Foods experts won't eat | Hacker News Reader

Foods experts won't eat

shine.yahoo.com

50 pointsdpatru42 comments

"Try this experiment: Buy a conventional potato in a store, and try to get it to sprout. It won't"

That's funny. I've got two bags of non-organic potatoes with sprouts all over them. Seems unlikely that I got the last two bags of viable potatoes on earth....

I grew some potatoes this year. I bought the starter potatoes at a garden center. While there, I asked the gardener why I couldn't just use potatoes eyes that had begun to sprout on store-bought potatoes. He told me that they would BEGIN to sprout, but would not fully grow because of all the stuff the potatoes are treated with to prevent early sprouting.

Just because they sprout in a week after some people buy them doesn't mean that much without knowing how long ago they were pulled from the dirt. Also the temperature they are stored at has a lot to do with when they will sprout.

Yes, every bag of non-organic potatoes I've gotten has sprouted after a long period of time.

Same here. Way to destroy your own credibility, National Organic Standards Board. I care a lot about 'food integrity' and sustainability, but it really bothers me that the most vocal activists spout this kind of pseudoscience.

Yeah, me too. The red taters start in a week or so.

Upvoted for identical experience.

It's pretty discouraging that most of the experts and people who spend a lot of time in a domain are so cynical about their products.

Some examples: almost everyone I know who worked fast-food as a teenager refuses to eat there as an adult because of their first-hand experiences.

Friends who write code for one of the major airline manufacturers telling horror stories about the systems code which fly the plane.

And I could go on for days about the things I saw when I was writing code for an emergency services (e911) company.

Now we can add farmers who wouldn't even eat the food they bring to market to that list.

It's a terrifying world out there if you're paying attention...

"It's a terrifying world out there if you're paying attention..."

More like it's a terrifying world out there if you buy into all the fear mongering.

Now we can add farmers who wouldn't even eat the food they bring to market to that list.

Where in the list do you find that example? The only comment by a farmer I saw was a (great) grass-fed beef producer lamenting the quality of mass-produced grain-fed beef. I'm quite certain he happily eats the products that he produces.

I deal with a lot of conventional and organic growers. While I'm sure that they exist somewhere, I've yet to run across a farmer who wouldn't eat what he produces.

OK, reading closer I guess you are right if you're willing to go on hearsay. A representative of the National Organics Standards Board is quoted as having talked to potato farmers who say they wouldn't eat what they sell. Or is there some greater evidence you see?

#4:

"I've talked with potato growers who say point-blank they would never eat the potatoes they sell. They have separate plots where they grow potatoes for themselves without all the chemicals."

The expert: Jeffrey Moyer, chair of the National Organic Standards Board

He has an agenda, and his story sounds apocryphal.

Also, CS experts are the ones least likely to trust eVoting machines. And doctors are more likely than the general public to support naturopathic medicine.

I suspect it's a corollary of the Fundamental Attribution Error.

It's basically the old aphorism that you don't want to know how the sausage is made. Dig even mildly deep in most things that humans do and you'll find objectionable things.

All jobs have horror stories. People like to share them. A pizza delivery driver's horror stories are forgettable, but an air traffic controller's are not.

Which airline manufacturer?

Not systems code, but I worked for a legacy airline in engineering and now have a fear of flying. The plane I observed most closely during my job was the Boeing 757 with Rolls Royce engine.

"Nature didn't intend for salmon to be crammed into pens and fed soy, poultry litter, and hydrolyzed chicken feathers. As a result..."

We're going to have to start farming just about all fish soon. I find a lot of the source article here vague and unscientific. Nature doesn't intend anything.

I agree that nature doesn't intend anything, but when people say that it does, what they're actually doing is slightly clumsily expressing a very valid concern.

And that concern is that a lot of agricultural science suffers from a dangerous sort of reductionism. We come up with a model for how something grows, and then we assume that anything the model doesn't account for isn't important. (This is actually a general gripe I have about a lot of biological science.)

The fact is that plants and animals evolved to give and take as part of enormously complex systems we've hardly begun to understand. I think it's reasonable not to assume that we can scrap those systems, rebuild them from the top down based on what understanding we do have, and not encounter unforeseen consequences.

I believe the intended meaning was environments which are not naturally occurring rather than attributing volition to nature.

Do you not taste the difference between, say, wild Alaskan or Colorado River salmon vs. fish farm stock?

Farmed fish can be improved just by using higher quality feed.

Have you ever eaten wild Alaskan or Colorado River salmon and fish farm stock at the same time, without knowing which was which? Were they prepared in the same way? By the same chef?

