Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

Great TFA but I partially disagree with this:

> A healthy, nutritious diet is much more expensive than a calorie sufficient one. As a result, three billion people cannot afford a healthy diet.

Is that so? My wife is the kind to obsess on healthy eating and always tells me it's cheaper to cook healthy than to cook unhealthy stuff. She's the kind that forces me to eat soup as dinner and that's it. It's not expensive to buy a few vegetables and to make soup.

(we buy, weekly, stuff from a local farmer btw and it's not exensive at all and he's happy to see people not buying everything from the supermarket)

Eggs aren't expensive: I find eggs super yummy.

Lentils, canned tuna (I love that: I just love that, not too sure if it's healthy or not but it's cheap), advocados (ok, they may be a bit pricey), corn, there are fishes that are cheap...

It's easy to go to a drive-in and buy junk. But they're not handing that junk for free at drive-ins. People who buy that could buy vegetables instead. Sure, there may not be same amount of calories and fat and whatnots but seen the average overweight person, I'd argue that that's... A good thing?

I mean, put it this way: it may be expensive to buy healthy food and yet end up as fat and unhealthy as when buying ultra high fat, ultra high calories, junk food... But maybe, just maybe, you don't need to be that fat and unhealthy?

My eight years old kid has been conditioned by my wife to only health healthy stuff: she sees a Mc Donald sign and pretends to throw up.

I understand that people can't be bothered to buy healthy stuff and don't have the will to eat reasonable amount of food and can't be bothered to make soup but I don't buy the whole "fat people are fat because they're poor".

They're fat and unhealthy because they are eating junk.

There's a spectrum between "Supersize me" and "three-star restaurant selling $$$ sushis".

He's talking in global terms here. This isn't directed at people from wealthy nations. He's talking about places where the majority of calories come entirely from grain, not because of dietary preferences or convenience but because of economic realities:

>The global definition of an affordable diet is one that costs 52% or less of average household expenditure. Using this definition, 3 billion people – over one-third of the global population – cannot afford a healthy diet. In other words, buying adequate food would mean spending more on it than on housing, energy, education, health, transport, clothing and all other items put together.

Would you consider India to be a wealthy nation? Even in India, it is cheaper to eat healthy than to not.

Perhaps this article only applies to nations suffering from outright famine.

A typical "not-so-poor" country with large scale nutrition problems would be China. A look into the micros shows that ALMOST EVERYONE is short on calcium, riboflavin, a couple of other B vits, and Vitamin A. The current deficiency data by DALY accordingly shows large disease burdens on iron deficiency (somewhat linked to riboflavin), good old protein-energy malnutrition (child stunting and the like), and Vit A deficiency.

A lot of the issues with micros can probably be solved through food fortification, except the public is not known to appreciate the price increase (however small it will be) and the longer ingredients list. You might also suggest switching from white rice to brown or parboiled rice, but economics of scale and (for brown) the need for airtight storage mean that these things are much, much more expensive than a 2-year-old sack of white rice.

Even then you haven’t solved the big protein-energy issue. Sure, push legumes more, but these things still don’t have the price-calorie ratio that rice has, and you might compromise the energy part as you do it.

(For non-kids there’s still a big protein issue. Laborers just want to eat enough fuel to keep working, and good old white rice with Lao Gan Ma wins every time. Tofu is fast to shove down too, but it’s mostly water.)

Micros: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9696081/

DALYs: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9570758/

[Legumes do provide a good amount of B too. Whole-ish beans and TVP are kind of awkward in Chinese fast food though. Maybe we just need more recipes with them as the star, instead of an accompaniment to meats.]

While eating healthy can indeed be cheap, I think systemically there are other costs like having the free time and free energy (which both might be depleted after a long day of hard work), other issues like the need to have some sort of transit to a grocer with fresh goods. For many parts of the United States, there's only Dollar General within accessible distance, and many people cannot afford to own or rent cars, and public transportation likely don't exist in their area. I think it's unlikely that prominent statistics of lower income being correlated with lower quality diets can be explained just by "poor people are lazy"

Poorer people are fatter in other countries too, and in most countries (at least the developed ones), very few people work more than 8 hours per day (so enough time to cook), and grocery stores are easily accessible.

Poor people often have to work multiple jobs and often work many more hourse than 8 hours a day. The stress of worrying about how you’re going to feed your kids, pay energy costs, rent etc soon eats time too

Maybe in USA, not in europe. 40 hours is pretty much the max, maybe 48 for some professions. Random independent contractors (electricians, painters,...) are an exception, but they're far from poor.

Having to work multiple jobs and many hours and low access to food (stores) is pretty much a uniquely US problem.

Depends on where you are in europe. Germany, probably better than the U.S. Romania, far worse.

