This all has very big "uncured bacon" energy to me (if you didn't already know: there's no such thing; vendors of uncured bacon performatively drive the same chemical nitrite reaction using vegetable extracts). For example: yogurt becomes a UPF simply by dint of adding carrageenan, which is on the order of calling dashi a UPF because of the kombu.
It's not that there isn't a very legitimate issue underneath all this: packaged, hyperpalatable, low-nutritional-density low-satiety foods are probably a major driver of health problems. It's just that "UPF" isn't the right metric for isolating those foods, and with the wrong metrics you end up in a similar place as California does with the Prop 65 warnings.
We went through a similar thing with "pink slime" (transglutaminase preservation techniques).
>which is on the order of calling dashi a UPF because of the kombu
when you use a comparison like this, you choose an example that people will understand so they can then, by analogy, extend that understanding to the point you are trying to make...
like the kombu in the dashi, you say? dash-it-all, that's a combunation I hadn't considered!
> It's just that "UPF" isn't the right metric for isolating those foods
I've heard this criticism a fair bit, and I sort of agree. The only thing is, what is the right metric? And if we don't have one, and know these foods are causing harm, should we just use UPF as a term anyway?
There is perhaps some rough correlation but as soon as you define an objective metric then consumer packaged foods companies will figure out a way to game the metric by engineering foods to get good scores and be highly palatable while still not being very healthy. Another way of thinking about it might be ultra-formulated versus ultra-processed: what matters is the contents rather than how you got there.
One thing I would like to see is a clear categorization of to the concept of chemically reduce ingredients into unreconizeable components, and then recombine them into the original product while presenting it as nothing has happened. If you take milk and reduce it down to fat-free milk powder, then introduce additional fat and rehydrate it with additional cream aroma, it doesn't turn back into fresh cream. Similar, if you take fruit and reduce it down into pure fructose, then reintroduce water and aroma extracted from the same kind of fruit, it may be similar but not quite like freshly squeezed fruit juice.
Canned Jalapeño often deploy a similar (but much less noticeable) trick in that the manufacturer grows Jalapeño without capsaicin, and then reintroduce chemically created capsaicin into the can in order to control for spiciness.
I don't know, it's a hard problem, but I think there's good public policy evidence that when you do these things wrong (as with Prop 65 cancer warnings and nitrates) you lose all the benefits the labeling tries to provide.
The thing is that, although the list used (the "Nova classification") is obviously somewhat arbitrary, the fact that everybody uses it makes research results comparable to each other.
Comparable how? If I compare one meaningless number to another meaningless number on the same scale then I can see which one is larger, but I won't learn anything scientifically valuable or practically useful.
Correlation != causation. Your correlation can identify a hugely important effect without pinpointing its mechanism. In this case: I think it's very likely that ultraprocessing has not-very-much to do with food health, but UPF foods tend to be hyperpalatable and low-satiety, which almost certainly does. The ultraprocessing isn't what's making the foot hyperpalatable or low-satiety (the macronutrient mix and sweetening is).
The previous comment was pointing out that there's an agreed-on definition of what "ultra-processing" means. There is. But there is no such agreement on mechanistic effects of ultra-processing.
The book Ultra-Processed People by Chris van Tulleken really opened my eyes about UPF. I highly recommend it. Here is a video of him delivering a lecture at the royal institution about the topic: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j1oOoYnCfJs
I don't think adding kombu to dashi would count as UPF according to the book's definition.
I don't know that it does, but I do know that carrageenan does, and they're both just seaweed extracts.
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This video is really frustrating. The first half of it is making relatively banal arguments about the importance of food to health. He's setting up an argument that I think basically everybody agrees with (hyperpalatable packaged food are a major driver of illness). But then he gets to UPFs, says the definition is totally agreed on, and then says they're all made by investor-driven large corporations.
That's just straightforwardly false. I made a mac & cheese out of some stored roasted cauliflower (never put a raw cauliflower in your fridge). To melt the aged cheddar I used, I added a half teaspoon of sodium citrate (a miracle ingredient). My cauli-mac is now a UPF. No giant corporation made it.
My argument isn't that packaged food isn't exactly as much of a problem as the UPF people say it is. My argument is that "UPF" is not the right axis on which to determine which foods are and aren't healthy.
I think it’s misleading to suggest a substance is okay because it’s “just” an extract. Normal foods contain lots of substances that when extracted, are obviously bad if concentrated and consumed in larger quantities than would be had during normal consumption of whatever the source is.
