Comment by ciconia | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ciconia | Hacker News Reader

In practically all developed countries, agriculture is wholly dependent on subsidies financed with taxes. The price of alimentary products in the supermarket does not reflect the true cost of production. This, coupled with countries like China subsidising exports, leads to a "race to the bottom" situation in which there's constant pressure to drive prices down.

One way to reduce waste would be to stop subsidising agriculture on a global level. This might be also be accompanied by raising the price of fuel and electricity. Before screaming bloody murder and downvoting, please consider the following:

- roughly 50% of food in the US goes to waste [1]. Meaning you already pay double what you think you pay. - About 40% of people in the US are obese [2]. We're eating too much. - Modern agriculture is an environmentally destructive practice [3]. Reducing food consumption can reduce its environmental impact. - We have all become used to abundance - in practically all domains of life: water, food, energy, travel, communication. We have become desensitised to the real value of things, we have no conception of the externalities involved in producing them, and pass our lives on an infinite binge of blind consumption.

On a personal level, each of us can make the transition to consuming food in a more reasonable and sober manner. Finally, educating people about food waste is not enough. What's needed is rather a coordinated effort to move to a new model where people consume what they physically need, rather than indulging momentary craving.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/america... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20190629233657/https://www.cdc.g... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_agricu...

Agriculture is subsidized for many reasons but one of the main reasons is national security. A nation that depends on imports to feed itself is beholden to whoever exports to it. Likewise a nation that exports food can exert control over those countries dependent on it for food.

Well, this should be true, but subsidies go to the luxury foods, mostly animal products, not the most efficient nutrient to cost ratio foods with minimal externalities.

Humans do not eat corn, wheat or soy in coming out of current production levels.

If we are to go with “national security” explanation, infantry and navy are mostly big men who (for right or wrong reasons) prefer meat in their diet.

The national security argument is not about feeding the army what they like to eat, it's about the literal survival of the common people.

I understand that. I was making an argument why government would want to keep meat production subsidized.

National security isn't just protecting from outside, it's also protecting from within. Stabilizing society via bread and circus is a valid realpolitik strategy, and what better way to do it than boosting the production of food to post-scarcity levels

First of all, national security requires having food on hand that people actually want to eat. You know what happens when you go to war and suddenly the only food left is corn? Riots against the war and a massive black market.

Second of all, subsidizing foods that people don't want to eat is inefficient since people, amazingly, won't eat it. So now you have a lot of food that you need to dispose off. You can't just make less of it because then it won't be there in case of an emergency. So you're almost literally throwing money into the dumpster.

Subsidies are made for luxury foods. Luxury foods are not kept in storage houses losing value, luxury foods are sold fresh.

If you grew beans, the best protein, calorie per externality (smallest energy required to grow), then you could store it, subsidise it and be really safe with that choice.

There is no national security in growing energy expensive foods. If you can't input the energy required to grow it, you're going to need to subsidise it even more in times of crisis. It's just plain simple stupid strategy and is not robust, not antifragile, it's fragile ridiculous strategy.

Luxury foods are subsidised because of insane lobbying. That's the only reason. No bean farmer is going to ask for subsidies given that his current demand is no where near beef.

Farmer that is working for Tyson Foods is going to ask for subsidies because the business model of Tyson Foods is made just to extract more money from government.

I find the national security argument unconvincing, especially for the US, which enjoys an abundance of natural resources. The best thing we can do for national security is be a friend to all nations, rather than world police.

Developing multiple lines of trade helps guard against the hostile exporter, but we should be asking why they are hostile in the first place.

The best thing we can do for our agriculture is to allow the free market to allocate land, labor, and capital to their best and highest use, which is probably a lot different than the use allocated to them by lobbyists, cronies, and bureaucrats.

We live in a market-dominated world - how can south american, african and south asian countries extort control?

It isn't the foods that are making us obese that go to waste. Processed foods don't go bad like kale and beets. I am still in favor of you plan.

I agree with your sentiment that we are dealing with an infinite binge of blind consumption. It is an interesting thought but in some sense raising prices isn't going to stop the addict.

Can you provide references to the subsidies you mention? I think you will find that this is a common misconception with only some truth to it. I hear often that US agriculture is subsidized, but never hear specifics. I'm genuinely curious where people get this impression.

The majority of ag subsidies are not given to farmers for growing things. Crop insurance is subsidized, but that doesn't necessarily lead to overproduction as is only really kicks in when conditions are very poor. Conservation programs (to NOT farm land) are also subsidized. This again doesn't encourage over production.

There are many things that could be improved in modern agriculture, but my view is that subsidies have little to do with our largest problems.

