Hacker News Reader

Comment by joe-collins | Hacker News Reader

Mass production isn't inherently bad, and you're explicitly making an appeal to nature of questionable worth.

There's plenty to find fault with in the modern food industry: toxic or carcinogenic pesticides, antibiotic-resistant pathogens created by human abuse, contamination of water supplies and oceans with runoff, the role of government in creating various health crises by subsidizing high-carb/high-glycemic index foods simply because they're a cheap way to feed a population, ground subsidence due to unchecked dependence on slow-filling aquifers, native habitat destruction... off the top of my head.

But all of that doesn't make "natural", on its own, better for human nutrition.

View on HN

It does, white rice and white flour - for instance - don't exist. We're supposed to eat the whole grain with all the micronutrients. Industrialisation removed them for no reason, and enabled never-before-eaten substances like trans fats, and tablespoons of polyunsaturated fats (seed/vegetable oils). Then refined sugars come along, too.

So yes, you are not evolved to eat these substances. You do not need them. You can survive perfectly without them.

> Mass production isn't inherently bad

Mass production is inherently corner-cutting, and, given that nutrition is an unsolved problem, natural is inherently wholesome in a way that artificial can, at best, only attempt to duplicate.

In Germany we mass produce bread that essentially contains exactly the same things I'd put in it if I made it myself.

The entire point of bread is turning wheat seeds into a digestible food. Part of that is milling, part is baking, and a big part is the fermenting and the long natural yeast rise.

Mass produced bread never does this long natural yeast rise. Cheap versions use all kinds of chemicals to get the texture right, even the high quality variants use rapid rising yeast because natural yeast is way too slow. Only in a local bakery or at home will you find bread that is made in the healthiest way possible. The natural yeast fermented slow rise results in a much healthier product, bread that even gluten-sensitive people have no issue eating (and it tastes better)

I usually buy sourdough rye bread in the supermarket because that's the cheapest form of bread and I like it. It contains no "chemicals" that the legislator deemed necessary for inclusion in the ingredient list, save some sodium acetate as pH regulator and preservative. Sure, the artisanal bread at my local bakery is tastier, but it also costs about ten times as much.

To my knowledge yeast doesn't touch gluten at all and only breaks down the starch. I really doubt that there are measurable health benefits of artisanal bread. Do you have any studies to back up that claim?

> I really doubt that there are measurable health benefits of artisanal bread. Do you have any studies to back up that claim?

There are clear health benefits of artisanal foods: they costs more, you buy less (for the same weight), you get less calories - you aren't obese.

Mass produced bread can be produced like that. There's nothing about the concept of mass production that forbids products from taking a long time to produce.

Maybe in the US, nobody mass produces bread like that.

This. Even if something gets „mass-produced“, it doesn't mean it has to be bad. It just won't be the cheapest product on the market any longer.

Frozen vegetables are basically raw, untouched, pretty good for you food, and they are grown by pretty terrible corporations trying to make as much scummy money as possible, and it STILL only costs me about a buck a pound or less at the grocery store.

No, profit maximization is inherently corner-cutting

Reply on news.ycombinator.com