Additionally, even if that substance is perfectly safe, the extraction process may effectively increase (as a %) the amount of byproducts. For example - and this is totally made up - suppose ice cream normally contained 1ppm microplastics, but adding carrageenan increased that to 10ppm because of the microplastics in seawater and the failure of the extraction process to remove them. Or even things that are “good” in their normal dosages might be “bad” at higher doses found in extracts.
In general, I would suggest it’s a good heuristic to avoid foods containing ingredients added for stability, preservation, or color. Maybe it’s fine but the benefit vs just eating fresh food that doesn’t need it is basically nil even in that case. Carrageenan would fall into this category. (It seems like there is some research suggesting carrageenan is not great for you but I’m not an expert: I’d not heard that and avoid it simply because it’s not anything I would add to a food I made.)
At some point with this line of reasoning you fall into the precautionary principle and the naturalist fallacy. I'm fine with people being squicked out by food additives that are products of petroleum chemistry, like benzaldehyde. You can get carrageenan simply by rehydrating and simmering seaweed and then filtering it through cheesecloth.
Whatever else is going on with carrageenan-stabilized yogurt, the carrageenan itself isn't doing anything to drive the health problems this speaker is talking about.
This is actually I think a really good illustration of the problem. There is absolutely a (primarily message-board-driven) literature of concerns about specific variants of carrageenan. But those concerns --- which I don't think are well-founded --- have nothing to do with the wave of concern about "UPFs" generally. The UPF thing isn't about IBD (some think kappa carrageenan exacerbates intestinal inflammation with susceptible people) --- it's about people eating hyperpalatable low-satiety packaged food, which are obesogenic. Getting rid of carrageenan does precisely nothing to address that problem; getting rid of cane sugar, which is not a UPF ingredient, absolutely does.
> At some point with this line of reasoning you fall into the precautionary principle
Is there something wrong with the precautionary principle? It would be one thing if the supposed benefit was something really incredible, like extending lifespan or curing cancer. Then maybe we should be less cautious. But we're talking about adding something to your ice cream to make it look nice for longer.
> it's about people eating hyperpalatable low-satiety packaged food, which are obesogenic. Getting rid of carrageenan does precisely nothing to address that problem; getting rid of cane sugar, which is not a UPF ingredient, absolutely does.
I'm not advocating anyone eat tons of sugar, but sugar consumption and the obesity epidemic are not very well correlated. I would agree that we should eliminate "hyperpalatable low-satiety packaged food", but if you were to hypothetically ban basically all non-salt/sugar preservatives, stability agents, flavor enhancers, colors etc. then you almost eliminate this entire product category, because it's no longer practical to produce and sell, easy to consume, or as marketable. Even banning corn syrup in packaged food (as a UPF ingredient) would be a positive move because forcing its replacement by cane sugar (regardless of whatever alleged health problem HFCS s may or may not have) would mean that such products become less economically viable, because its more expensive and less stable.
> the naturalist fallacy.
The naturalistic "fallacy" is approximately true for diets. We are animals that evolved in a way that optimized for the consumption of various foods in our environments. We're some of the most wildly complex chemical systems in the world, and we have remarkably broadly adapted digestive systems with a pretty good tolerance, so you can get away with throwing a lot of stuff down the pipe without anything bad happening. But that's exactly why "eat the same foods people always have and not bizarre lab concoctions" is a useful heuristic for health. It's entirely possible that various additives are perfectly fine or even pro-health, but it's not the way to bet as a general principle, and it's impractical to conduct meaningful long-term nutritional studies to find out with any real assurance.
If you believe that about the naturalistic fallacy, you should be fine with carrageenan-stabilized yogurt; the carrageenan is arguably more "natural" than the yogurt.
But all this just shows to go you: this whole "UPF" thing is a sort of motte and bailey deal. We all broadly agree that packaged hyperpalatable low-satiety foods (along with liquid calories) are a danger to human health; that's the motte. The bailey is all this stuff about how we need to rid the food chain of stabilizers and glutamates and nitrates and preservatives because "bizarre lab concoctions" endanger people.
The right food classification scheme wouldn't have this problem, and wouldn't be a way for people to smuggle in proscriptions against sodium citrate or transglutaminase while coming up with "UPF-free" logos for cane-sugar-sweetened beverages.
> The bailey is all this stuff about how we need to rid the food chain of stabilizers and glutamates and nitrates and preservatives because "bizarre lab concoctions" endanger people.
In my case, I'm arguing that doing away with these things, regardless of any health effects they may have, has the effect of eliminating the entire class of foods you have a problem with.
