The war on big food

At some point I just stopped buying anything that isn't fresh or obviously a food I recognize. I live in a modern first-world country with a decent salary, I enjoy walking to the shop a couple to a few times per week, I'm not slaving away on my job so much that I don't have time to sit down and prepare a proper meal throughout the day.

The realization seems to be that there's really no reason for me to buy these kind of sugar/salt-packed opaque possibly-dangerous glorified ration packs that we call food in our supermarkets.

The irony is that the ambiguity/confusion of nutrition has been a good way for the industry to sell its garbage for generations, but now people are so cognizant of the complexity of diet that they want to narrow down the possibilities to the simplest thing possible, and that's not good for the complex food industry. This also makes sense:

> Confectioneries have held up in part because there was never any confusion over whether they’re an indulgence.

It's the rest of the food that people eat when they're "being good" that they care about.

I'm getting really tired of zeitgeist shifts away from "the way it's always been" being sensationalized as "The WAR on [ENTRENCHED WAY OF DOING THINGS]!!1!!!!!!!111!!!"

Especially with goods that are sold, especially in America. Aren't we supposed to all be completely and totally enamored with capitalism and are't we all spoon fed the line that "The market will sort things out"? Because I see this as capitalism and the free market doing what conservatives always bark about it doing- the market following along with consumer demand. And yeah we can sit here and argue till we're blue in the face about whether or not the marketing behind that consumer spending shift is sound or not or "fair" or not, but at the end of the day, people are voting with their wallets and they're voting against the old guard, and the old guard is panicking and flailing about because they see that change is coming and they don't want to have to change.

I largely exited the standard food supply about two years ago after my partner developed a number of food allergies including Celiac. It has been altogether a wonderful experience. Our mix has been since then around 50% from farmers' markets, 20% bulk goods from an organic grocer, 20% we grow ourselves (or more between June and August), and at most 10% from a high-end butcher. Our expenditures have increased only minimally (from ~10 to 12% of income; we are graduate students so it is relatively high). We now spend less time overall getting food: we spend ~1 hr a week the farmers' market (and see friends at the same time) and ~1 hr a month at the grocery store. The butcher takes about 10 minutes a week. Charcuterie like chicken confit and smoked duck breast keeps for weeks so we can keep a supply in the fridge; between this and the bulk goods we never make extra runs to the grocery store.

Some observations on the transition: -Expensive fresh items are easy to grow in small amounts of space (e.g. herbs, berries) -"discrete meat is a treat": we eat steaks, fillets, etc. less frequently and instead use stocks, bake vegetables in animal fats, fry veggie cakes, and the like instead -Charcuterie is amazing: pork and chicken are relatively expensive, and a lot of the French preparations take very little time to prepare to serve -Fruits and vegetables at farmers' markets are only marginally more expensive -Our farmer's markets are a mixture of certified organic and conventional produce. We buy both, what matters more is that it is small-scale. -Growing your own isn't for everyone, and is certainly more expensive than buying it through a store (factoring in opportunity cost for time and land, and you don't get economies of scale). However, I would recommend it as a hobby to pretty much anyone on HN: I spend 8-12 hours a day on a computer, so spending 2-4 hours a week planting things, pruning fruit trees, thinking through drip irrigation systems, and learning about soil ecology is a ton of IRL fun.

We are very conscious that our diet is not 'natural' or in some way a reversion to older ways of life. I can get ridiculously cheap drip irrigation equipment on Amazon Prime delivered to my door, many of the vendors at the farmer's market take Stripe, and there's no such thing as a crop failure in mid 21st century coastal California. Our food system is what's next, no what came before.

I found out a few years ago that HFCS was contributing to my digestive issues and that gluten was contributing to digestive issues as well as sinus issues. I cut the two out (and caffeine for more sinus issues) and I feel great. There seems to be this spectre about fad diet gluten free eaters. I've never met anyone who doesn't eat gluten for fun. Even for me, it took a year on and off to actually stop eating it.

