rich mashed potatoes. Meat always comes with additional and excessively plentiful carbohydrates.

That's because people in the United States as a general rule eat tons of cheap, processed meat. When removed, there's a slight chance it'll be replaced by actual vegetables, of which their diet has tremendous lack of, so in almost any case it will be a win-win for their digestive system and cholesterol. It's not the meat it's you

The thing is, this regulation doesn't appear out of thin air. It came about because corporations had, and still have, so much power in the united states. In places where corporations are powerful, they will use that power to influence government. This is why Libertarian free market policies are pretty much as conceptually impossible as communism. When power is concentrated in the hands of few, they will gain economic power in the case of communism, and political power in the case of free market. It's not by chance that many are turning a blind eye to the root and noticing only the regulatory component of the problem as that is very beneficial to the corporations, and there's hardly anyone left to make arguments against them when they hold all the power.

In the "Libertarian" scenario it isn't the free market that lets corporations gain political power. Its the democratic institutions that the corporations are able to subvert.

The question is: is there anyway to organize society that doesn't led to some entities gaining power at the expense of everybody else?

I imagine this author has never been to a soup kitchen. One experience with your typical soup kitchen should cure anyone of the notion that this is a good idea.

The food is appalling. The service is terrible. If your stuff gets stolen while you eat because they insisted you leave it elsewhere, not their problem. They assume they know what is best for you, never mind they have no idea what your diagnosis is and no idea about the doctor ordered dietary restrictions that go with it. So the assumption is both flat out wrong and monstrously insulting.

I would literally rather fast for a day or so than ever go back to a soup kitchen. That is not hyperbole. I have made that exact choice on a number of occasions while dirt poor.

Like any government program, or anything really, it could be operated well or poorly. We can examine what about the proposal might make it hard to implement properly, such as the wide variety of dietary restrictions as well as peoples' personal tastes and the fact that food for many people is a central part of their family and culture. Maybe that means such a program should focus more on the raw ingredients than delivering prepared food. I'm not sure because some soup kitchens are bad, we should discount all publicly funded food. For one, it does in fact feed lots of people today via free school lunch programs.

The difference is that when a private program is run badly, it goes bankrupt and is closed. When a public program is run badly, it keeps going on forever.

I think this is a bit naive. Badly run corporations find ways to keep themselves alive, it's not like owners and shareholders look at a bad situation and just say "Oh well, we tried" and go home. I think there's a strong case to be made that shareholders should be much more willing to just close up shop and cut their losses when the world changes around them, but that's not how people work.

You are of course right, but it is nevertheless mostly true, and in this case mostly true happens to be sufficient. Evolution works despite the fact that unfit animals don't always die.

More importantly, private companies preserve choice (assuming no monopoly). Government provides no choice. My ability to make my own choice is what is most valuable to me.

I don't mean to be too harsh, but you might value your ability to choose less if you didn't know when your next meal would be.

I was homeless for a long time. Valuing my agency above all else helped me solve my problems and get off the street.

When you start eroding rights on the excuse that someone is too poor to have any right to care about such high minded frivolities as rights, you deprive them of hope of resolving their problems.

I don't think anyone here is talking about taking away anyone's rights. The implication above was that government providing free food might lead to less choice as government crowds out business, but not removing someone's "right" to choose. The tradeoff between more choice in food and people starving doesn't seem to be much of a tradeoff. There's plenty of room for a middle ground.

My comments are in regards to your statement here:

but you might value your ability to choose less if you didn't know when your next meal would be.

I am telling you that when I was so poor that I often had no idea when my next meal might be, I valued my own agency -- my right to choose and to make choices -- tremendously. But it looks to me like, overall, most folks here don't want to hear the opinions of someone who actually ate regularly at soup kitchens for a time. They want to say nice things about being generous people who will feed the hungry, and let's not let actual facts get in the way of our pretty ideas that this is always a good thing with no down side.

It is a form of virtue signaling. It is also a form of pity, which is fundamentally disrespectful. You assume you are in a better position than the people of whom you speak to decide for them, while completely dismissing the opinions to the contrary of someone still poor enough that food security is an ongoing question mark.

This seems to be par for the course.

While I value your experience and perspective, I don't believe you speak for all people who are food insecure. There is lots of evidence, given the success of food banks, meals on wheels and other programs, that many would welcome this type of universal free food. You also assume that I am somehow in favor of paternalistic policies and against the agency of poor people, when that is not at all the intent of my comment and does not reflect my personal beliefs. I am personally strongly in favor of a universal basic income and other approaches that enable people who do not earn wages or have other sources of income to make the best decisions for themselves. I also think this is a good idea. I think there are a lot of different ways to improve the quality of life of a lot of people, and I don't think just giving away food to everyone (rather than means-testing the program or something) is particularly paternalistic or highly choice-limiting.

With regard to "virtue signaling", that is a derogatory term used to imply that a person is only promoting an idea to appear good to others, without a genuine care or interest in effecting the change they are promoting. I think we have a fundamental disagreement about what sorts of policies would be effective, and using that term is unnecessarily dismissive.

I think we have a fundamental disagreement about what sorts of policies would be effective, and using that term is unnecessarily dismissive.

Using that term mostly indicates that I feel incredibly dismissed most of the time on Hacker News.

This is a new handle, but I am not new here. I have had college classes on, for example, homelessness and public policy. I got myself off the street on my own efforts, not through some program. As best I can tell, I am the only woman who has ever spent any time on the leaderboard of HN.

