Comment by _eht | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _eht | Hacker News Reader

Here's an idea, stop constantly feeding yourself from companies who enjoy playing psychological pricing and ingredient/filler games on massive scales. Chances are you have someone in your town who roasts coffee beans. Chances are there are local eggs you could be getting easy, or with a little more effort, harvesting your own. Stop feeding yourself and your offspring insanely high levels of sugar breakfast cereal. Have you realized that they skirt food definitions around you? When was the last time you bought real dairy iced cream? Why are we chlorinating chicken and pumping it full of saline solution for the shelves, again?

This article is frustrating because the onus is not directly on the manufacturing... consumers allow the behaviour by largely being ignorant about their own nutrition. But who can blame them, we have entire governments building pyramids to suit questionably beneficial food industries. Where does all that corn come from for our addiction to high fructose corn syrup?

Stop letting people and companies who do not care about YOU, feed you and your family.

Yup, this is the real solution. It's not easy, but it's the truth. So long as we allow supply chains to be centralized and verticalized, we introduce not just more middleman links to allow for adulteration, but more incentives for the middlemen to do so. People seem to forget that the adulteration involved in lowering prices has second order effects that can very much be unknown. Just a century ago, custom cough syrup tonics containing cocaine and heroin were considered completely safe. Even beyond the adulterants we know to be harmful, how many others which are currently GRAS will in the future be looked at as tragedies? Hopefully, few. But if not...

I think the solution to this problem is to increase supply chain locality, as you said. It would be great to have more solutions that directly connected buyers to local farms. Another option I've thought about is building infrastructure around making it possible for folks to run microfarms inside their own homes -- if this could be done in a convenient way, it would be the 100% ideal solution, but short of that, I think reforming the current system to be local farm -> consumer is still closer to 99% ideal.

> consumers allow the behaviour by largely being ignorant about their own nutrition.

This idea that "consumers allow the behavior" is a very pernicious one - it's common in the context of global warming too ("if only people stopped driving their car and started caring about the planet!").

It's an utter reversion of causality. People are going to do whatever makes the most sense given their own context, and if you're struggling time and money wise to take care of your family in a nutritional desert [0], and the only jobs you can get require you to drive an hour a day, then of course you're going to be buying frozen waffles at Walmart and Big Mac takeout for your kids and driving your car around. Not to mention the billions of dollars spent on advertising to manipulate people - what do you want citizens to do, when their own educational system fails to teach them the most basic literacy/numerical skills? [1]

We need to be angry at governments and companies, not people doing what they can to merely get by.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert [1] https://cepa.stanford.edu/content/patterns-literacy-among-us...

Not only that, but even if you can afford (both in time and money) to shop for honest, nutritional alternatives, how many people are really going to spend a significant amount of their time seeking out and acquiring these alternatives?

The OP talks about finding local sources of coffee and eggs, but many people would have no idea of where to get those, nor have any means of verifying that they were really what they claimed and not fraudulent.

As a consumer, I have no way of knowing if, for instance, the people hawking food at my local farmer's market (which I'm lucky enough to live within a convenient distance of) are really source their food locally or just pretend to. I have no means of verifying whether their food is really "organic", or is merely sold as such.

To take an example, the adulteration of "raw", "organic" honey with fillers like corn syrup is a serious problem.[1][2] An individual consumer has virtually no means at their disposal to determine which honey is genuine, short of becoming a beekeeper themselves or having a trusted beekeper friend, which is (I would venture to guess) the case for approximately 0% of the population.

The same goes for pretty much every other product. In aggregate, for all of the products a typical consumer buys, this can not be solved at an individual level.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22518291

[2] - https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/884kq4/your-fancy-honey-m...

The disruption to supply chains from COVID and panic buying has resulted in my local grocery store carrying more local and regional products to replace the ones that have shortages.

They already carried local products, but that has increased.

So relax.

> So Relax.

Why say that? The OP is absolutely right about this issue. The fact that you get more local post COVID-19 is just temporary, they’ll go back to the way it used to be before and that is very questionable

People are buying the new products, and that will increase the market for them, which means that the situation cannot just return to before.

If you're so pessimistic, well, why do you think anyone cares about exhortations to buy local? Something will prevent them from doing so.

Also, it's kind of odd if pessimism makes you think the effects of COVID will vanish promptly. People normally adapt to recent events by assuming the possibility of a recurrence exists.

People are buying the new products due to a lack of cheaper alternatives, which you said yourself (it's the whole reason they're carrying local items in the first place).

Once those cheaper items return to shelves, a significant portion of the shoppers will return to them.

Please don't tell me what I said, especially when I didn't.

The new product I particularly had in mind is both cheaper and better (coffee).

Can I tell you what you didn't say? You didn't say the local item was cheaper. That's an important bit of your argument.

The article is from 2018 and the context you are missing spans a large area. Maybe try being less relaxed and complacent? Also consider reading the article. Your comment indicates you missed the points.

Thanks for the advice. I was replying to a comment about buying local, not to the article.

Wages are linked to inflation, inflation has been kept low by shrinkflation.

Many cannot elect to buy real ice cream.

Do inflation stats not account for shrinkflation?

There literally isn't enough productive capacity in the world, at present, to feed people this way.

The only way to get healthy food to most people is for the regulatory power of the government to step in, backed up by the vigilance of the people. Capitalism won't solve this problem. Your individual choices won't solve it. Engaged citizens using their right to regulate business is the only solution.

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