I'd really like to see a study done on how many people follow these diets for medical reasons, diagnosed or not, and how many people are doing it for 'fad' reasons.

I'm not diagnosed with anything, but I've had these problems my entire life and discovered the root cause by an elimination diet. If a hospital had pointed out these issues when I was a child or teenager, it would have changed my life. Recently when I brought up these issues to my doctor his response was more or less 'well then don't eat gluten'.

Big food is losing market share and I'm sure they're fighting back. Not to get too conspiracy theory but all the media on GF sensitivity being made up has made me doubt myself multiple times, and multiple times I have regretted those decisions to 'test to confirm'.

All told, I feel a lot better with the dietary changes I've made, and from the health issues I hear other people describe I think they could benefit from an elimination diet as well. If you have gas, diarrhea, or a stuffy nose/sinus headaches on a regular basis, look at your diet as it could change your life. Unless of course you enjoy those symptoms, in that case, carry on!

Something not discussed is long term food fads. You could get me to eat pop tarts and pizza rolls in the 80s because they were new. I knew they were bad, but new and interesting enough to try. Pizza rolls in 2015? Dude I was eating those when Reagan was president, boring, try my homemade carnitas instead. Unfortunately I go food shopping every week, and there isn't anything processed that is interesting enough for me to try for a couple years. I'm always looking for something interesting, but there isn't anything new.

Specifically, I'm claiming processed foods follow a fad trajectory, unlike, say, apples or steak, and fad trajectory shows natural decay over time, and there simply are no new processed food fads that are gaining traction.

The closest thing I can find to a current processed food fad, is about a year ago there was an attempt to push greek yogurt into freaking everything, but that seems to have failed. A few years ago there was a push for ready to eat rice on shelf stable bags, but that kind of rice tasted like contaminated styrofoam so I only bought it a couple times.

Its hard to believe but just a few decades ago things like frozen pizza, hot pockets, and pop tarts were new and vibrant food fads. What we call processed food in 2015 was actually NEW in maybe the 80s. There just isn't anything new anymore.

There are sea changes/disruptions going on in food comparable to changes in media consumption, ride sharing, the music industry etc. Look at McDonald's rapid decline, microbrew beer going from a niche to outselling Budweiser.

Even 10-15 years ago, %90 of what the average person learned about food came from mass media ads. Now it's probably %90 social media. In this world, mass produced food is practically the definition of "unshareable" - there's not much interesting about something that's inherently common and such food usually isn't too photogenic. Like so many products on the internet, this is a world where "the long tail" of food products, restaurants and even recipes can thrive like never before.

More than anything, I think there's a healthy competitive dynamic going on - food is legitimately getting better. Yelp reviews give local restaurants equal footing with national brands. Restaurants of all stripes have to compete with their own consumers, who have easier access to good recipes (and greater incentive to cook).

> chains like Target are actively giving increasing space on their shelves to a slew of New Age players like [...] Hampton Creek (which sells a popular plant-based mayo)

I understand people who buy "junk mayo" (I do, more often than I'd like to admit) but I really don't understand why you would buy "high end mayo", because, if you're quality-conscious, how hard is it to make your own?

Or is this some kind of vegan mayo? But it's also possible to make your own mayonnaise with no eggs.

What is not possible however, is for a product that has to sit on shelves for any period of time to have no preservatives and no pasteurisation.

People are cooking more, buying pre-made food less... WAR, meh

Yeah, the title is way overblown ("war"... come on).

Big Corps are already shifting... my favorite personal example is Heinz ketchup... they make a simple ketchup called Simply Heinz. Awesome.

not only do they want simple ingredient lists with names they can recognize or even picture in their heads, for many consumers these specialty brands an easy way for them to fool themselves into believe they are being healthy. For some it may even fall into the category of luxury items, treating themselves. the food scares a few years ago with imported food from China probably has done some to move this market as well.

Yet it will be interesting to see what happens to people's choices when after years of moving to easy to understand foods their health doesn't improve. The one connection most of them haven't made is that it isn't necessarily the types of food they are eating but simply the volume especially related to their activity levels.