None of it seems to make any difference. I continue to get no traction. I continue to not get substantive feedback on my projects. I continue to have no connections. My income remains extremely low.

I can't help but feel that sexism and classism are factors and I am just incredibly frustrated. Trying to do something good against long odds, etc begins to seem totally pointless and fruitless. I increasingly understand the very angry feminist types. I don't agree with their approach, but no approach seems to actually work.

You and I do fundamentally disagree. I am not pro UBI. I think that is a polite means to crap all over the have nots and increasingly cut them out of ever more access to money, rights, you name it.

I don't intend to engage further. I don't think this is in any way whatsoever productive. It is yet another exercise in me trying to engage in good faith with someone who seems to fundamentally be incapable of genuinely respecting me. Everything you say is another ever so politely dismissive thing done in accordance with the rules such that me getting offended just makes me look bad in the eyes of everyone here.

I have been facing this sort of thing with, I think, quite a lot of aplomb for more than 8 years, to no avail at all. And I just am not coping well with that fact at the moment.

I know lots of situations where horribly inefficient companies continue to operate, and I know of situations where poorly run public programs have been stopped, either because of public pressure (because governments are accountable to their voters), or just because the administrators realised that they could do more effective things with the money.

It's also possible to find a middle ground; food providers could be paid by the government based on how many people they feed, giving the opportunity for competition between providers.

we should (not) discount all publicly funded food.

I am all for food stamps. I wish that were made more readily available. Due to the lengthy and complex application forms, it is hard to apply to the program. I have six years of college and only managed to fill it out successfully because an agency helped me. I lost my food stamps due to a bureaucratic snafu and my attempts to reapply on my own were not successful having to do with barriers for me in the application process.

The EBT card itself is done very well. I would be completely fine with people suggesting we make this program easier to access and also increase the funding by about 50 percent. I don't see any reason why we need to dream up some imaginary American Diner for feeding people instead of making some modest improvements to an already existing program with a proven track record that has already worked out a lot of the bugs.

(When I was first on food stamps, using the EBT card was not as smooth as later. I know from firsthand experience they have worked out some of the bugs to make it work more smoothly than it used to.)

I think you're being too harsh. Sure, there are a number of poorly run soup kitchens. There are also some excellent ones! And even the poorly run soup kitchens ostensibly do good - they certainly use the money that funds them more efficiently than most other enterprises, and they of course provide food to the hungry.

Maybe your choice is to be hungry rather than go back to a soup kitchen. That's fine, you're entitled to that opinion. But I don't feel that your experience should deprive others of the choice - I know some people who rely on soup kitchens so as not to starve, and they certainly would prefer to have soup kitchens than not.

You are reading in things I did not say and rebutting ideas I did not promote. My statement contains zero suggestion that existing (charitable) programs should be shut down. It only rebuts the suggestion that we need some government run "free food" program of the sort described in the article.

There are also some excellent ones!

I am aware that quality varies. I did a write up of one that didn't completely suck as a potential model for how things should be done. But I wonder how many soup kitchens you have personally eaten at and how many you thought were excellent and would prefer it to most paid eateries (I mean solely on the basis of the high quality of the experience, not on the basis of it being free).

I believe this is mostly a matter of funding. I would expect soup kitchens to be governed mostly by poor funding. I don't think their goal is the balanced diet that the author envisions. Then again, public schools are also governed by their funding. I'm sure a lot of people would have preferred not to go to public school either.

Sorry if this brings up bad memories for you.

And, don't forget about your experience at the DMV or the INS, or the IRS or any other government service.

> We don’t have government-run grocery stores like we have government-run schools. And yet most people in the country seem pretty happy with their grocery stores. They can get whatever they want there, and if they can’t afford it, we subsidize it with a “voucher” (i.e. food stamps). The profit motive hasn’t led to a rapacious system of exploitation.

This isn’t strictly true for poorer areas. Grocery stores that have a predominately captive clientele (i.e. can’t afford to drive long distances and have big kitchens to store bulk purchases from discount big box stores) do tend to charge more for the same goods than stores in more affluent / mobile areas.

As a European that has moved to the USA, I find these "food deserts" here appalling. In order to have access to local, fresh, quality ingredients, you need to be in an outrageously high income bracket. There is absolutely a food supply problem.

>Every town has an American Free Diner in it. The music is great and there’s a buzzing neon sign.

I think that latter sentence is telling. No music is "great" to everybody. In some cases any music at all may make the diner unusable, eg. for autistic people with sensory processing difficulties. The author appears not to have considered this. Centralized food provision will necessarily reduce choice, and reduced choice will harm many people.

Of course capitalism isn't perfect either, for all the reasons described, but it makes more sense to address specific market failures with regulation than replace the whole system. Eg. I don't see why corporations should be considered people with free speech rights, so I'd support heavy restrictions on advertising.

> I think that latter sentence is telling. No music is "great" to everybody.

I'm imagining the same people who run the DMV choosing the very best in royalty-free elevator music.

I don’t necessarily agree with the article or the solutions proposed (and definitely not the subhead that free markets are a disaster) but your comment actually nearly illustrates why we need to address basic needs (health, food, shelter) differently from other stuff. Because while you are right about music, any food is almost always better than no food, unlike the music scenario.

That's a big jump from a tiny percentage to "many". How many autistic people with sensory problems would even attend a general populace diner and not their own state run diner attached to their adult care home?