> "UPF-free" logos for cane-sugar-sweetened beverages.
I'm not arguing that people should drink coke (which is full of all kinds of stuff besides HFCS I doubt people should be consuming), but the obesity epidemic is not well-correlated to soft drink consumption. The latter has been in decline since around the mid-90s.
My point is that you're arguing for something far outside of the mainstream, but the "UPF" framing makes it hard to tell; it sounds at first like you're saying we should stop subsidizing Takis (fair enough!) but in reality you're also saying all the yogurt needs to be reformulated (not gonna happen). I'm not trying to engage with your theory of health; I'm trying to establish that the UPF thing has Prop 65 vibes.
The Prop 65 people make a lot of the same arguments you are --- most especially that we should more formally adopt the precautionary principle. Which is why you get cancer warning labels on bags of organic sweet potato sticks. And so nobody takes those labels seriously anymore.
>The latter has been in decline since around the mid-90s.
I'm curious about this. Do you have a reference for this? What is in decline specifically? Number of people drinking sugary soda? Number of sugary sodas consumed per person (on average)? Amount of sugar consumed by drinking sugary soda? I'm curious because it seems the amount of sugar per can of soda has drastically increased since the 90's. If my memory serves me well, a can of soda 20 years ago was like 26g of sugar, today they're like 53 g per soda. At least in the United States.
I don't think your memory is serving you very well. A 12oz can of Coca-Cola contains 39g of sugar, which hasn't changed in a long time. (Some people claim that switching the sugar from sucrose to high-fructose corn syrup had harmful effects but there's little evidence for that.) Other brands have a little more or less sugar but that's probably the one most commonly consumed.
Sugar consumption per capita has been trending up slightly in the last few years. But ironically it was actually higher back in the 1970s when the population was less obese.
You can go to any Asian grocer and get thin-sliced pork belly and cook it up yourself to see the difference. It is not subtle. For American bacon flavor, you need nitrites (nitrates are a slow-release source of nitrites).
If you're talking about American-style bacon, and it tastes like bacon, there's no such thing. They're just exploiting labeling rules by selecting very specific nitrite sources. Nitrites are what give bacon (and ham) its flavor.
<strike>This is before we get to the whole premise of avoiding nitrates. Would you eat a beet? That's a serving of industrial bacon's worth of nitrates right there.</strike>
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(Actually, super bad example, since the concern is nitrosamines which are formed in the presence of proteins. The point about the illegitimacy of nitrite-free bacon stands!)
This is partially true. The use celery extract or whatever they can get away with legally. Smoking is what gives bacon the flavor. Buy your cut of meat, season, and smoke it with a very low temp for long time, you have bacon. No nitrates.
No you won't. You'll have smoked pork. Nitrite curing is the difference between ham and pork, and is part of the source of American bacon's flavor. You can make or buy unsmoked bacon; it will still taste like bacon.
It is weird to me that people try to make an issue out of this, because it's not like the flavor change in cured meat is hard to miss. Just buy some pink salt! Corned beef tastes like corn beef because of nitrites.
If there is a thing a reasonable person can do with pork belly, I have done it. I think you have the higher evidentiary burden here, regardless of our respective experience. You can check Ruhlman's Charcuterie and Salumi books, you can check AskCulinary, you can check the food Stack Exchange, you can just notice that literally every packaged bacon product, whether or not it claims to be cured, is in fact cured (usually with celery powder), or, of course, you can just take some sliced pork belly and make a 5% pink salt/salt mix and throw it in a zip in your fridge overnight and see.
I get that you like smoked pork belly. I do too. I don't even object to you calling it "bacon". All sorts of things that aren't American bacon are called bacon. But nitrites are absolutely part of the distinctive flavor of American bacon.
The whole thing is silly, because we can just point to ham and corned beef, two products where the debate doesn't even make sense; we only see it with bacon, and we only see it because vendors lie about whether their products are cured.
The Coleman bacon doesn't list ingredients. But the Applegate bacon lists celery powder because that is a source of nitrates. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celery_powder
I don't know much about either brand but there are good reasons to buy fancy bacon instead of Smithfield and Hormel, just because of the quality and ethics of the livestock inputs. But nitrites aren't one of those reasons.
A burger with the lot here in Australia will have beets and bacon. And an egg, probably pineapple too. Lettuce, tomato, cheese. hmm.. I know what I want for lunch today.
I could understand the beetroot when I was Down Under, but the pineapple just had me go "?" similarly to when I was served eggs, pasta, and mushrooms for breakfast.
> Nitrites are what give bacon (and ham) its flavor.
