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Comment by GuB-42 | Hacker News Reader

I am sure that in the past, good or bad food was more about conservation and food borne diseases than it was about nutrition. At least, that's the attitude that would make the most sense. That would explain sugar good / fish bad. There is probably a political aspect too, local food is seen as better than the rival neighbor food.

The modern, first world attitude must be very unusual towards history. We basically solved conservation and food born diseases are now uncommon and mostly treatable, and we have an abundance of anything, so nutrition is the only thing that remains when discussing healthy food.

What didn't change is the made up theories surrounding food. Despite all our science, we still have a lot of these today, in some for or another.

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For most of human history calories in was way more important than nutrition since we could barely even manage that. Just the fact that you can buy fresh fruit and vegetables in the middle of a harsh winter is an incredible feat of logistics and technology that has taken a century to develop.

> buy fresh fruit and vegetables in the middle of a harsh winter

This is extremely recent, most people even in my age range (40-50) recall growing up on frozen/canned in the off season for the most part.

The idea of getting year round good fresh produce flown in from other climates is regionally a very recent thing. Peru for example exports 40x more blueberries to the US today than they did even a decade ago.

It was more of a storage problem than a production problem. Plenty of grains and foods people grew throughout known history were more than capable of providing all the calories someone would want or need without crazy effort. The problem is keeping that food good for an entire year, or more if there is unexpected bad growing weather. One person, even using entirely hand tools and no draft animals, could grow 10x more food than they need in a year. But people didn't do that because they knew they had no way of keeping food around for that long, all it would do is attract pests and/or mold and rot after enough time.

It was both storage and transport. The development of international shipping logistics, improved infrastructure and refrigeration were all needed to make this happen.

You can grow the food and you can store the food but that doesn’t do much good if locally you make too much and someone somewhere else is starving but you can’t get from point A to point B, and it has to get there not only unspoiled but intact, or at least undamaged enough to eat.

You’re correct, there needs to be refrigerated trailers, train cars, and ships along with refrigerated warehouses from source to destination. Transportation and storage.

Before vapor-compression refrigeration, there was the ice trade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_trade

Even that is a bit of an advanced step.

We didn’t have paved roads or railroads until relatively recently, and so a good chunk of goods were being damaged on rickety horse drawn wagons on bumpy, muddy dirt roads.

A century? I guess you mean all of human history to develop.

Not just nutrition, over the last ~30 years there's also been a philosophical shift globally where many people went from thinking about impact on humans as the only thing to assess, to considering the impact on the wider ecosystems.

Today not only we discuss nutritional content we also discuss the externalities to produce those calories.

You're talking about the common misconception that this planets ecology is somehow broken, that humans are supernatural (literally above nature) and that only other humans can fix it.

I'm also assuming that you're goodwill for other species ends at insects and bacteria

DDT kills both bees and bald eagles. Let's not overuse it, even if we could grow more nutritious food if we did.

It definitely is easier to comment on what you make up than what was written, but don't be lazy.

I hope this never happens, but if one day a cell in your colon maximizes its short-term replication at the expense of the long-term stability of the system it depends on, I hope nobody tells you it's fine because it's "natural."

Roundup, last I heard, is not a natural product and its worldwide impact in insect biomass is at the level of the largest mass extinctions in history.

Likewise the biomass of humans and cattle have an impact that can definitely be considered at the extremes of what nature has to offer.

Do you think that a 1.5C+ increase in global temperature in a century is also something typical of the natural cycles?

> Do you think that a 1.5C+ increase in global temperature in a century is also something typical of the natural cycles?

Yes. By definition, we are part of nature. But it wouldn't matter even if it wasn't, my contention is that it won't be the apocalypse it's made out to be.

> But it wouldn't matter even if it wasn't, my contention is that it won't be the apocalypse it's made out to be.

Against the evidence of every branch of the natural sciences that studies the problem from every conceivable angle and consistently say the effects are actually going to be much worse.

I don't hold it that you're the kind of person that goes out there every day pointing out issues in the ECMWF models, or telling biologists that their understanding of crop performance is actually _all wrong_ and crops will magically create new adaptability measures out of nowhere, or showing that the human body can actually stand nighttime temperatures that we already know it can't stand.

> Against the evidence of every branch of the natural sciences that studies the problem from every conceivable angle and consistently say the effects are actually going to be much worse.

I'm not talking about meteorological outcomes but sociopolitical ones like massive migrations, outbreaks of political unrest. I also think climatologists step outside their remit when they make such claims.

I don't doubt 1.5c, I doubt the end of humanity

It's not an immediate end of humanity, it's the slowly eroding collapse of institutions. We're at 1.5 anyway so it's likely not the end, but the end is there and it's within a very likely scenario.

> It's not an immediate end of humanity, it's the slowly eroding collapse of institutions.

It's just too vague to rebuff...

Dealing with sugar specifically, sufficient concentrations act as a preservative as well. Honey, in particular, can be applied to surface wounds to help promote healing by resisting infection.

Also, it's delicious, and you're less likely to find parasites in it than animal flesh.

And the reason it is delicious is because evolution told us it was the best food there is: safe and tons of readily available calories.

Funny how in the last few decades we turned a system that has benefited us for millions of years into a liability, simply by making that "perfect food" so abundant.

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