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Comment by theodric | Hacker News Reader

> we have lost “diversity and deliciousness"

I sincerely doubt that the chilled stock in a local Irish supermarket makes my food options LESS diverse than they were a century ago. Grapes, blueberries, strawberries everywhere at any time of year, frozen fish from halfway around the planet, frozen pizzas, even ice cream for God's sake. Perhaps the cucumbers are worse, but I can always get them, and don't have to suffer the Hungry Gap in winter on nothing but potatoes, nettles, cabbage, pickles, and grain.

> American households open the fridge door an average of 107 times a day

This also beggars belief.

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The fridge door one came up some time ago on HN with actual data to back it up from "smart" fridges. Some people with kids said it was opened well over 100 times a day which shocked me.

If TV/film/YouTube is anything to go by the habit of leaving the door open for extended periods is common too. That one really grinds my gears. I just can't understand a brain that doesn't tell you to minimise the amount of time the door is open. It's one of those things that makes me realise how fundamentally different people can be.

100 times a day might be bursts of many times in short succession, which is definitely preferable to leaving the door open for what might be a longer cumulative time.

Minimizing the number of openings, even in favor of longer ones, would reduce the number of times the air in the fridge is cycled.

You can probably chart this and calculate an optimum.

When I bought a fridge for my camper I realized why nobody who cares about power usage has a common standing fridge. Every time you open the door the cool air falls out, it sucks in the warm room air and has to start over again.

While "camping coolers" just keep the cold air inside.

My fridge doesn't cool when the door is opened, not even sure if slightly longer opening times make a huge difference when the complete air is exchanged in seconds anyway.

My math may be off, but it seems like 2000 joules to cool the volume of air 1 degree C vs 6,000,000 for the same volume of water.

It's the stuff in the fridge that takes the initial work, repeatedly exchanging the air is maybe a rounding error?

A few years ago I had a housemate who would fill up the kettle all the way to the brim, would wait for it to boil and then she'd make a single cup of tea and let the rest go cold. Every single time. This unreasonably angered me.

Kettle fillers are bizarre but I think there's slightly more to it. Some people think they are being rude if they only prepare enough food for themselves. I think kettle fillers may believe they are doing a service for others when they fill. But that's really stretching the benefit of the doubt here. They may just be thick.

I can actually top this, though. In my student days I had a guy from a hot country move in. Apparently the water from the tap was too cold so he would warm it in the kettle. The trouble is the kettle is too hot... So I watched in utter disbelief as he boiled the kettle, poured boiling water into a pint glass, then carried said glass to the fridge to cool it back down to drinking temperature!

Later I came back and he'd forgotten about the water so it was now colder than tap water in the fridge.

Perhaps the diversity lost is the one caused by seasonality. Fruits and vegetables are highly seasonal, some meat and fish are, too.

From reading various articles, apparently there really was greater diversity in vegetables, too. Nowadays people eat tomatoes, salad, onions, perhaps carots, and that's about it but there are many, many more that can be locally grown and that have almost disappeared from many people's diets. If you mention swedes, turnips, cabbage, beetroots, leeks, rhubarb, types of squash, etc. even cauliflowers to many people they won't be able to tell you when was the last time they ate or touched one. The only time people touch a pumpkin is at Halloween and they don't eat them.

Regarding meat, offal has almost completely disappeared, and I suspect seafood is now mostly processed fish from one or two species only.

> swedes, turnips, cabbage, beetroots, leeks, rhubarb, types of squash, etc.

Perhaps this is a U.S. issue. Every single one of these is available at my local Lidl supermarket (~a marginally upscale Aldi for those outside Europe) for much of the year, not to mention other more starkly seasonal things that filter in like peaches, salsify, runner beans, cherimoya (a tropical fruit), and so on. Across Europe I've had no trouble getting all the offal I'd want: head cheese/zult, haggis, black pudding, balkenbrij, hearts, various horrors suspended in aspic-- in supermarkets. Not specialist shops, not the butcher. I'm in rural Ireland now, but the selection was better yet when I lived in Switzerland and NL and also shopped at Lidl.

I should have mentioned that I am in the UK.

Many of them tend to be available in supermarkets, though it varies by location, but, really it's only older people who buy them.

That said, coming from the continent myself, the UK is below average. For an island the general lack of a variety of seafood is especially stricking.

Those are all available in any US supermarket well. The quantities on the shelf suggest they don't sell well, just enough to be worth having.

There is some diversity missing from my local UK supermarket. I don't know if it existing before, but I can only ever get one kind of squash - butternut. There are dozens of other varieties of squash of different shapes and colours but I can only get them at a farmer's market.

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