Crop insurance pays out at least five billion dollars a year in the US so it’s not solely “when conditions are very poor”

There are other hidden subsidied, such as tarriffs on sugarcane meaning most fructose in the us comes from corn. A tarriff on a competitor is economically the same as a subsidy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy

I'd always heard that dairy gets quite a lot of subsidies, including from advertising like the "Got milk?" ads. A quick search seems to support this. It'd be interesting to hear from someone who's dug into this a lot more.

https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/dairy-subsidie...

https://qz.com/944630/the-us-government-program-behind-the-g...

https://www.idausa.org/government-meat-dairy-advertising/

How is the National Diary Council paying for advertising, which is a lobbyist group made up of dairies, a subsidy?

Their subsidies are in things like the farm bill where they are protected by tariffs and our weird obsession with pasteurization. Our dairy industry does a bunch of exporting milk powder to the 3rd world.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bethkaiserman/2018/12/30/farm-b...

Subsidizing crop insurance absolutely leads to lower food prices, which the parent argues is the problem.

Obesity is not eating too much, it's eating bad, highly processed foods. I doubt somebody can get obese by eating too much salad or chicken. It's not as simple as forcing everybody to higher prices or starving them.

It's simply eating more calories than a person needs in a day. Of course, that's often easier to do with "highly processed foods", but the 33% of the U.S. population that's a healthy weight eat all sorts of things (as do I).

> It's simply eating more calories than a person needs in a day.

This is true but without explaining the issue. Gary Taubes compared it to asking why a theater is over capacity, and getting the answer "because more people entered than exited." Well, yes, but why?

You're at a healthy weight because you don't eat more calories than you need in a day. I'm obese because I do. But those facts don't explain why you don't and I do. It probably isn't because you count calories more diligently.

I've actually personally proven calorie counting makes zero sense in the context that healthcare has tried to phrase it.

It isn't that you eat too many calories, its that your body hoards to many. Chronic exercise "helps" in the short term, but just causes long term damage, and your body just makes you want to eat more in response.

The trick is not how much you eat, but what you eat. Same with carbs, not how much, but what. Stick with nutrient dense foods (which pretty much means whole, fresh, goods, despite how much that is associated with a certain crowd), and your body just finally lets go and lets you lose weight.

For me, I went strictly Paleo for a year, not even low carb. Over a year and a half, I went from 340 to 183. I made sure I didn't decrease caloric intake (~2000 calories a day), nor increase caloric burn. According to common (but woefully incorrect) knowledge, I'm clearly lying, and I still weigh 340, yet, I don't.

Stripping out grains, refined sugars, dairy, legumes, refined oils, other refined products, and replacing it with fresh meat, vegs, moderate fruit, coconut and olive oil, while not decreasing calories, still helped me lose weight.

Healthcare sets people up to fail and then blames the victim. Its nuts.

I'm sorry, but your claim is simply not believable. A 340 pound man cannot maintain that weight with only 2000 calories a day. That would equate to a metabolism that burns less than 6 calories per pound. MAYBE if you were bedridden your metabolism could drop that low.

It is true that metabolism varies by individual, and it's also an unfortunate truth that people who were obese and get their weight down to a level that the medical community deems healthy will have a slower metabolism than most naturally skinny people. But there is no chance that you were maintaining a 2000 calorie diet before you started losing weight.

What is also true is that most people do not properly estimate the number of calories they consume each day. I certainly have a hard time doing it - the only real way is to prepare all of your food yourself, or buy prepackaged food that you can measure accurately. I guarantee you were eating much more than you thought you were.

> What is also true is that most people do not properly estimate the number of calories they consume each day.

I don't have a reference handy, but I have read studies that show that when people self-report calorie consumption from memory they tend to underestimate by a large margin, reporting in the vicinity of 50-70% of actual consumption.

You can't get closer than 10% accuracy given that nutritional labels can be off by that much, and you aren't getting that unless you are making all your own food and weighing everything with a food scale.

A restaurant meal can vary by hundreds of calories based on how much dense fat like oil or butter is in it, and look identical each time.

It wouldn't surprise me to find out that the average person really does underestimate calorie consumption by that much.

Beverages alone are one of the major sources underestimated calories. A 20oz bottle of soda with sugar is multiple servings, but people don't think about it as such. The same goes for fruit juice and a lot of the fancy coffee beverages. Alcohol is also easy to underestimate, especially if a glass of wine with dinner can turn into half a bottle or more, or a nightcap turns into a double.

Thank you for proving my point, people are quick to just repeat what they've been told and ignore new information. It is certainly a strange phenomenon on the internet nowadays.

You did not present any new information. You made a claim that is not supported by the science.