I think you should put aside your music objection. Of course, the NHS, which he used as an example, accommodates a wide range of people. I'm sure as they'd be so many diners needed they'd have rooms available without the music you've latched on to. I would imagine in the UK you might have one room on radio 1, another on radio 2, some silent, etc.

While I doubt it would ever happen I'm pretty certain he's right that this would help far, far more people than it would hurt. And, bonus, if they don't like it they can go buy their own groceries and cook.

The music will affect only a small minority, but the music is just one of many choices the author proposes the government make for people. The number of people affected by at least one of those choices will be much higher.

Even if there's a private option, the public option has to be funded somehow. If you can opt out of paying in exchange for losing access to the service then it's no longer "free".

And in my experience, while the NHS is superb for common physical ailments, if there's anything unusual wrong with you then they're close to useless. Healthcare is in any case an atypical market because it's already so heavily regulated.

> That’s because I tend to think that when a service is for profit rather than for the public’s benefit, all sorts of perverse incentives arise. If schools operated for profit, with education subsidized by vouchers, the companies running the schools would have an interest in spending as little as possible actually educating the students, because every dollar they could save would be a dollar they could keep.

The problem with this kind of argument is that it forgets the incentive of a government run or public's benefit is that they too have a different metric to adhere to - politics. They then lead to a cumbersome system with nearly zero responsibility. This then gets picked up by people on the opposite side of the fence as failures of public benefit, government run system.

So, unfortunately things have to seen on a case to case basis. Public benefit schooling is a great thing. But public benefit food option? That is debatable. For some it will come off "government controlling what we eat" and hurting fundamental rights.

My friend, have you heard the good news about Public Choice Theory?

Not really. Please enlighten me.

From the article, I find it funny that the article actually loops around later to counter your cherry picked quote and argument from the first paragraph.

>There is a tacit acceptance of the basic idea of “public choice theory”: that state actors are just as much selfish maximizers as anyone else, and that the only difference between the state and a corporation is that the state doesn’t have to be as accountable to its consumers.

>>> because every dollar they could save would be a dollar they could keep.

Which is why they shouldn't operate as corporations. They can still be "for-profit" but under a different corporate scheme. Make all the kids/parents shareholders/members in the association and keep those profits internal.

So a cooperative model? I like that. I think pretty much everything would be better off and we would all benefit more if our institutions were structured as worker-owner and worker-consumer cooperatives.

Also public school can be seen as "government controlling what we learn". Private and public have two different metric indeed, one is profit and one is politics. None of them is perfect, but I think one of the two is better especially if talk about food/health of the population.

> Americans live on junk food; they have terrible diets, with too much sodium, too many calories, too much sugar, and too few fruits and vegetables.

Yes. That happens because they are able to execute their own free will and choose for themselves - and of course, most people are easily manipulated and choose poorly.

But here lies the fundamental difference between "left" and "right" positions. "Left" tends to optimize for the best utilitarian value from some objective, authoritative point of view (like how good a person diet's is) and would favor a situation where a well-intended authority would choose what's best for the people. Meanwhile, the "right"-wing objective is to optimize a person's individual freedom - which, of course, usually leads to most people making poor choices and having less total utilitarian happiness.

Which of those values we should optimize for, and what is the best compromise is a complicated question that lies at the basis of a lot of modern political debates. In this particular comment I'm not trying to take any sides. But why am I talking about it at all then? Because it seems surprising to me how people on the "left" side of such arguments naively assume that we all want to optimize for the same total utilitarian value, completely disregarding that the other side tries to optimize for a different metric.

Phrased this way, it starts to sound like an ML problem. Optimize based on a cost function, now what cost function do we use?

Having people choose to maximize happiness seems to be leading to worse outcomes by many objective standards. The monetary costs are high for the society in aggregate (and the externalities are not distributed according to the costs), health outcomes seem to be getting worse even to the extreme of lowering life expectancy, and so on. Purely seeking individual happiness seems like the wrong cost function based on that.

Of course, focusing only on economic cost to society would be even worse, and health outcomes tend to be based in large part on individual happiness.

I guess I'm saying that as you've characterized things, you make it sound like the "right" position is the correct one, but there seem to be a lot of things about that position that aren't so great. To be fair, you said "less total utilitarian happiness," but I thought it might help to give examples.

> Phrased this way, it starts to sound like an ML problem.

Which, I think, it pretty soon well be, and in some sense, already is (trading).

> I guess I'm saying that as you've characterized things, you make it sound like the "right" position is the correct one

While this is indeed my position, I tried not to express it in this particular comment, because it's not about who is right in this debate but rather about acknowledging it's existence and importance in the first place.

I think your distinction between left and right is a bit dishonest. Left is mostly concerned with social inequality, while right is not.

Of course, you can't start talking about inequality if you believe that values that people assign to things (preferences, but I think a good case can be made that preferences do not exist) are completely subjective. And alas, they are not.

Personally I see that more as "Up" and "Down" on the authoritative, libertarian scale. There are far more political nuances than "Left" and "Right" can provide. And that dichotomy forces us into positions we're in today.

How do you reconciliate "execute their own free will" and "are easily manipulated" ?

Easy: all manipulation is fair game as long as people don't lie and you're in an adequate state of mind when you're making the decision. This is the area where the existing laws of most of modern countries work quite well.

How do you possibly consider it a fair game when the Corporations that you play against have vastly higher resources to pour into winning?

David vs Goliath is story precisely because the giant usually wins

Come to think of it, the concept of "fair" is something completely subjective and therefore irrelevant in this kind of discussions. I probably should've used a different word.

