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Comment by teknopaul | Hacker News Reader

Starts out so wrong. I live in Spain, traditionally good food still a staple. Most of the world I have visited is like that too.

OK USA has screwed it's food chain, but that does not apply outside. People generally value traditions, and specifically food traditions, highly. It's a long way from financially difficult to keep these alive. People just have to decide they want to and spend time, not money. People round here do that.

N.B. Traditional food does not come from a shop, you make it yourself. Thus, it cannot be gentrified away. Growing your own local specialities is usually easy where it is traditional.

If you can't imagine obtaining anything without going to the free market and haggling, your limited options are your own doing. That's not gentrification.

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N.b., the author is British not American. Argindustry isn’t a uniquely American thing, it’s global and pervasive, specially for protein and animal feedstock. A lot of vegetable in a global context is grown locally and purchased at local markets (outside the US and urban settings globally, which are end to end industrialized), but most people don’t raise artisanal pigs for slaughter. Most people buy their meat from a store or merchant who buys from a middle man who buys from a dense industrialized setup. Even in developing countries dense animal farms are the norm for most meat, even if individuals raise some amount of animal for extra money or protein in their diet. The economics are just too strong. Likewise feedstock tends to be larger plot farming by either large land owners or corporations.

I do not believe you though that people in Madrid and Barcelona and other urban areas of Spain raise their own food in their studio apartments, herding their sheep in their half bath. They buy from supermarkets, or often restaurants, who buy from distributors, who buy from wholesalers, which buy from whoever sells them the food for the cheapest.

What the article gets profoundly wrong is that somehow tourism is driving industrialization of food production. What’s driving industrialization of food production is profit motive and a growing population with enriched tastes and growing wealth that’s outstripping the ability of small farm operations to meet at scale and relatively flat pricing as demand soars. That requires ever increasing supply, which requires ever increasing land productivity with a shrinking farm workforce and shrinking available arable land. The “it’s all the offensive bourgeois food tourists fault” is absurd and talks more to the author seemingly unreasonable social dislike of certain types of people than a level headed economic assessment.

Dense? It's pigs under old oak trees?

I didn’t take away the same message. To me it was a decent attempt to explain that offensive liberal bourgeois foodies have been sold a bill of truthy sounding bullshit because that is how free markets work. If you want to help someone tell them the truth, if you want to help yourself then tell them what they want to believe. There is a whole market of selling expensive things and claiming it will save the planet or the poor or stop colonialism or some other lie which is designed to enrich the seller.

In terms of peak bullshit, I personally think the absurd stupidity of vertical farming is what caused most people to realize the ideas coming out of one camp are mostly bullshit.

> The economics are just too strong.

This is really the crux of the issue.

Farming sucks. Farming at small scales really sucks. There is a massive incentive to consolidate. Even when left alone, farmers tend to form co-ops in order to mitigate risk.

I had a long talk with a local producer of "Hormone free, antibiotic free, grass fed, grass finished" beef (need it because of family member with corn allergy). The economics are brutal. Corn finishing a steer nets you 3x (or more) the weight. Grass is highly dependent upon rain. etc.

Basically, the best thing I could do was commit to buying a whole steer every 6 months and let them sell what I can't deal with. Effectively, I gamble that they can sell the extra meat or I eat the loss. It generally works, but how many people can float a $5K-$10K loan every 6 months? And, even if they can get enough customers to float the loan, it will quickly saturate the number of customers who can buy the "extra". It's really a tough problem.

Everybody talks like farmers don't know what they are doing. Go talk to one and prepare to be surprised--you'll find out really quickly that most farmers know their business extremely intimately and can tell you how every single dollar is put to work.

Oh yeah, farmers are engineers of the land and nature for sure. They know their processes, their dependencies, and procedures in extreme depth and they are complex and unforgiving. Farming isn’t gardening, and every farm is a business end to end - and a risky one with low payouts and huge downsides that are often entirely out of your control. Modern farming techniques aren’t that way out of some sort of malevolent spite, they actually work and make farms profitable reliably. That they blast the earth and poison the populace is sad and most farmers don’t relish destroying their land.

> even if individuals raise some amount of animal for extra money or protein in their diet.

It happens more often than I expected, but of course it's still not common.

A friend of mine living in an apartment in Shanghai once complained to me that her neighbors were keeping a chicken in their apartment and she was irritated by the daily crowing.

But she took the philosophy "soon enough they'll eat it and the problem will go away".

Hard to imagine something similar happening in the US.

Tbh that’s a fairly uniquely Chinese thing I’ll wager

This is incorrect. I have seen Madrid and Barcelona. Nobody is living off the land in those cities. They are fed by massive agricultural complexes and include alot of imports.

Both those cities are way too dense for the population to feed themselves on home gardens and rabbit hutches.

Just because you value traditions it doesn’t void basic economic laws proved over centuries (supply and demand).

> OK USA has screwed it's food chain, but that does not apply outside.

How? Spain imports quite a bit food.

https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/opportunities-us-agricultural-....

> People generally value traditions, and specifically food traditions, highly.

The author specifically discusses how, for example, the production of regional traditional French cheese is, in fact, highly industrialised:

"Meanwhile, to keep pace with gastronomic demand, farming relentlessly intensifies. In the famous cheesemaking regions of France, you will scarcely see a dairy cow. Instead, vast tracts are cultivated for maize. Passing tourists romantically assume it’s sweetcorn for human consumption – the French must eat a lot of sweetcorn! No, it will be turned into silage to feed the cattle stalled in the vast steel sheds – cow factories – that have sprung up from Brittany to Savoie, a business as brutal and industrial as any other. Milk is trucked across hundreds of kilometres, trade fairs market the cheese from Dubai to Shanghai."

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