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Comment by jokoon | Hacker News Reader

The problem of replacing plastic in food is the cost. If you use glass or steel or aluminum, you need new logistics to reuse them.

Also, glass is heavier, and requires a lot of energy to be made, so it would require a production chain that ships back empty containers.

The best silver bullet solution would be to have local canteen, a bit like in the army or at school, where you just get a subscription with a calendar (not on demand, you plan the meals you'll get), so it reduces waste and costs.

We should just stop eating at home, with individual fridges, ovens, kitchens etc, this is highly inefficient.

Yes, this is collectivization, but it's the best solution for an economy of scale. Individualism was never a good solution, individualism is often very wasteful.

Call me a communist or a socialist, I don't really care.

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So you want people to eat only when and where and what the state says you can eat???

The vast majority of people don’t want to choose your wet dream when they have the choice between their own private house versus a local canteen on a schedule. Nobody likes other people so much that they’d choose to be stuck in a school cafeteria environment for their food or their children’s food forever. Life is not perpetual kindergarten where everyone’s together all the time. Life is competition and mutually-beneficial cooperation in some things, and friends are made on the basis of mutual desire. Not forced socialization and collectives. What you are proposing results in mass starvation when the systems of incentives and motivations collapse.

More local farms and more vertical farms and more greenhouses and more victory gardens are the best path. I leave it to families and individuals to choose what options they want and to buy food whenever they want. With more production, all the options will get cheaper as we flood the world with more fresh produce from better and more localized supply chains owing to incoming innovations in vertical and greenhouse farming. Not interested in going back to top-down control structures from the 1900s.

What’s next? Restricting the caloric intake of political pariahs? Restricting the options available at the local canteen to give the best options to the friends of the party and everyone in charge? Lol

> Life is competition and mutually-beneficial cooperation in some things, and friends are made on the basis of mutual desire.

This is a really sad, myopic view of life. Thankfully, it is wrong

It is ironic that you are peddling such fearful narratives given your name

This is how they do it in Germany. Most working Germans I know of eat at the work canteen and have a small bread meal at home in the evening

Weird that you're getting downvoted for this. HN is on a weird one recently

Because the united states valued individualism for a very long time, before and during the cold war, and even now. It's a cultural aspect.

Blame people like Reagan and Milton Friedman for this. It's a highly political problem.

Inequality is already somewhat caused by individualism, but climate change is also caused by climate change. For example, if China wants to reduce its co2 emissions, you only have to convince Chinese leaders, and it's done just by snapping fingers.

In the US, you have to make it profitable, which is doable, but it's more complicated and lobbyists will also be a big barrier to change.

I loathe the chinese leadership, but being a democratic modern industrialized nation doesn't mean you will see decisions that make sense.

What's weird though is that a lot of US tech companies also have canteens and on-site restaurants

Communist China is responsible for nearly 2/3rds of CO2 emissions since 2000. In the US it's been going down for the past decade.

You also have to keep in mind the American entrepreneurial culture or DNA which has born fruit unlike any other system, and is even responsible for the very platform we're using right now. That's all about this idea that any individual can change the world.

I don't see what either of those things have to do with the parent comment. Can you explain further?

Is a canteen the same thing as a cafeteria? Lots of Americans have their lunch at a work cafeteria as well.

A big lunch and a small dinner would probably be a good change for lots of us.

It’s just a weasel wording to say “lots.” How many and where did you get your number from? How many of those are using a designated sitting area to eat food they brought from home?

And if you think something is a good change, make it for yourself and don’t impose it on someone else. Vast majority of people given the choice will pick independence and purchasing/making their own food whenever they want, not being dependent on their work or state cafeteria.

Just fyi in Germany we aren't forced to eat at the work cafeteria if we don't want to. I'm not sure where you got the idea of forcing people to eat communally from

I pulled “lots” out of my ass, based on having been to a couple different campuses. The fuzziness of “lots” accurately represents the level of certainty (low) which is appropriate for chit-chat about the existence of cafeterias. Chill out, nobody is actually going to ban cooking at home.

Yes. Also I kind of agree, but personally, the canteen food here in Germany is usually too calorific for me compared to the food I cook.

Source that this is the norm in Germany? How many Germans do you know who do this and how did you conclude that the sample is indicative of the broader population? How expensive is food in Germany that people have no independence to buy and prepare food?

Parent is getting downvoted because the vast majority of people won’t agree with that nonsense. Leave it in the 1900s.

I work at a major research institution with a canteen and literally all of the Germans in my research group eat at the canteen. When I walk past it is very full.

Germans have a meal called Abendbrot which means "evening bread".

When COVID hit, Germans struggled to cook food at home, even leading to house fires https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-pandemic-reveals-germans-p...

My wife's startup does not have a canteen, so the Germans order in fast food. She is British like me so she has a small lunch and a big dinner.

> How expensive is food in Germany that people have no independence to buy and prepare food?

It is cheap but the work canteen is also often cheap. People have independence to buy and prepare food, they just don't want to.

> vast majority of people won’t agree with that nonsense. Leave it in the 1900s.

I don't think this is worthy of a response.

A research university is a pretty select group though. What about the average working family with children? Or retired age adults? Do Germans not have a "slow food" movement where they are encouraged to garden, cook, and compost at home?

Without resorting to abolishing the family kitchen altogether (many years of church morning teas give me the heebie jeebies about foodborne illnesses around community food prep) - there are ways to avoid some plastic packaging. Depending where you are, wholefoods places probably exist and will happily sell you a scoop (metal) of the ingredient you need in a pickle jar (glass). Also a good way to avoid storing bulk amounts of rarely-used ingredients, saves some waste.

This was an idea of the infamous Romanian communist dictator Ceausescu: he wanted to feed the whole of Bucharest in a single giant canteen. Unfortunately he was toppled and killed in 1989 before this idea could come to fruition.

It’s unfortunate that a communist dictator was toppled and killed? Did you ever bother to look into why that happened and all the evils he did?

We shouldn’t be borrowing from a dead communist dictator’s playbook. Clearly it didn’t work out for him and the vast majority of people didn’t want that.

I suspect the 'unfortunate' in the parent comment was dry irony, not an earnest expression of sadness.

It was irony. It was unfortunate for him, because he couldn't realize his grand vision of communal food distribution: https://www.rferl.org/a/photos-romania-hunger-circuses-bucha...

I didn't think I needed to elaborate that any idea coming from communist dictators (let alone the self-styled Genius of The Carpathians) should not be the basis of our policies.

Collectivism need not invoke communism and socialism. I've long lamented how we've lost the local community at the village or even family level.

I.e. we can still follow your idea but at a village or family level. So why buy butter in a plastic tub when your neighbour next door has a cow and butter churning machine? Heck have a big enough multi-generational household compound and you can keep it all in-family!

Doing it at the family level or between neighbors who like each other and agree to share from victory gardens and greenhouses and personal farms is much different than what the parent proposed. Multi-generational family compounds are an awesome idea. This also solves retirement issues for the elderly.

I call you someone who doesn't like to eat good food :D

A good canteen can combine more ingredients in a more sophisticated way than I have time for at home. I'm not making Beef Bourguignon at home, but it's easy for them to make up a big batch. Economies of scale!

That's how you end up fat.

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