But anyway, corporations only have vastly higher resources when compared to the sum of all people they're targeting with their advertisement. When taken in a context of a single human life, resources that a certain corporation can spend on advertising to you directly are dwarfed in comparison with attention and empathy and interest (which are main resources required to manipulate someone) from any of your friends, family and colleagues.

I disagree. Aggregate behavior that can be manipulated by advertising scales very very well, while attention does not. It is impossible give literally every interaction with a corporation the attention necessary to truly divine whether it is the "best" solution for you. As a result, shortcuts are required, and those shortcuts are exactly what the companies are spending billions to hit. It also works INCREDIBLY well, otherwise by the very theories behind the "Free Market", nobody would be doing it at such a scale

It works incredibly well on aggregate of millions of people. On any particular person, it's an incredibly weak influence.

I think you are pointing out a legitimate dichotomy that exists, but you are incorrectly labeling them as "left" and "right". This is orthogonal to the left-right spectrum. There are examples of both of those positions on both the left and the right. For example, for the first one, there would be Stalinism on the far left and absolute monarchy on the far right. For the second one, there is anarchism of the far left and anarcho-capitalism on the far right.

One thing I was talking about with some other people is to have a community kitchen. You could buy prepared food, or if you have more time than money you could buy the ingredients sold there and make it yourself in the kitchen. This could be really great for people that lack a kitchen (like college students) or for people who weren't taught how to cook.

The major problem with this is who's responsible for cleanup, and how would we divide labor for this place. What do y'all think?

I have had similar thoughts. Also just an option for people who don't have families or live far from their families (e.g. single and moved to a new city for work) to prepare and share meals together. Like maybe I know that I'm cooking for ~6 people every Tuesday as part of a meal sharing, and someone else is cooking on Thursdays. Or maybe one night a week, I know that I'm cooking on the first Tuesday of every month, and someone else is cooking the second, etc.

> I went to a public school. I enjoyed myself there. I believe it taught me some things.

My mom switched me from public to private school in elementary school. Without a doubt the quality of the private schools' facilities, teachers, staff, and education were much better then the public school. I ended being held back in the 3rd grade simply because I was so far behind my other classmates in terms of knowledge that was not stressed at the public school. Yes, private school can be expensive, but if you have the resources and can find a good school with a track record of success, I highly recommend enrolling your kids in a private school.

Come to a Scandinavian public school. Then you'll see working public schools. Evidently, this has nothing to do with publicness or privateness, but rather a culture. The big question is: in what direction should we push the society?

In 2010, 18 million people lived in a food desert, without reasonable accessibility to any grocery store, and 41.2 million people live in a food-insecure household.

That's 10 percent of the population with no access to healthy food, and 1 in 7 Americans going hungry every year.

And this guy wants to build Diners (where no grocery stores exist) and not only collect food there, but cook and serve it to people. And thinks this will solve our nutrition problems.

Sorry, but this guy is a fucking idiot. Besides the fact that this would be a bigger infrastructure project than fixing all our ailing bridges and roads, How are you going to handle thousands of people all wanting to eat at the same time? Are you going to provide transportation for them all? Leftovers? Handle all possible allergies, dietary and religious restrictions? Is the food going to cover a range of cuisines, since people in the US all come from varying backgrounds and traditions?

There's probably a thousand different problems with forcing people to go to a specific place every single day just to get a meal, besides the fact that this would never get funded by the government, because almost all food banks and soup kitchens are privately funded, because the government won't.

I understand the article is more about feeding in mass.

However, how hard is it to eat healthy?

I don't understand why people have trouble here. It is fairly simple concept we can apply logic to:

if food is prepackaged:

    if food has ingredients you can't pronounce:

         bad for you

    else:

         probably bad for you

else:

     good for you

Do I eat salads everyday? No. I get my chickens from a local farm up the road, killed the day I buy them. I fry them up with collard greens on the side. The collard greens are made from the pig I bought from the same farm and had slaughtered - its understand collard greens are made with bacon slow cooking all day.

Does everyone have access to these farms? No. Though you can still buy quality food at the super-market.

I look at people's carts, and its full of soda, chips, frozen food, Starbucks coffee cans etc... Literally none of the food requires any type of cooking - heating in the oven or microwave does not equate to cooking. Plus this stuff is not cheap, chips are $3, soda is $3 - 5 a 12 pack etc... Drink whole milk at $2 a gallon or brew ice tea at $0.50 a gallon. Buy popcorn kernels at $8 a bag (expensive from local farmer, $3-4 is more likely), melt Kerrygold butter pour over top and add salt.

If you do not know how to cook I recommend starting with 'The Essentials of Italian Cooking' by Marcella Hazan. You can make sauce and pasta (not required) from scratch in under an hour. Inexpensive, fair better tasting and healthy. Most recipes are simple and teaches you how to cook - Italian cooking at least.

This thread is full of victim blaming.

The simple, completely obvious, counter-argument to this is that if it were that easy, every person would do it. There would be no obese people. Virtually no-one wants to be fat.

Instead the problem is getting worse. Telling people to eat less and move more is simply not working.

There are no victims because it is a personal choice. If you want to be fat and lead a horrible life, so be it.

Eating healthy is very simple. People research which TV to buy, what television show to watch, what political news story to be enraged about etc... But can't spend five minutes how to eat properly?

There are no victims here, just people unwilling to accept responsibility for their choices.

Again with the victim blaming, no matter how many different ways you say the same thing, you're completely wrong.

