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Comment by zozbot234 | Hacker News Reader

> Healthy food was generally prepared at home from fresh raw ingredients. Perhaps there was a small veggie garden in the back yard.

Yup, that's called a subsistence economy. It's a very good thing that we can spend our time doing something better than back-breaking agricultural work and general housekeeping. That's what progress is all about.

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This is the only possible future and the best possible future. Progress is intrinsically a very good thing. The disappearance of the home-cooked meals can't possibly be anything but a great liberation. We have better things to do than feed healthy food to our children.

We have the results to show for it:

> In the 1960s and 1970s only 13 percent of U.S. adults and 5 to 7 percent of U.S. children were obese.

> The US obesity prevalence was 42.4% in 2017 – 2018.

> For children and adolescents aged 2-19 years in 2017-20181 the prevalence of obesity was 19.3%.

https://www.apa.org/pi/families/resources/newsletter/2012/07...

https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html

https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html

Most people spend that time doing a job they hate so they can afford someone else for services to meet basic needs.

Not a good deal IMO.

False dilemma. There is a state of being between subsistence farming and outsourced meals, and it's characterized by frugality and patience.

It's perfectly possible to have good meals on the go, as evidenced by the fact that Italians, Spaniards, French and Peruvians can get simple lunch fares with high-quality ingredients and affordable prices, and it's not necessarily about home-cooked meals either.

So can I, but I have frugality and patience.

> “To sum up, I may say that if the taste of our people [in France] for possessing land, and our habit of cultivation on a small scale, have singularly facilitated our progress towards equality, it is probable that the excess of opposing causes will drive the English in the same direction”

Alexis de Tocqueville, 1861, cited in https://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_12_02_01_choi.pdf

That the French (still) have access to good meals (not sure what you have in mind specifically) might have quite a bit to do with a history of small scale farming. That and a climate conducive to small scale farming. It remains to be seen how long this will last. The forces of globalization are rapidly eroding local culture everywhere around the world.

I cannot feed myself off a probability that a veggie garden exists. It clearly is not a "subsistence economy" whatever that even means.

I know what you mean, most Americans can't afford enough real property for a garden of any kind themselves. Fewer and fewer every generation.

Depending on how you do the math that's an even less-than-subsistence level.

Especially when it was such a prosperous nation merely 60 years ago, in spite of productivity being statistically much lower then.

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