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Comment by kaycebasques | Hacker News Reader

> Is this a bad thing?

Thread argues that modern chicken is less tasty:

> Modern chicken is notorious for being "dry, "bland," and "flavorless." Contrast this to the 1960s, where chicken was considered a delicacy. "Chicken should be so good in itself that it is an absolute delight to eat as a perfectly plain, butter roast, saute or grill."

Thread also argues that fat profile is out-of-whack due to modern chickens being fed diets that are different from what they ate in nature:

> Conventional Grain-Fed birds have an Omega-6 to Omega-3 ratio that can be as high as 17:1. Contrast this to a pasture-raised chicken, which has an Omega 6 to Omega-3 ratio of 6:1.

I haven't heard of this ratio before. Supposedly a smaller ratio between the 2 types of fat is healthier.

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"flavorless" is exactly what the industry wants. This allows easy control of the taste during processing. This is why the chicken "wings" you buy in your well-knownfast food restaurant taste the same everywhere and every single day of the year.

That seems backwards and hard to believe. They could use the same chickens and would need less sauce frying and spice

This is backwards for a cook who tries to enhance the intrinsic taste, texture of some good ingredients.

But the industry wants a constant taste, texture on a massive scale. The only solution is to produce on one side the needed spices (easy to control the taste) an apply it on a relative tasteless substrate. It means that you do not need to adapt the recipe during production.

Source: wife worked a couple of years for Unilever, some of my customers are in the flagrance, food additives industry.

It's important that the chicken breast sandwich from McDonald's has exactly the same taste and texture whether you get it from San Francisco or Toronto. Might not be important to you, but it's important to McDonald's.

It's not that I find these arguments false or anything like that but I always notice a seeming lack of awareness that the extra food produced by these chickens or gmo corn or whatever actually saves lives.

Complaining about taste and fat content is a luxury not everyone can afford and I think a lot of the "natural" foods type of people take that for granted.

As an anecdote, I spent time in that margin-- where the presence of mass-produced, 'optimized' food probably meant the difference between my being able to afford enough food vs not-- but I consistently dreaded these sorts of 'inflated' foods, where nutrients had clearly been deprioritized for quantity. This chicken situation is one case, but they show up in a few forms in the US, and are particularly endemic to food deserts, where it can be genuinely hard to find food that hasn't been preserved or 'optimized' beyond the pale. As you said, yes, it certainly beat starving, but I would've rather had better food distributed more effectively. I believe we can have both.

By this logic, complaining about how inhumane and painful it is for these unnaturally bred chickens is also a class luxury.

Does sacrificing food quality for quantity really save lives, or does it just allow for population increase, with similar levels of suffering at the margins?

This is a controversial question. To pick a popular example, estimates of lives saved by the Green Revolution range from the billions to the hundred thousands, and you don't have to look hard to find arguments that this shift in agricultural technology increased the number of people living in poverty. The advent of agriculture precipated explosions in food production and population growth along side a major decrease in living standards that persisted for millennia. One well-documented side effect of this transition is a vastly increased susceptibility to epidemics.

When presented with a surplus of a resource, humans have an interesting tendency to simply use up more of it until a shortage reappears. Maybe this is why I have to use so many electron apps.

It doesn't save lives, it just allows more breeding. As long as the population is growing, we are in a food surplus. More expensive food would just result in people having ~2 kids instead of 3, and the excess famine would resolve itself quickly and return to equilibrium. Likewise, if all food suddenly became half as expensive today, the only thing that would happen is that people would have more children until the food is back to "saving lives".

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