It's not a personal choice, it's like claiming smoking is a personal choice. 40 years ago it really wasn't, it was a social normal, and then when it became clear how badly the tobacco companies had misled the world, it took a lot of struggle and effort and huge public policy initiatives to reduce smoking.

A large section of society has been attacked by companies for profit using lies, addictive substances and manipulation and simply saying "stop smoking" or "start spending inordinate amounts of time researching every thing you eat to find out if it has added sugar, even though it's presented to you as healthy", didn't/hasn't worked.

That you're still trying to peddle the obesity crisis as a moral failing of some huge swathe of the population is really sad and disappointing.

You are completely wrong.

What you eat is a personal choice, such as smoking is personal choice. Regardless of societal norms, it is still a personal choice.

Not every issue in society requires a victim. Victim for example is someone who was raped because they didn't have a choice in the manner. Going to the store, and choosing which items to purchase does not equate to a victim. Just because a large portion of society makes poor choices does not equate to a large portion of society being victims.

If all of society jumped off a bridge, are they all victims?

> If schools operated for profit, with education subsidized by vouchers, the companies running the schools would have an interest in spending as little as possible actually educating the students, because every dollar they could save would be a dollar they could keep.

How can someone actually believe this?

That point of view makes the rest of this article hard to take at face value.

I have an aunt that works private education in Florida. This is in fact the norm of private education there

My kids have been in 3 schools. Public (among the best in the area) has proved far worse than private. "Keep" too much, and the money walks.

ITT, Devry, University of Phoenix, Corinthian Colleges, etc.

Yeah, I wonder why people would think for profit education is not in the best interest of the students too. /s

The trouble with a public system is that all sorts of perverse incentives arise. Civil servants' unions have an interest in maximising benefits to their members, and in the U.S. they spend their dues (taken, ultimately, from the taxpayer) to lobby politicians to increase their members' benefits (taken, ultimately, from the taxpayer). A public system mandates that everyone contribute, regardless of his or her beliefs: in Tennessee an atheist might be forced to spend on a school which teaches creationism, while in San Francisco a theist might be forced to spend on a school which teaches that there is no God.

There would be similar problems with a 'public food option.' The author notes 'I could give you a dozen people who could run a nutritious, delicious, and decidedly non-dreary nonprofit diner given a sufficient budget': what would prevent those dozen people from each building their own little empires on the taxpayers' dime? Who is to determine what is a sufficient but not exorbitant level of non-dreariness? Is it okay for the Free American Diner to serve meat? Non-kosher food?

None of this is to say that private firms don't also have perverse incentives: he's right, they do. But I think that the answer is generally to try to fix that (e.g. by regulation) rather than to go public. At least with competing firms one might have a choice: with a public option, only the very wealthy can opt out.

> "Then I remembered that nutrition in America is a total disaster, that ⅔ of the country is obese or overweight, and that half of the country either has diabetes or is at high risk of having diabetes soon. If we start providing education like we provide nutrition, then God help the little children…"

The irony here is (pardon the hyperbole) literally deadly.

If we're going to prevent obesity then more people need to be educated on the causes. In many (read: all) of the non-medical condition based cases, the individual is their own best enemy. There is nothing more choice based than what you put in your mouth.

No doubt, there's room for improvement in the food system. But I've seen people with choices consistently choose badly. To blame the system is blaming a symptom.

This is discussed extensively in the article, and is in fact the main argument of the article.

The thrust of his argument is that capitalism forces companies to play to biological triggers that are bad for us, and to play them hard. And then use psychological tricks to make you feel ok for falling for them, even though you logically know you shouldn't.

If they don't their competitors will.

So the system is deliberately exerting pressure to become obese, it's not a symptom, it's a direct cause.

He even uses examples of how Brazil and other countries have been targeted deliberately by companies selling sugar and salt and have suddenly developed obesity problems, after US companies ran around giving away desserts and other sugar laden food.

I would re-read the article and pay attention to the parts about Coke, Raisin Bran and Minute Maid juice, plus him discussing Brazil, if you missed the arguments.

Yes. I got all that. I see it everyday. My point is that when we've reached a point where it's acceptable to blame anything but ourselves for what we buy at the supermarket...for what we put in our mouths...then we are in very bad shape.

Fixing the system isn't going to fix The Problem. The lack of self responsibility will only manifest itself elsewhere.

Put another way, in the bigger scheme of things, we can't keep complaining about the power of the overseers (i.e., the 1% et al) and make every solution one that champions the Nanny State.

At a certain point I think it's reasonable to say that a company spending half a billion dollars on psychology research and manipulation (advertising) MIGHT just have the upper hand.

Pardon my non-HN tone but...does that reasonable point come before or after I look down and can't see my own penis when I pee? How isn't that a trigger for "something is wrong"?

Yes, there is a well-armed enemy. But most people I've come in contact with are in denial that enemy exists. You can't stop a problem if you're unwilling to admit it exists. You can't improve your health if you're more committed to the idea that you have a God-given right to a sugar frosted donut.

Is it unreasonable to expect people to look in the mirror, literally? I'm not suggesting it's easy, but why is trying a bad thing?

Furthermore, and not to get too off-topic, but aside from too many sugars/carbs the average American diet includes too much factory farmed animals - whether that's milk or meat. Those animals are VERY resource intensive. Those animals also produce green horse gases (i.e, they fart, a lot).

