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Comment by curuinor | Hacker News Reader

If you read the papers on palatants and food processes destined for animals, they'll increase consumption by 20, 30% easily.

Check out this patent for a horse nugget, for example: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/63/5b/ef/5e6b6bd...

So if you take that and realize there's more money in palatants for humans than in animals, that'll explain an entire obesity epidemic entirely without any other explanations.

But by dint of this fact, natural flavoring and proprietary crunchification processes and things like that are the thing which will not go away in the general movement against food additives. It's essential to the business.

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To be fair the best French baguettes are crunchy and soft at the same time and have only water, flour, salt, sugar? and yeast, so nothing much to be afraid of there.

And they require an immense amount of skill to make, which means you can only find really good bread in communities where a baker artisan can run a sustainable business. In the age of home grocery delivery, it's an uphill battle.

The number of bakers in France has steadily gone down over the past half century or so. It's been going up a bit recently due to the new phenomenon of upper class white collar workers who quit their job in their 30s to find meaning in their life to do something more "noble" like baking, but it remains to be seen what the long term impact of this will be.

You can manufacture Twix and Cheetos at scale, but not baguettes.

I disagree, since the 90s in Ireland every convenience store big enough to have a deli counter has been selling Cuisine de France baguettes. Usually as the popular breakfast roll or chicken fillet roll. They are mass produced and crispy, they are cooked in store by staff with no special training.

What makes you think they have only those five ingredients? I’d bet on more gluten, malt, potato starch, a couple exotic salts, and more.

https://www.innit.com/nutrition/cuisine-de-france-demi-bague...

It uses enriched flour (which I doubt makes much difference), but also adds conditioner which really is the culprit of being engineered for mass production.

There is nothing wrong with most additives. Even so-called 'artisanal' bakers add 'bread improvers', which contain things like 'ascorbic acid' (ooohh scary! except that its common name is... vitamin C), enzymes or some fast sugars that are entirely converted to alcohol and CO2 by the yeast (i.e. they're just used as yeast feed, no extra sweetness to the final product).

My mother used to work with a woman who later opened a bakery with her husband and they were well known in the surrounding area for their great bread and bread rolls (this was in Belgium - similar style of bread as in France, baguettes not quite as good but often very close; just saying this wasn't some American sogginess). When I got into making bread at home, I asked him about his special trick to make great bread. The first one was 'experience', i.e. practicing the procedure dozens of times until its perfectly repeatable. And the second was 'a pinch out of my special jar' which he bought from a generic wholesale baking supplies vendor, and which contained the things I mentioned above.

I always add a crushed vitamin C tablet to bread I make; it really helps with the gluten development and the quality of the rise. But most online bread making communities are full of idiots who recoil in horror at such sacrilege - they're all like "if I wanted bread full of chemical additives, I'd buy it in the store" rollseyes. But if you suggest they add a squeeze of lemon juice they they're all cool with it, they just complain about they don't want the slight lemon taste to their bread. Sigh.

Don't get me started on nitrate as a preservative in sausage making and the idiocy 'biological sausage makers' spew about that...

Start renaming things

MSG = Kombu Salt

Nitrates = Celery Juice (though this is already done)

HFCS = Artisnal Corn Sugar

"some American sogginess"

The equation of American bread with Wonder Bread is really tired and offensive. Maybe you should spin some tale about how American flour is so, so, different that making bread with flour, salt, yeast and water is so different than in Europe and it comes out completely inedible to those of refined palate.

Eh, I don't think using "American bread" as an expression for bad bread is all that horrible, just like "being on Italian time" (or Brazilian or whatever) or for people who are habitually late or "going Dutch" for splitting a bill is all that bad - even when I do know Italians and Brazilians who are always on time, and Dutch people who will pay for their table. Then again, it's 2020, so I guess I should change colloquialisms like this.

In defense of America, our San Francisco Sourdough is only soggy when used to sop up the chowder.

My complaint about bread here in the states (I am American) is not that it's soggy so much as Americans have very high tolerance for stale bread, which means stores will often leave stale bread to fill the shelves completely, and I guess less "artisanal" brands will make their bread much less appealing when fresh because the market tolerates bland, hard textured, flavorless goods.

This varies a lot with the store and in what town you buy the bread. I didn't have this complaint as much in the Northeast as I did out west. But out west, you can find the good stuff if you are more selective and pay more.

There's a whole aisle in my American grocery filled with wonder bread and its equivalent. I grew up on it.

I've been ruined by learning about bakeries and good crusty loaves with texture and flavor. Won't eat anything else now.

So I don't know about 'tired', its a real thing.