Are you sure about that?
Because it's the first time ever I stumbled upon this argument.
The explanation I heard is that there are legit bacterial food safety concerns (salmonella and listeria, IIRC) that justify using nitrites even if they are by themself harmful, the benefit/risk ratio is simply favorable to nitrites.
Pretty sure. I make bacon and dabble with salumi. It's definitely not strictly a food safety issue. I sometimes put a pinch of pink salt in with my duck confit cure, and it comes out distinctively hammier. Nitric oxide interacts with myoglobin in ways that alter your taste perception; sort of the way I understand miracleberries make things taste sweeter (by cutting off your perception of bitterness), nitrites do to the metallic flavor compounds in meat.
It's both. Curing is a preservative technique and it gives bacon and ham the flavor people enjoy. Like a lot of food preservation techniques (jam, etc) curing was most likely developed for preservation first, and then people came to enjoy the flavor it gave.
You're still getting the industrial levels of nitrates/nitrites. They just stuff it in as an extract from celery.
The problem isn't the curing, per se. In old school hand curing, almost all the nitrate/nitrite has reacted and is gone by the time you buy the meat.
The problem is the industrialization of the process. In order to not have to inspect the cured meat (as that would take people--the horror!), industry injects a massive amount of curing agents such that even when the meat is "fully cured" there is still a ton of it left in the meat itself.
As a European who moved to Canada and spends a fair amount of time in the States, one thing that really surprised me is how hard it is to find healthy food options compared to the unhealthy ones. Food was a bit of a concern before moving, but I didn't know just how frustrating it would be.
Even something as simple as Yogurt is usually insanely sweet / sugary compared to European variants. Ingredients that are banned in Europe are regularly found in products, and something as simple as bread has a ton of preservatives (as the article shows).
And I'm vegetarian, I assume for people who eat meat there's the additional concern of antibiotics resistance due to the antibiotics given to livestock.
My nearby Kroger has four brands of greek yogurt with no sugar added and three brands of plain yogurt with no sugar added. Each of these brands sells yogurt of varying fat contents in quart and cup containers. This takes up like eight feet of width on the shelves.
Well, the supermarkets know know what the effect of their product placement is. If they change it, the customer buys different things, on average.
So, we can say it's reasonable for people to do some research and pick the yoghurt they consider best, but we know most people don't do that. And that supermarkets prefer to give the best spots to sugary yoghurts.
What's wrong with doing the research once for the average person and then regulating the supermarkets so they give those the eye level space? People can still make different choices if they want.
It could be the result is people buy more danishes and doughnuts from the bakery section for breakfast instead of now harder to find sweetened yoghurt.
The amount of work the consumer puts in is matched by food makers. You'll see the deceptive marketing on so many foods. "No sugar added" no longer means no added sweetening agent. It means that sugar was replaced by alternative sweeteners.
If the issue was only about choices adults make about their own bodies and there were no externalities from those choices, then IMO it would of course be reasonable.
Look? As in open your eyes? It's literally right on the front of the package in large letters. You can see exactly what you're getting without even squinting at the fine print on the back.
> You can see exactly what you're getting without even squinting at the fine print on the back.
So the nutrition facts and ingredients list doesn’t convey any new information? The designers managed to cram all that info into an appealing front facing label? And the marketers refrained from soft deceptions and convenient omissions, prioritizing truth and clarity over sales numbers? Sure.
Lots of people in this thread missing that unsweetened yogurt options are probably not distributed evenly across US supermarkets.
Your local coastal city store might have a half dozen plain greek yogurts but I bet there are plenty of areas where they are not stocked because they know it won't sell.
You would lose that bet. I eat plain unsweetened yogurt. I have seen it on the shelf in supermarkets everywhere, not just coastal cities.
But hey, don't take my word for it. Most large supermarkets now offer online ordering. Pick a few small Midwestern cities at random and look what dairy products the major local supermarkets have in stock. It's hilarious how people keep posting uninformed comments here without taking 5 minutes to do some trivial fact checking.
It's marked as "plain" yogurt. You can still find adulterants in it, just not added sugars. For example Trader Joe's "plain yogurt" is a mixture of yogurt and buttermilk.
While there are some people who live in "food deserts" with very limited options, complaints by most HN users about the difficulty of finding healthy food don't align with reality.
FWIW, Greek Yogurt is not the same as Yogurt, it's a different product. Those two items are not "essentially the same thing". Also, low/zero-fat yogurts dominate the market in the US. Plain Whole-Milk traditional yogurt is more available now than it was a decade or two ago, but it's still nowhere as common as the high-sugar flavored ones.