So when was the last time you heard ANYONE of significant leadership say "America! You need to change your diet - for your own good, as well as the good of the planet"? Sure Obama got us ACA but he never met the much bigger (no pun intended) - less politically beneficial - root problem head on.

That's. Not. Leadership. Is it?

We're not talking about sugar coated donuts are we?

We're talking about a supposedly innocuous looking water that turns out it's sugar laden and a healthy looking breakfast cereal that again has huge amounts of added sugar.

While in the us/UK/etc. there is now widespread knowledge that coke and sweets are bad for you, the healthy looking alternatives also have tons of sugar added, deliberately, with manipulative packaging. But in poorer countries they're just using the old cheaper tactics, showing deliberate malice even though they know their product is generally damaging.

In my supermarket in the UK if you want to buy sugar free yoghurt you have to inspect the fine print. A large number have sugar as their second biggest ingredient. They're out to trick you all the time, with things that look like they have no sugar in them.

Not sure how your Obama beef is relevant.

And in fact, Michelle Obama even went on a large scale campaign to improve American eating: https://letsmove.obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/healthy-school...

Those are token, fuzzy, feel-good efforts. Great PR. But low on the priority / impact scale.

That effort should have been on the table right next to the ACA. If past presidents (in times of war) can ask the American public to make sacrifices, why can't that happen or this issue? After all, the military has declared the obesity crisis as a threat to national security.

https://www.usmilitary.com/29468/military-leaders-say-obesit...

ACA was great politically (for those on the Left), but it was only acknowledging half the problem, and in doing so is ultimately undermining the ACA itself.

Maybe this will help as it's a perfect example of the arc of my point.

In my supermarket in the USA, if you want to buy sugar free yogurt you go right for the plain knowing you can add anything you want; and that you'll know EXACTLY what you're adding, how much, etc. Personal responsibility to my body & mind trumps convenience (and a sugar high); it's my pushback against blaming The System when I already have and use the tools I need.

Plus, it also reduces shopping stress. There is no decision, just get the plain. (BTW, I'm not vegetarian / vegan but I do try to avoid yogurt as much as possible.)

Food is for nourishment, and occasionally to stimulate the senses (read: strictly for enjoyment). The problem is, too many have inverted that ratio; too many are unwilling to modify their relationship with food so they are healthy. There is nothing more personal than that relationship (i.e., what goes in your mouth). The System offers temptations. That doesn't make it okay to cheat on yourself.

p.s. My beef isn't with Obama. It's with (so called) liberals. Healthcare (which rightfully includes personal health), as well as the environment are both said to be liberal hot buttons. They are also connected. But all we get is ranting about the ACA and the Paris Accord? That's not leadership, at least not the type of leadership we really need at this point.

When did you learn that plain yoghurt is ok, but all the others are not ok? The packaging makes all the others look ok. Plain yoghurt vs strawberry yoghurt sounds like, and is presented like, a taste choice. Not a choice between 0 spoonfuls of sugar and 10 spoonfuls of sugar.

How did you learn it? And this is one example in a myriad of food choices! Almost every cereal, "whole grains and nuts", has sugar listed as the third ingredient. Including the healthy looking ones. In the UK, Special-K, advertised by thin women in red swimming costumes, presents itself as a diet cereal. Third ingredient? Sugar. "specifically tailored for women with a mix of ingredients to give you a positive, healthy start to the day and help you feel strong from the inside". Healthy start my ass, it's just carbs.

What about all these other little rules and gotchas and tricks that you've learnt manipulative companies are trying to play on you?

How many articles did you have to read?

And why do you think the rest of society has this same level of education about food? You, I assume, are well paid, have time to sit at your desk reading articles about yoghurt and added sugar. You have a vastly different level of education than most of your country, access to much higher levels of pay, have different exposure to revealing stories about the tactics of companies adding sugar came from.

We haven't even touched on how carb laden, added sugar food is vastly cheaper and easier to cook than nutrional food, making it extra seductive in two ways to poor, overworked people.

You've fallen into the classic trap of "I know this, I act like this, I have this level of money, I have time to act on this, therefore everyone else should be able to".

If you want to blame private grocery stores for obesity (and I don’t think you can), it’s only because they don’t exist in poor areas and they’re too hard to get to. If the government wants to attack the problem, public transport is the solution, not “free” restaurants. Public transport is an example of something governments are good at.

Agreed. No doubt food deserts are a real issue and they need to be addressed. But why is that holding up everything else. Btw, have you ever seen this TED Talk? (Note: I'm not a TED fan but this Ron Finley is a genius.)

https://www.ted.com/talks/ron_finley_a_guerilla_gardener_in_...

As I was saying, what about all the people NOT suffering from such a situation? What's their excuse? Funny how the poor get blamed for making bad choice, but non-poor (white) people get to blame the system or anything but themselves (for their obvious bad choices.)

Unless we lock down every last cookie, sugar cereal, etc. the availability of better nutrition - which the majority have access to already - ain't gonna work. It was the system that go us here. It's time to try solving the real root problem. That is, too many people are willing to poison themselves on the regular.

(Rant over.)

There's one huge flaw with the American Free Diner, and it's that it would inevitably be supplied by a place like Sysco or Aramark. Not only that, it would be the cheapest option with the lowest quality ingredients, and it would still wind up being relatively expensive to run.

I remember the Malcolm Gladwell piece ripping Bowdoin for serving good food, and thinking how he got it all wrong. There are so many schools that wind up with garbage from Aramark, and they still pay an arm and a leg for it.