If you won’t, I’ll jump in. There’s evidence that it would be a positive choice to drop nitrates from ones diet entirely, but any cured meat product that claims to be nitrate free is either unrecognizable as what the label says or preying on consumer ignorance. Generally it is the second option, and celery salt is the smoking gun. Here’s an article on the subject: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/food/celery-juice-viable-a...

Im comfortable saying any deli meat or bacon marketed “no added nitrates” is either over priced or subpar quality and , in most cases, being hawked by charlatans who thrive on their customers being low information.

Great link, thanks for that.

I didn't saw yet a single industrial baguette that was better than what my local baker does.

Industrial one may be crispy but have nothing like a good one.

They’re pretty good though. And also cheaper. The same argument could be made of chips.

You can take any random supermarket bread and say it happens to not be as good as your standard, but the process that makes it mass market, making the dough and freezing it in the factory, and baking it in a store, I don't believe has to meaningfully compromise the quality.

I don't know how it would be better, but I don't think it has to be worse.

The manufacturing process makes them worse. On a mass scale, every cent counts and the first thing to take a hit is the quality of the flour and the density of the dough. Then it's machine mixed, frozen, and baked in the very same condition at all time in electric ovens and that makes for a pretty forgettable taste and texture.

The end result is nowhere near what a competent baker can do, working manually and especially when using for instance a wood fire oven

> On a mass scale, every cent counts and the first thing to take a hit is the quality of the flour and the density of the dough.

Yes, but a better product can be sold for more. That's why they are making something resembling baguettes in the first place, and not just the cheapest loaf possible.

(Not saying that in practice the factory baguettes are better than what your favourite baker does. Far from it.)

Surely baguettes are always sold for way more than the cost of ingredients.

I'd assume so. Labour costs (including both baking and retail) are a big part of the price of a baguette.

Why?

Oh, perhaps because I wrote 'Yes, but a better product can be sold for more.'?

To be more explicit: Yes, but a better product can be sold for more than a worse product.

(Not: "Yes, but a better product can be sold for more than price of ingredients.")

Same in Germany. The small bakeries are dying. But at least in Germany and France even the supermarket bread is way ahead of most even the fanciest US bread.

It's funny you'd say that, one of the thing that has been killing bakeries for the past 5 years is the broad adoption of bread making appliances. Small home appliances where you poor the ingredients, mostly half of water and half of flour, then it does the whole mixing and cooking by itself in a few hours. The bread always comes out warm and perfect. Making bread has never been easier.

top sellers on amazon France: https://www.amazon.fr/gp/bestsellers/kitchen/57878031

For a family that eats a lot of bread it's certainly a functional option, but the bread that comes out of it is pretty bland texture wise.

More like mass produced bread from the grocery store is good enough for busy lives.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/france-bakery-bread...

I find it amusing that bread machines and the NYT "no knead bread recipe" differ essentially by a few trivial steps.

German factory-made bread is quite palatable.

Even quite on par with what gets sold as artisanal bread in a lot of places. (Though the factory bread is not as good as the real good artisanal stuff, of course.)

So, you can get pretty good quality food from an industrial process, if there's a big market willing to pay for it. It's not even expensive.

Of course, if your consumers don't care or only care for the 'wrong' things, you get: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorleywood_bread_process

Baguettes are not really healthier than chips. The same can be said for sushi (well sushi got some other stuff that's good for you, but let's just think weight loss). They're mostly just carbs.

If Americans had sushi and baguettes they wouldn't be slim like the French and Japanese, they'd eat sushi till they are 110% full (the Japanese aim to not stuff themselves at meals) and then carry around a bag of baguettes for in-between grazing (the French prefer set meals).

They'd also blame everything on their delicious national cuisine, rather than on themselves.

Here's an interesting take I heard recently- in addition to the move to white flour, some also suspect the move away from slow, natural leavening (sourdough) to fast, industrial leavening (instant yeast) has contributed to making bread less healthy. In support of that claim, notice the low glycemic index of sourdough bread.

You have to skip over a lot of chemistry to say baguettes are the same as chips. I’m not convinced food is all about macronutrients. I think frying things in hot oil has been shown to generate some potentially harmful substances though Im sure the jury is still out on how much you’d have to eat to be dangerous.

This is another factor to consider regarding carbs/starches, in addition to the more commonly known ones like GI:

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

Yes. "Crispiness is a stimulant to active eating; it appears to hold a particular place in the basic psychology of appetite and hunger satiation, spurring one to continue eating."

And that's how the food industry turned America into a nation of oinkers. Even modest convenience stores now have entire aisles of chips.

> So if you take that and realize there's more money in palatants for humans than in animals, that'll explain an entire obesity epidemic entirely without any other explanations.