I hate the obsession with low/no fat that has stuck around for decades here. Taking out the fat makes the food less tasty and less satiating. Not to mention that extra sugar tends to be added to try to compensate for the taste, thus making it at least as bad for you if not worse than if had more fat.
Even if they did add buttermilk, it would almost undoubtedly be cultured buttermilk, which is really nothing more than very thin yogurt. So I'm not seeing what the issue would be with Trader Joe's adding yogurt to yogurt.
The Walmart thing has pectin in it as a stabilizer/thickener, which, benign as it may be, qualifies as an adulterant. And it's not permitted in plain yogurt in Germany (though usually added in fruit/flavored yogurt).
> While there are some people who live in "food deserts" with very limited options, complaints by most HN users about the difficulty of finding healthy food don't align with reality.
Some… Most…
You’ve made some broad assumptions here. I’ve lived in various neighbordhoods in one of the largest cities in this country and near and far suburbs of the same. Only when I’ve lived in ritzy or trendy areas have I had no issue eating healthy (according to my definition of healthy), and always at significantly greater financial cost.
My guess is either your concerns are less restrictive than mine annd others’ on this thread. Or you’ve been privileged enough to not have a clear perspective on just how large, dispersed and discontinuous, the American “food desert” truly is.
I haven't made any broad assumptions. You can buy healthy food like frozen vegetables, raw chicken, ground beef, potatoes, beans, rice, apples, olive oil, plain yogurt, etc pretty much anywhere. I travel a lot and have seen these foods widely available in neighborhoods that are not remotely ritzy or trendy. They are usually inexpensive, and if you have a little storage space then you can stock up when stores have discounts to save even more.
There are a small fraction of people who do live in food deserts and we ought to help them out. Probably the best thing we could do to make many food deserts "bloom" would be to fund the police and strictly enforce shoplifting laws, especially against organized retail theft gangs. Good grocery stores have been driven out of some neighborhoods partly by high shrinkage rates (not the only problem but a major contributing factor).
> Every grocery store where I've shopped has yogurt with no added sugar. It's right there on the shelf, just look at the label.
Large parts of the US are designated as food deserts, where one's best option for groceries might be the convenience store attached to a gas station. Good luck finding plain yogurt with no sugar added there. Your specific experience is exactly that.
You made a claim that plain yogurt is generally available in US food markets, attempting to make an inference about grocery store selections drawing from your own experience. I pointed out that it is not actually generally available and noted that your experience does not generalize.
I am not sure why you mention eating habits, since this is not what is being discussed
> I pointed out that it is not actually generally available
Actually, you pointed out that food deserts exist, and asserted that that meant that plain yogurt is not generally available, the thing you pointed out does not support the conclusion drawn from it.
Food deserts appear to roughly correlate inversely with population density[0]. I don't interpret the existence of food deserts as evidence that food choice is not 'generally' available. Assuming we are serving people and not geographies.
My claim was 100% accurate and my experience does generalize. Plain yogurt with no added sugar is generally available at the vast majority of supermarkets throughout the country. I have actually seen it in both poor and affluent areas all over.
But you don't have to take my word for it. Instead of making things up you can literally just go look.
Wow, 100% accurate? OK, I definitely can't argue with that. Nor I suppose can I argue much with overinterpreted anecdotes and absolutist analysis from a non-expert about a nuanced topic. You should start a Tiktok or a Substack or something, you are leaving money on the table.
While I don't live in a food desert where these kind of stores are the only option, I have, in fact, regularly found plain yogurt in gas-station convenience stores, the even smaller refrigerated-food sections in urban drug stores, etc.
Now, fresh produce, except—if you are very lucky—extremely expensive (for the quantity), relatively small packs of cut carrots and other things people might reasonably purchase as snacks, anything usable as a cooking fat excepted salted butter, and lots of other things, sure, you are going to be SOL, but plain yogurt (both the usually watery American kind and strained "Greek” yogurt) seems pretty common.
I have also found plain yogurt in gas station convenience stores
My issue was less with the plain yogurt specifically and more with the logic of the parent, namely that "X product has been available in every grocery store I have shopped in" implies that "X product can be found in every grocery store"
A good example of a food desert would be an inner-city neighborhood, the first time I heard this term, they were talking specifically about places in Oakland, CA. Which ironically is a short train ride away from the Food Mecca of the USA.
> There are no set few factors, but some other influences that affect food deserts may include: mobility, existing health issues, working irregular hours, fast food culture, lacking adequate knowledge about nutrition, and many more.