"I’ve also always been suspicious of privatization schemes. That’s because I tend to think that when a service is for profit rather than for the public’s benefit, all sorts of perverse incentives arise."

Holy crap, how can anyone take this piece seriously with this zinger in the opening paragraph.

Neither private nor public are by themselves a panacea. Everything has trade-offs. This kind of polemic is not contributing to any kind of rational discourse.

I agree with this. However there's a different way I'd look at it.

It takes 25 sq ft of vegetation to feed a person. Along with this, you can also raise tilapia. Aquaculture. But this is backbreaking work. Farming sucks, and hurts the body.

So, don't farm. We can instead use Farmbot.io as a platform of what to build. So we have a basis of how to automate farming. It still requires killing fish when they mature, but im sure even that can be automated.

Now, back to 25 sqft. If there's 30k people to feed, that's 750k sq ft to feed everyone. Now, if we construct a building 3 stories tall, that's 250k sq ft per floor.. square root of that = 500ft x 500ft floor size...

We need a building 550'x550' 3 stories tall to feed 30,000 people. And that would be climate controlled for the food you're producing, and ideally free for any to eat.

I call it food security. It may be "communist" for some definition of communism. But I don't care. This provides a right to live, by the very fact that you now have a guarantee of a share of food. No compulsion or anything.

You were doing great until "free". It's not free. It's hard work, using resources of value. There is compulsion, whereby others must sacrifice (under threat) their own wealth & resources to facilitate what is falsely advertised as "free".

You have a right to live, insofar as nobody else may unduly take your life from you. That you live, comes the responsibility to provide for yourself - and suffer the consequences of your choices.

We've seen communism tried time and again. The death tolls & misery are staggering. Many of us will make sure it's not "tried", aka imposed by threat & violence, here; this is not up for debate, and you'd do well to understand why.

> You were doing great until "free". It's not free. It's hard work, using resources of value. There is compulsion, whereby others must sacrifice (under threat) their own wealth & resources to facilitate what is falsely advertised as "free".

Initially yes, it is an expenditure. It would cost tax dollars, which I'm guessing by your tone, is "theft by a gun from state entity". Yes, ive heard the normal libertarian trappings. But this provides guaranteed food. And for those preppers, it's also local production. And it's provided to all.

> You have a right to live, insofar as nobody else may unduly take your life from you. That you live, comes the responsibility to provide for yourself - and suffer the consequences of your choices.

Yes, and the law is equal, in that it bans both the rich and the poor alike from sleeping under bridges.

The rich can afford whatever food they want. The poor cannot. This would provide a buffer for every living person in this country to get healthy food. Where you talk of "Self Actualization" ideals, there's people in this country starving. That itself should be abhorrent and disgusting. But I'm sure you'll have excuses why they should deserve to starve.

> We've seen communism tried time and again. The death tolls & misery are staggering. Many of us will make sure it's not "tried", aka imposed by threat & violence, here; this is not up for debate, and you'd do well to understand why.

Communism has useful tools and ideas. So does capitalism.

Communism's been tried and gets stuck at military dictatorship on its way to stateless egalitarianism, every time. Capitalism goes the other way with large monied interests turning into their own dictatorships. It's not like many of the robber barons enacted company farms and company stores, and kept strikes from happening by violence... Oh, they did. Quite a few were killed by companies and National Guard.

And the big difference that you fail to cede to, is that with computing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, we can start changing:

     "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" 
     --TO-- 
     "To each according to his needs".

And that would entail nobody "by threat & violence". Try looking past 1850's political theory. I know I try.

Communism's been tried and gets stuck at military dictatorship

Of course it does. It has to. You're compelling people to engage in behavior they don't want to. That "to each" unavoidably requires "from each", decided by people no better than others, denying producers the full fruits of their labors, and blessing the idle with those fruits. Superior productivity becomes intolerable (as "inequal") and thus suppressed. The only way to enforce this unnatural state of affairs on people is thru threat of force leading precisely to military dictatorship. It's unavoidable.

Capitalism, however, lets people work out what is mutually beneficial without being bossed around by uninvolved strangers. Yes, some become powerful and persuade trade, but people always have the option to not - nobody's going to get fined, jailed, exiled, or killed not buying Brand Mega products. I've seen many massive corporations collapse - nobody died in the process, everyone had the choice to not associate with them.

(And yes, you always have the option to buy some cheap seeds, buy some cheap land, and go live off the land yourself. That's basically how I grew up.)

"Large monied interests" do NOT turn into "dictatorships". Any worker who doesn't like the work/pay exchange can walk away. Any customer who doesn't like the product doesn't have to buy it. (The strikes you reference involved wanton physical disruption & destruction; obstructionism, vandalism, and violence gets met with likewise.) However, in communism: mutually beneficial contracting without state sanction gets one jailed; walking away from communism gets one shot.

And yes, there will always be a need for "from each". Food doesn't grow & harvest itself in, no matter how automated. Buildings don't construct themselves. Work will need doing by humans. There will always be something for someone to do, so long as the state doesn't interfere. And ONLY capitalism will bring the price of food/shelter/etc down to the point that one need work very little to earn those basics.

TL;DR the CrossFit of permaculture

Yes! We need this and I dream about dedicating my life towards this work. Permaculture fits in this. It might be tricky to keep the stigma of food kitchen out of this idea, or maybe expand and fund food kitchens some how.

I want to farm healthy food and give it away. I want to cook healthy food and show people a better way of eating.

I think the MVP of this idea is to sell food as close to cost as possible. Make it taste amazing. Make the atmosphere not feel like a cafeteria but more like a Starbucks.