Well, that's what you get when the economy's health is measured by broad and sweeping measures like GDP. In the current American economy, the fries company makes 20% more, the doctor treating the obese person eating too many fries or the surgeon doing their lap band surgery gets paid, and a lot of insurance companies and middlemen make money. So everything is happening as planned.

Without socialized healthcare, there is no incentive for food manufacturers to make their foods not addictive. I wonder if there will ever be regulation regarding this as there is for alcohol and cigarettes. Mandatory calorie counts on fast food menus and such are barely scraping the surface.

How does socialized healthcare change food manuf incentives?

I do also wonder about where it makes sense to draw the line when it comes to nutrition policy. We all share finite healthcare resources, especially as it becomes more socialized.

I think at the very least it becomes even more obviously predatory for you to make money off peddling addictive junk food to the masses. I would start there when thinking of helpful policy. Though things get ethically questionable very quickly.

Might be more helpful to look into why 7/11 in Japan is full of so much healthy food compared to 7/11 in USA where you're lucky to find a shrink-wrapped apple, and what kind of cultural shift is needed to bring about that change. I feel like that difference summarizes why we are so screwed. We've lost the plot somewhere along the line.

It doesn't change much in fact. That's why several prominent socialized healthcare nations are extremely obese just like the US.

That includes: Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Greece, Israel.

All have adult obesity levels around or over 25%. Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Britain are among the most obese nations on the planet - despite having world-class socialized healthcare systems.

When it comes to adult obesity among major nations (ie not Tuvalu or Tonga), New Zealand is #11, Canada is #13, Australia is #14, Britain is #20.

The only way you can really control that as the parent was trying to imply, is through direct government control of all food consumption and production.

> through direct government control of all food consumption and production

This is an alarmist representation. Incentives can work just fine in a market-driven economic system, witness the most recent tax cuts that were passed into law. Would a generous tax cut for stores that sell mostly fresh food be that bad?

Man its a shame New Zealand has such bad obesity figures. The outdoors activities are great. Tons of great trail running/backpacking/hiking to be done

France, too, seems to have hit a cultural inflection point. Obesity rates are quickly climbing. Maybe it's bias, but over the past several years I've also noticed several stories about how McDonalds is becoming more popular in France, as well as the flight of the middle-class out of traditional towns into suburban homes, shopping in suburban malls.

I agree the government trying to optimize to increasing GDP is not great for society, but it does also optimize for maximum tax revenue increase, so I understand why its done.

I don't see any reason why one needs to socialize healthcare in order to regulate foodstuffs. Food manufacturers are going to make their foods stuffs addictive if people buy them more because of that, not whether a country has socialized medicine. One might even argue that people have less incentive to work on being healthy when their healthcare is paid by someone else.

I think the point being made is that when the government bears the cost of the externality it is more incentivized to address root causes, as it is a direct driver of savings. I am always looking for this sort of alignment of incentives when structuring a project, and it takes some effort but when you can find it it's dynamite.

With prisons the government bears the cost, and would benefit if fewer people were in prison. In practice, it has lead to for profit prisons and judicial corruption.

This is due to revolving door lobbying inherent in the political system, which is why states have started banning contracts with private prisons.

> I think the point being made is that when the government bears the cost of the externality it is more incentivized to address root causes, as it is a direct driver of savings.

Thank you, this is indeed the point that was intended. It's not a direct case of the food manufacturer saying "Hey we have socialized healthcare, let's make healthier chips", it's the government thinking "Damn, we have a lot of obese people, let's have incentives or rules that make manufacturers produce healthier foods".

That is a pretty optimistic view of US government agencies that I don't share. Most fight tooth and nail to increase their budgets so I think don't heathcare being socialized (and becoming the largest agency in the government) would likely increase the government interest in a healthy population.

> So if you take that and realize there's more money in palatants for humans than in animals, that'll explain an entire obesity epidemic entirely without any other explanations.

You realize that by definition there will always be more money in human food than animals? The only reason to feed animals, is to feed human, thus any cost related to animals food will be included in human food.

An industry also has much clearer cost to benefit, it's quantitative, it's clear that if you can get the same benefit for 1$ less or if you can get 1$ more out of something that cost less than that, again it makes sense. In the consumer world though, it much less clear, marketing has a much greater power there for example. Most people won't do the math on what's will feed them the most efficiently, they go by taste, they go by packaging, they go by brand awareness.

I can eat like a King every day, and do less physical labor as well. Celebration foods have become everyday foods, especially in the United States.

> "You'll need a LOT of data to support the general hypothesis that humans who eat 20% more of any food will get fat,"

But that's just the thing, theoretically I could choose to eat any number of healthy things, but guess what I think about when I get hungry?

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