Nobody is arguing that we aren't learning more about weight and nutrition, but that doesn't mean we ignore science for personal anecdotes that are likely untrue.

Except you're still further proving my point. Instead of expressing that you wish to learn about the science, you just quote decades old bad science that never really was true.

In a way, its sorta like how flat earthers and anti-vaxers work, you're just part of a third type that denies nutrition science. I did exactly what I said I did, and so have many other people, and what you're engaging in is an odd form of fat shaming (seeing as I'm not fat anymore, but used to be; and lost my weight entirely by following the science where it lead me).

Obesity derives from calorie intake, not from the quality of the food. But I guess there is a strong correlation between people eating junk food and the ones eating too much food. Probably, if you don't care about what you're eating you also don't check the calories count.

That’s what I meant. By ‘much’ I meant that by eating a lot whole foods it’s really hard to be obese, you’ll get full faster or they are just not caloric enough. I guess I should improve my English writing skills ;)

Isn’t their a strong argument out there that hormones play a bigger role in why people become obese? E.g., insulin resistance from too much sugar, which makes the body store fat.

Not only. First, some people, eating the same excess calories than you, won't store it as fast. Genetics play a role. Also, you may store more fat or not depending of:

- the time of the day you eat it (you will more likely store things if you eat it late than early in the morning due to your homonal cycle)

- the duration on which you eat it (the infamous 9 hours popularized by dr rhonda patrick)

- what you mix. Eating the same amount of calories in pure fat, or in a mix of 50% fat and sugar will not result in the same process by the liver.

- insulin sensibility. Which is influence by the quality of your food. E.G: how much sugar it contains.

- ability to process said food, again influenced by the state of irritation of your intestine and your microbiome, and hence influenced by the quality of your food. E.G: adult can get irritated intestines by intaking dairy product after they lost their childhood ability to proess it as well.

I know it's a convenient shortcut to say "calories in, calories out", especially since it's easy to demonstrate (the anecdotal Twinkie diet made us all think). But if we keep repeating that, we are not helping people to lose weight. Dieting has a very low success rate because of the solely focus on the calorie count, while using the informations above as well lead to less rebound and frustration in my experience.

I agree that dieting is hard, but it's largely not because of different calories being stored differently. The big nutritional study [1] sponsored by Gary Taubes (the main proponent of "not every calorie is created equal") show that low-carb and low-fat diets result in same weight loss.

I'm also not aware of any study (though I haven't looked very hard) that shows intermittent fasting results in greater energy consumption (and hence lower fat gain / greater fat loss) except by making it somewhat easier to eat less.

[1] https://freetheanimal.com/2018/02/taues-peter-strikes.html

Also, people tend to be consistent in the weight of food they eat, so eating less energy dense foods helps people lose weight. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGbGKSNPBzo

For example, adding an apple between meals helping women to lose weight.

> About 40% of people in the US are obese [2]. We're eating too much.

Does the obesity really come from eating too much? Or does it come from eating with disproportionate amounts of fat and sugar? Also, I think you can factor in things like how the people in the US need to drive much more than people in other countries because everything is so much further apart. It's not as practical to walk.

Add to what you said, we're eating too much sugar causing a health crisis no one's talking about (from eating sugar).

So true! The sugar addiction is real and I just don't know how to kick it. For me, it is twisted in with my caffeine addiction and I struggle trying to ward off potential withdrawal migraines with wanting to stop caffeine and also wanting to make it through life/work.

May I make a starting recommendation - start weaning yourself off of it. Start with your coffee. Work yourself to decaf, start with 3/4 regular, 1/4 decaf. Then, 1/2 sugar, and try 1/2 stevia. It's tough to do it cold-turkey.

If I can suggest an alternative, reduce the sugar first in coffee and start switching to black without anything else in it.

I think sugar is far worse than caffeine including alternatives like Stevia. Decaf on the other hand depending on how it was made into decaf can also be harmful.

Kick the sugar first. I replaced it with tarts like green apples and other fruits and not only lost weight but artificial sugar does not even taste good to me anymore.

On a side note I'm never typi g from a mobile phone again I'm sick of.typos and I'm done fixing them from here, this mobile phone bottleneck is terrible.

Same. : )

Typing on a mobile phone is still really bad. I'm not just being a "old person". Key boards are way better, and I'm surprise that we have not had much innovation in this relm.

It's almost like the powers that be, want to keep mobile and tablet as consumption devices and not a creation devices.

It's really hard to produce meaningful data with a phone...

Basically bottlenecked from keyboard and mouse, to just mouse...

Reducing workload and stress levels worked for me. I am only dependant on coffeine when I need to work a lot, and on sugar when I need to artificially cheer myself up.

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