Seems like the qualifications are whatever they want them to be.
It doesn't, actually. It says most people who are in food deserts are in urban areas. The vast majority of food deserts, however, are absolutely not in urban areas.
Even if it were true, it still only affects 13 million people. There are 330 million in the US, so it's a non-issue with regard to our obesity problem.
OK, point taken re most people vs most food deserts
In any case, I am talking about the availability of items in response to the parent's obviously absurd implication "every food market I have been to sells X, therefore every food market sells X".
I am using food deserts as a counterexample since definitionally these are regions where certain items are hard to find. I know (hope?) that the person I am responding to likely doesn't believe every grocery store in the United States carries plain yogurt, but I also know that people here often forget that not every place enjoys the same level of choice that is enjoyed in places like the SF Bay Area
I truly don't understand why you are bringing up obesity, this feels very remote to what is being discussed.
"...how hard it is to find healthy food options compared to the unhealthy ones."
Sure, if you limit your purchases to Dollar General and Casey's. If you spent time in an actual grocery store, you'd find that your comment isn't true.
The problem is that to a European citizen this is a bit unexpected. In Europe, in all countries, you can find roughly the same level of "safeness" of food across all tiers of stores. Go to a cheapest one and the most expensive one, and the yogurt, tomatoes or meat would be approximately the same quality and have the same nutritional components. The only difference would be that expensive store would additionally carry some imported fancy tomatoes or some fancy steak cuts. But those steak cuts would be subject to the same standards as a cheap chicken meat in the cheap store.
Romanian here: the tomato quality varies by a lot. All stores have crappy "plastic" tasting tomatoes. It's not that easy to find really good tomatoes (in summer you can find them at local markets, in winter... Fancy imports I guess).
My wife doesn’t let me buy tomatoes in winter. And even summer tomatoes are bland in comparison to the ones one would get in a mediterran region or the ones she grows in our garden. It’s not even the same ballpark.
Tomatoes are, imo, the prime example and possibly the only one of popular produce, of bland produce in the US.
I think it's a combination of having them year-round (they are picked before they ripen for shipping) and the emphasis on color/look being very high. A good tomato tastes much better than most store bought to the point I didn't know I liked tomatoes until I had a garden grown one. Now I eat store bought as well but it's not the same.
I don't find most other fruits/veggies to suffer nearly as much from that though.
I mean, in most of the US, they're an extremely seasonal product. If you go to Pete's (a commodity big-box grocery chain in Chicago) in August, you'll get very good tomatoes. There's basically nowhere you're going to go to get very good fresh tomatoes (maybe cherry tomatoes) in April.
Really? I grow blueberries, strawberries, several cultivars of hot/sweet peppers, zucchini, yellow squash, tomatoes, garlic, bush beans, and several different herbs, and without fail ALL of them taste way better than the store bought version. That isn’t to say the store versions are always bad, but you know the home grown ones every single time.
Its not just a "tier" of store, its a "genre" of store. Stores like Dollar General are not really grocers, they just happen to carry some food products. They typically do not carry any fresh foods. So its not a matter of their tomatoes are somehow worse quality, its that they do not sell tomatoes. Its not that their meats are worse quality, they do not sell fresh meat. They practically only sell pre-packaged goods. Think about the few isles of junk food and small packages of household products (soaps and what not) you might find at a gas station, and scale that up ~800m^2.
If its not something that is OK to sit on a shelf for a few months, you won't find it at a Dollar General.
When it comes to actual fresh foods (which can be found if you go to actual grocery stores), those are highly regulated. You'll find fancier varieties at fancier grocery stores, but in the end a yellow onion at Kroger is about the same as a yellow onion in Safeway or Publix or Albertsons or HEB or Whole Foods.
>But those steak cuts would be subject to the same standards as a cheap chicken meat in the cheap store.
Speaking also as an European, not they would not. There's a pretty big difference in the quality of the meant across the board between shops and brands(suppliers) of meat depending how the animals were raised, fed and cared for.
Here in Austria there's been plenty of scandals covering the poor conditions of animals in meat factories (living in feces, infections with puss, etc) yet the meat cuts receive the AMA seal of approval. I also did some work for the farm tech sector and the conditions of animals in some (most) EU countries I saw were indeed as appalling as those in the stories. It almost made me go vegan.
Sure, it's all(probably) technically safe to eat due to all the antibiotics they pump in those animals, just like in the US, but quality varies a lot.
And like sibling said, there's also a big difference between the quality of fruits and vegetables you find in supermarkets depending on where they come from and the conditions under which they were farmed.