Depends where you live and work. I'd totally pick Romania or even Bulgaria over Germany. Healthier and tastier food for one, and I'm not talking restaurants, but farmer's markets. Cities are probably worse, more cars parked eveywhere, more annoying drivers operating them, more pollution, more chaos. I've also met people from Moldova and Ukraine telling me food is way less expensive there. They also eat tastier and more healthy food: borsch, fish, salads but lack EU regulation for big agriculture, so grain, and industrially grown vegetables and meat is probably laced with chemicals banned or regulated in the EU. In Germany the traditional food is quite boring. I won't venture to say awful, because it's still eatable, but doesn't have much variety or taste, like South or East European food. Czech Republic and Poland were also very pleasant food wise: great pickles or cabbage based foods. Hingary? They're eating too much meat. But the goulash and sausages ate usually quite good.

Certainly happens in the UK and some of the Eastern European countries

Even if one technically has time, cooking is a considerable commitment and so it’s easy to end up having little to no downtime after working it into a schedule, especially in a family situation.

It’s hard to keep that kind of tight schedule up for long periods while maintaining sanity. Even if you start out cooking regularly and eating healthy it’s easy to burn out and wind up in a funk which then causes a spiraling effect that makes it ever-harder to get back to a healthy lifestyle.

So I might suggest that many don’t just need time and energy to be able to cook healthy, but enough to cook healthy and still have time and energy left over. In other words, a sustainable schedule.

One thing to note here: although industrial agriculture in the US is criticized for using too much energy, we in the US use more energy cooking food than is used to grow it (including all energy used to fuel farm equipment and make agrochemicals.)

So don't think that cooking is somehow a trivial problem, especially for the world's poor.

That happens only because most people use energetically inefficient methods of cooking, not because it is something intrinsic to cooking.

Everything that I eat is cooked by myself from raw ingredients and for that I consume around 0.6 kWh of electric energy per day.

As opposed to the global poor, who have highly energy efficient cooking equipment? That doesn't sound right.

While the maximum energy efficiency for cooking is obtained with modern equipment, like microwave ovens, cooking equipment does not necessarily have to be modern and expensive.

I am pretty certain that the kitchen stove used by my grandparents had a much better energy efficiency than the kitchen stoves that burn natural gas and which are still very widespread now.

That old kitchen stove was a wood-burning kitchen stove, but only a small quantity of wood had to be burned, because it had a huge thermal inertia and after becoming hot enough food could be cooked for hours with minimal wood consumption. The heat transfer from the large hot iron stove (but with a temperature close to that needed for food, i.e. much lower than the temperature of a gas flame) was much better than from a gas burner, which resulted in much less lost heat.

The efficiency of such a wood-burning kitchen stove is likely to have been similar with the efficiency of an induction electric stove.

>we in the US use more energy cooking food than is used to grow it

Do you have a citation or a calculation for that?

Not directly, but various things I google show that in the US food system, only 10-20% of the energy used is on the farm. Much more is in handling (which includes cooking and refrigeration), transportation, and processing.

No surprise, farm is powered by the sun and water pressure.

I hope you're trolling, because that's definitely not how that works.

He thinks farms don't use a lot of fossil fuels because he experiences positive feelings when he thinks about farms :)

I have smelled a tractor before

Sure other fuels go into it but it also takes in things like sunlight and water pressure as inputs for doing work (from the growing crops perspective at least). Whereas with transporting the goods, you don't have solar powered trucks or things powered from watermills or hydroelectricity moving these tomatoes. 100% of the energy makeup of the transportation side will be from fossil fuels, in contrast to the growing where fossil fuels make up some fraction but not the whole due to the work done by the sun and pressurized water. Likewise with handling and storage. I expect tyson foods has no bulk freeze drying apparatus that is powered independently with its own nuclear reactor, they are probably pulling from the dirty grid.

Cooking with modern methods can take much less time than with traditional methods.

Until three or four years ago, I was cooking traditionally. Because that required many hours, I could not do that daily, so I was cooking for the entire week during one day of the weekend, which was mostly lost to this activity.

Then I have switched to cook everything in a microwave oven (which I had previously used for decades only for reheating food), including things like baking home-made bread. This allows very short and perfectly reproducible cooking times. Many kinds of food, typically those with high water content, like potatoes or meat, can be just roasted in closed glass vessels without adding anything to them and they are much tastier than when they are boiled, without needing to fry them in cooking oil. Other vegetables are better boiled in water with salt, but regardless of the method all vegetables require less than a quarter of hour in the oven.

Since then, I am cooking every day what I eat just before I need it, which takes less than half of hour from start to finish for all operations, when cooking vegetables.

Meat required less preparation time but more time in the oven (at reduced power levels), depending on what kind of meat it was, e.g. up to 30 minutes, so when I was eating meat I was cooking it separately, in amounts sufficient for several days, and I was cooking everything else just before the meal, when it was combined with the precooked meat.