Invite people to stay as long as they like, invite them to help.

The biggest expense would likely be the commercial kitchen (hopefully buying the building and land). The first versions of this idea could be private but substidised. Government gives me 100k and I use 100k of my own money to buy and setup the facility.

Another idea is to treat it like a gym membership, like those crossfit clubs that have sprung all over the United States.

Pay $150/mo for all you can eat healthy choices.

Also check out the interesting response from Slate Star Codex. http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/21/contra-robinson-on-publ...

Wow, that article is excellent, and says everything I could have said, but better.

Highly worth a read.

The argument seems to be that "government can also be bad" and that "food industry is distorted by subsidies". Which is valid as far as it goes.

Getting to choose your own food and housing? Great, far better than being allocated by the government.

Getting to choose your own healthcare and education? Do you really have enough information to make an informed choice there? Are people who are unconscious or under 5 really good at being informed consumers? Or are they just having the decisions made for them by someone else?

Not getting any food or housing because you can't afford it? State option starts to look really great.

Sure seems like something our society could experiment with and see what happens. Step A - build one (1) of these in a city somewhere, maybe another in a sub-urban location and see if people show up. Don't cut any benefits or anything, just see if people are interested in the setup.

If that works, scale it up in a single large city, then a single state.

The place where I see this most likely to fail is that the organization will be under constant dual pressure of budget restrictions (pressuring them to serve cheaper foods) and 'usership' (pressuring them to serve less healthy == tastier foods). As with any system, the incentives have to be set up properly from the start.

Similar has been done. "Pay what you want" restaurants featuring healthy options have all failed.

This is a response to an earlier article by Scott Alexander, and he's already written a response to this one, too:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/21/contra-robinson-on-publ...

The general idea is "you can't compare real capitalism with a fantasy government, you have to compare real capitalism with a real government, and real governments are worse than real capitalism"

You can absolutely compare the real with a fantasy. That's how innovation happens.

Well, yes, but you generally have to have a plan for how your innovation happens, rather than "my version won't have any of the problems the existing versions have" without having an explanation for how you achieve this.

Markets are incredibly good at giving people what they want, not what they say they want, but what they actually want (economists call this revealed preference).

Some people, like the author, see this as a problem. He had no viable solution to the problem. We have actually tried to the "free healthy alternative" in schools, and what happens is either the healthy parts are thrown away or traded away.

Is lung cancer from smoking a revealed preference?

Wait a minute...traded away? So somebody does want them?

Schools with health breakfast and lunch options are strongly correlated with academic success. It's actually one of the most efficient uses of school funding even if many students don't partake the difference is staggering.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/...

There seems to be a single study that looks at what children were given - not what they ate - and I'm not sure how they controlled for other factors (i doubt this is the only change). I will read about it later though.

How can you say there's only one study? Why would you cast doubt on a study you admit you haven't read yet? What studies are you citing to back up your own claims?

I just took the first few results from google for a study to give evidence on this either way, and they seem to show the opposite of your claim:

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/03/do-hea... http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/04/health/healthier-school-lunch-...

That isn't to say there aren't instances of somebody using a vending machine (where schools choose to have them), but it actually does seem that we see improvements not just in health but also in performance.

From further Googling, I would say that the issue with the "healthier lunches" the parent probably is referring to more has to do with abruptly adjusting to the new requirements... not necessarily the healthiness of the food. [1]

It seems that the key here is to give both students and school cafeteria kitchens time to gradually adjust to newer cooking techniques and healthier ingredients. Those that have gradually phased in healthier options have done pretty well.

[1] http://healthland.time.com/2012/12/31/more-food-for-hungry-s...

>"[..]not what they say they want, but what they actually want[..]"

That always sounds circular and a little unscientific to me.

It's a variation of the old:

1. markets give us ideal results; 2. how do we know? because in other case we will not get those results.

Soylent- the UBI of nutrition!

Soylent distribution machines in every school and prison cafeteria, on street corners, any place where food scarcity exists. Each has a single button which dispenses a soylent, free of charge. No limits, no strings. All the soylent you can carry! Do away with food stamps- send 150 bottles of soylent a month, by mail, to any human being who can ask for it.

Moreover to reassure people it will be completely optional once they have consumed their first four bottles for the day.

You can take a look at the English-as-a-foreign-language schools in a few Asian countries to see what a private education system would look like and it is just as described, even despite the results being fairly measurable (can you speak in English or not).

Attacking the profit motive is insane.

There were a billion people on this planet 200 years ago and now there are 7 billion people. The main reason for that is profits.

When someone grows a bushel of wheat for $3.75 and sells it for $4.30, they're able to grow 13% more wheat in the next harvest. That profit makes the growing of wheat self sustaining and scalable.

Now apply the logic to every crop, every home appliance, every energy source - every endeavor human beings pursue. The result is 6 billion people who didn't die of starvation, disease, or exposure.

The biggest problem with lefty attacks on the profit motive is they simply don't realize that the profit motive could be used to solve the problems they describe!

Upset about the education options in this country? Create a profitable alternative and you can scale it out to every student in America.

Don't like the obesity problems developed countries face? Find a profitable way to turn fat people into skinny people and watch the pounds of every population dwindle.

Profits are like magic. They make solutions to difficult problems available on a mass scale. There have no doubt been some growing pains as humans have learned to harness this magic, but the solution to those growing pains is not to eliminate the profit motive - the best solution is always profitable.

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