That's why I dislike these over generalist "In Europe it's like this and that" blanket statements. No it isn't, it's just one point on the graph, but in reality it varies A LOT, it's a friggin continent ffs.
In large swaths of the country, these "non-grocery stores" are a lifeline, as they are the only option. In others, you don't even have that -- gas station convenience stores might be that lifeline instead. [1]
I am familiar with what the grandparent is referring to, having spent a decade running purchasing teams in US grocery stores. Even in urban areas with many different food retail stores, a typical supermarket in the US is a fairly difficult place to shop for someone with specific food sensitivities. Hopefully folks here who live in the SF Bay Area appreciate that it's a total outlier in both the diversity of stores available and the assortment of products sold in a typical Bay Area supermarket
Is there a better source for that data? I appreciate that you're at least bringing data to the discussion, but honestly I kind of don't buy it, having lived all over the US from rural farm communities to Manhattan. I think I can identify where I live right now on that map, by virtue of being right on the border of IL/IN and Lake Michigan, and it has a little indication of "food desert", but it certainly isn't.
For most US supermarkets, shop around the perimeter and avoid anything in any of the center aisles. While individual floor plans vary, that tends to route you to the fresh produce and meats and dairy and avoid most of the ultraprocessed packaged stuff.
The SF Bay Area is hardly an outlier. There may be more specialty grocery stores here, but the large supermarkets where most consumers buy most of their food are the same as anywhere else. If you compare a Safeway in Mountain View, CA to a Publix in Daytona Beach, FL or a Kroger in Toledo, OH there isn't much difference in the products available.
Safeway has an in-house organic brand, "O Organics". I can easily go to Safeway and pick up only organic foods. I don't know if that's true for Publix or Kroger.
UPDATE: ChatGPT tells me that at Publix it's called "GreenWise Organic" and at Kroger it's called "Simple Truth Organic"
I hope that you recognize that your casual-outsider evaluation of the assortments of these stores is deeply flawed and not based on actual data. If you think about it even just a little bit, you'll recognize that it wouldn't make sense for a supermarket in one of the highest median income cities in the country to have assortment parity with a chain targeting cost conscious shoppers. The devil here is in the long-tail, which is definitionally less visible to you as a shopper, and in fact may not exist at all for certain retailers -- especially those targeting cost-conscious shoppers.
I lived in rural areas a large portion of my life. What you are describing is limited to areas with extremely small populations. Meaning even my hometown of a few thousand has a Walmart (put up when I was a kid in the 90s) an Aldi, and two local grocery stores with tons of healthy options.
So yeah, there are a lot of towns that fit that criteria (less than 1000 residents). But as a portion of U.S. population it is not substantial in any way.
i lived in one of those small towns through highschool, just a blinking yellow light and a gas station. What we did, and everyone did, was drive the 20miles to the large town with a Walmart and get groceries there. It only takes 20min because there's no lights or traffic in those areas so the time commitment is about the same as living in a city. My mom made meals from her recipes using basic ingredients so it's certainly feasible to eat how you want in these areas. Only in the most rare/extreme cases are people forced to grocery shop at a gas station.
I've got family in the rural Midwest. It would surprise me if their town wasn't a food desert by these definitions. You might go grab a thing of milk or sliced bread in a pinch at the convenience store, but yeah otherwise you just make the short drive into "the city" to get food at a regular grocery store.
Or you just ate the food you were growing on your own lot, or what your neighbors were growing, or from the farmer selling stuff off the highway.
I hope you recognize that your claims are deeply flawed and don't align with the reality that most middle-class grocery shoppers experience. Regardless of what you think makes "sense", major supermarkets throughout the country have rough assortment parity (with minor differences for regional consumer preferences). In some cases the long tail is actually longer in lower median income cities because labor is cheaper and stores are physically larger (cheaper real estate). That Publix where I shopped in Daytona Beach is enormous.
Instead of making things up you can just go look. Many supermarkets have online ordering now so you can see exactly what they stock at each local store.
Yes -- I know that my experiences don't align with most middle-class grocery shoppers: I worked in the food business for a decade where assortment was literally my job. There is a lot that casual shoppers like you don't notice! That's actually built in.
In any case, I love most of what you have written here.
Online ordering enables larger long tails. In which market do you suppose online ordering is more common, Daytona Beach or Mountain View?
If you were managing assortment at a Publix in Daytona Beach, how would you structure your long tail? Would you look to a Safeway in Mountain View as a model to follow?