Yes, there probably are differences that you could detect in a blind taste-test. But given the positive affect associated with the names -- "Colorado River Rock Star Javascript-Guru Salmon" -- I wouldn't be surprised if most of the difference in flavor is printed on the menu.

No, but if it's anything like the difference in free-range chicken and factory-farmed chicken, you would have to be blindfolded and your mouth scoured to not be able to tell the difference (free-range chicken not only looks different - it's leaner, the fat is marbled into the meat and not in thick sheathes around it, it's a yellowish color instead of sickly translucent pink, it tastes different, and its texture is different).

Indeed. I just moved from NZ, which is big on salmon farming, to Seattle. The taste of farmed salmon, in my opinion, is repulsive compared to wild salmon. I can only hope we don't have to farm all fish in the future, as I don't think improving the feed can completely fill that taste gap.

The really frightening part is that this list of foods makes up probably 90% of the average American's diet. Imagine the daily cumulative totals of various chemicals consumed.

Make an effort to find a local farm and try some of their meat. I promise you will never go back to conventional meat at the grocery store. If anyone wants some suggestions in the Chicago area, let me know.

Make an effort to find a local farm and try some of their meat. I promise you will never go back to conventional meat at the grocery store.

Absolutely. We've found a local farmer who is a grass farmer who happens to raise animals, too. The ground beef, which is made from actual meat instead of simply trimmings, is amazing.

If anyone in the Pittsburgh area wants more info, I'd be glad to share.

This is an interesting topic, but a very unscientific article. I wish more people read Innumeracy or Taleb.

> A recent comprehensive study conducted by the USDA and researchers from Clemson University found that compared with corn-fed beef, grass-fed beef is higher in beta-carotene, vitamin E, omega-3s, conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), calcium, magnesium, and potassium; lower in inflammatory omega-6s; and lower in saturated fats that have been linked to heart disease.

Grass-fed beef is higher than corn-fed beef in vitamin E. How much higher? 101 is higher than 100, but in most cases it doesn't make a difference.

This article is full of innumeracy like that.

This list avoids mentioning the every day dietary monsters: sodas, sodium nitrite, hydrogenated oils, MSG, corn syrup, homogenized milk, and so on.

Homogenized milk? I haven't heard that one before.

I have, but it's not a common argument. Homogenization forcefully changes a lot of the natural chemical structure of the milk (especially concerning the globules of cream), making the flavor more bland and the shelf life longer.

2. Corn-Fed Beef

The expert: Joel Salatin, co-owner of Polyface Farms and author of half a dozen books on sustainable farming

This screams conflict of interest.

Indeed.

Aside from that, Polyface is awesome. David Suzuki had a chapter about it in /Good News for a Change/.

The more appropriate title: Food A Partisan Expert Won't Eat.

It's not clear what their incentives are to mislead in this case though.

You can't exactly get a blockbuster book tour out of Ten Foods You Eat Every Day That Are About As Good For You As You'd Expect.

Cater to hysteria -> Get eyeballs/readers -> Profit

Microwave popcorn for the cheap and lazy: put kernels in a glass bowl, cover with a dish.

I make popcorn on the stove with a large stainless steal soup pot.

   1. Heat a few table spoons of vegetable oil on high.
   2. Put in a single kernel to test (it should pop fairly quickly).
   3. Pour in a handful or two of kernels and cover.
   4. Gently shake pot to get all the kernels cooking.
   5. Wait until the popping dies down.

+1 if you use Coconut or some other oil with a high flashpoint. Burnt oil's not that good for you.

Considering the article, make that olive oil for the for the health benefits - I've been doing this recently and it is delicious. You do end up sweeping your floor more often, though.

Olive oil that is going to have a health benefit is also going to have a low smoke point. If you can make good popcorn with your olive oil then that is a signal to you that the oil is over-refined and has almost no health benefit whatsoever. Popcorn kernels need to reach ~360 F to pop and the pan should be in the 400-475 range for best results while virgin olive oil will smoke at 370 or so (less for unrefined) and heavily refined oil can make it to the low 400s before smoking. If the oil has hit its smoke point that you can be certain that you are starting to lose the polyphenols that provide most of the health benefits of olive oil.

The shaking is unnecessary, at least if the pot is thick enough to spread heat well. The popping mixes the kernels more than enough to avoid burning.

It also work if you put kernels in a plain brown paper bag.

But don't put them in a plastic container, the kernels get very hot and melt the plastic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com