So with some experimentation, it is possible to find ways to cook your food without wasting too much time and energy with that.

Yes, that. Yay to ovens and electric appliances where you just set the power and the time and go do something else until the food cooks itself. I stopped boiling most vegetables, I steam process them over a pot with a strainer on top.

Get an air frier and you'll have more option to cook dishes previously not possibly using microwave alone.

Healthy food is significantly cheaper than random food selected from what is easily available from a supermarket.

For instance, I live in the European Union and I eat very healthy food that I cook myself from raw ingredients, and in most days the food consumed during all day does not cost more than 5 EUR. Buying random food could easily cost ten times more than that.

Nevertheless, there exists much cheaper food than the healthiest food and the people who cannot afford the healthiest food choose cheaper alternatives.

For example, the largest amount of my daily fat intake comes from extra-virgin olive oil, followed by cold-pressed sunflower oil (used to add enough linoleic acid and vitamin E within a lower amount of calories than would be needed when using only olive oil).

There are many vegetable oils that are at least 6 times cheaper than the relatively cheap olive oil that I am using and at least 3 times cheaper than cold-pressed sunflower oil. Many people choose those cheaper oils even if they are less healthy.

Similarly, I eat a decent amount of proteins with balanced amino-acid profile, but it is very easy to reduce the cost of the food by replacing ingredients with high protein content with cereals like maize or with potatoes, which have lower protein content and higher starch content.

So if you plan a healthy diet you can save money in comparison with eating what you first see on the shelves, but eating an unhealthy diet can save significantly more money.

> A healthy, nutritious diet is much more expensive than a calorie sufficient one. As a result, three billion people cannot afford a healthy diet.

Is that so?

Yeah, could be. Plain white rice is a very cheap calorie sufficient diet. It's certainly cheaper than a healthy, nutritious diet.

1000 calories of white rice and 1000 calories of soybeans (or any legume) give you 90% of the day’s nutrients which is what I mostly ate for portions of uni. Pretty solid and healthy base diet to work with and it’s super cheap.

you live near a local farmer that sells low cost produce. you have the time to prepare meals. you have either good refrigeration or the time / accessibility to purchase produce on a frequent basis.

Soups are great. But they take a long time to make. A lot of poor people's situation is that they can only get groceries from the dollar tree that prioritizes non-refrigerated goods and they have a very limited amount of time to do any of this. So you can make your cheap carbs (ramen/rice/pasta) + condiment or instant foods which suck or you can get some fast food which is very rewarding. Neither are healthy.

> Soups are great. But they take a long time to make

I should really experiment with slow cooker recipes, though I am (probably overly) worried about the fire risk of leaving a cooking appliance on unattended (either while away or asleep.)

This reads as extremely tone deaf and relatively privileged. Which isn't surprising given the cavalier attitudes towards impoverished people that I've seen many tech workers hold. I'm very glad that you have access to fresh produce on a regular basis. That is not the reality for everyone around the world, let alone everyone in developed nations.

Are vegetables still cheap when you need to travel miles and/or hours away from your place of residence/work? What about if you don't have own a personal vehicle and depend on public transit? When you need to work 3 jobs in order to not become homeless and then still care for multiple children, is it as easy to justify spending several hours of transit back and forth?

We aren't just talking about people eating fast food. That's only a percentage of the people who rely on "junk food" to survive. There are people who source 100% of their calories from a gas station because all the grocery stores, both small-bussiness and corporate, have closed due to crime and/or economic hardship.

There are places where even the local Dollar Tree shuts down. Leaving only gas stations or service stations some of which even keep many things behind bulletproof plexiglass to reduce theft. Would you really want to bus and walk around with a bag full of fresh produce when everyone else is just as hungry as you? That's if the metro service even still runs in your area.

Food deserts are a reality for many people and you have the luxury to live in an areacode that doesn't deal with this due to your relatively high paying IT job. And before you say "everyone can learn to code", no, they can't. Learning new skills requires free downtime that many don't have the luxury of. Many people spend every waking hour working and even sleep less that is healthy in order to work more.

This is only exacerbated when they don't have the fundamental math/science education that CS requires due to chronic underfunding of school districts in those same areacodes. Or even access to any computers besides mobile devices provided "for free" via a monthly service plan. Regardless of how difficult your upbringing was, it's extremely evident that you don't grasp many of the privileges you have had access to during your lifetime.

I can't find the exact statistics at the moment, but a larger than I would like percentage of the US pet food supply chain is consumed by humans. Are you really saying that people who need to eat dog food to get enough calories to not starve to death are just doing that because they are too lazy to go to a grocery store and cook vegetables into a soup?

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