Safeway is the cost conscious option in Mountain View, compare it with the other options (Whole Foods, Nijiya). The comparison between Publix and Safeway is apt.
Safeway in the Bay Area regularly comes up very close to the same cost as Whole Foods, unless one regularly uses the app and clips the saving coupons for Safeway.
Ranch 99 and the little De Martini's produce shop undercut Safeway prices on produce in Mountain View. The comparable items work out to be less expensive at Trader Joe's versus Safeway, too, last time I looked. Produce at Costco is regularly less than all of the above but I only buy a few produce items that I can freeze for later use there. For me the two advantages to Safeway are the extended hours of operation and the locations being convenient.
The "cost conscious" option in a city with one of the highest median incomes in the US is very different from a cost conscious shopper in a city like Daytona Beach, where practically a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line!
I will also point out that "cost conscious" is one of several shopper profiles that Safeway targets, but broadly speaking Safeway targets a more affluent shopper (although cost conscious isn't the same as non-affluent). The degree to which a particular location services these targets varies by area. But no, these stores target fundamentally different shoppers and think very differently about assortment, at least with regard to the long tail
I live in Los Altos next to Mountain View and Safeway is very expensive compared to every other option except Whole Foods. There are a few items they have that are the same as others, like bananas so I sometimes walk to the closest Safeway to stock up on those but otherwise one has to be wary of the pricing.
This just doesn't align with reality; your chart is practically meaningless.
Yes, in rural areas you often need to drive further than 1 mile to get to a grocery store. That doesn't mean that normal food doesn't exist for these people.
>If you spent time in an actual grocery store, you'd find that your comment isn't true.
Also as "an European" whatever that means, I only spent a couple of months in the US as a tourist, and had no issues finding healthy foods from leafy greens, to good meats in places like Wholefoods.
If he couldn't find it while actually living there, tells me he's not commenting in good faith.
Leafy greens and cuts of meat are not something exclusive to whole foods.
The real issue is people don't cook for themselves and seek out premade shelf stable offerings of what their grandparents were making from scratch decades ago. It is like knowledge has been lost.
Yeah, when I visited USA I was shocked to find lots of larger "grocery stores" didn't even stock the basics. In Europe that isn't a thing, everything larger than a regular room has fresh vegetables and meat and other staples, even in immigrant areas.
Sure it might be possible to find that in USA as well, but its so much harder as not every store has it.
Were you actually visiting what Americans would consider a grocery store?
I'm not saying this is specifically the case for you, but it is remarkably common for visitors from other parts of the world to visit, go into what we consider a "convenience store", and then be confused that there's basically nothing in terms of actual groceries in there, with probably 80%+ of the "consumable" shelving devoted to snack/"junk" items.
Those stores are intended pretty much entirely for stuff people want while on the go, and the few "groceries" they stock are basically aimed at the kind of things a drunk/stoned person is craving at 3AM when nothing else is open (say, a frozen pizza), or the few things you might run out of by surprise in the morning/when about to eat and be willing to greatly overpay for being able to grab somewhere close by before your meal/schedule is ruined. (ex: milk, condiments, maybe eggs).
I do wonder if people are stopping into a CVS or Walgreens and thinking those are grocery stores. In a lot of the rest of the world, a small corner market like that would be a grocer, but in the US grocers are much larger stores.
It might not be right next to the pre-shredded cheese (usually those house brand blocks of cheddar and what not are), sometimes they're in a fancier part of the deli area. But I can't think of a time I've gone to a Walmart looking for a block of cheese and not found any cheese.
Its not going to be the fanciest varieties, but once again the question was for "basics" that don't exist. Having cheddar, swiss, parmesean, gouda, etc. is having the basics.
To be clear, "actual" grocery store for the purposes of finding reliably fresh and healthy food includes one of the following:
1. Upscale western grocery stores and markets, ideally located within the biggest and most affluent city possible. Pikes place market would be a great example of what I'm talking about for you seattle folks.
2. Asian grocery stores, like "H-mart"
3. Farmers markets, but these are hit and miss, especially in smaller communities
Most other grocery stores, including Costco, Trader Joes, etc are full of extremely unhealthy trash slop. It's still extremely hard to find reliable low sugar options nearly anywhere, including at health and "organic" oriented grocery stores.
America just sucks for foodies who don't have unlimited time to get through the slop.
Trader joes and costco aren't really the same thing as grocery stores. I know this is confusing for foreigners. Kroger/publix/vons/ralphs/albertsons/giant eagle are the real grocery stores. You can get all sorts of good eats there. baguettes and sourdough loafs cooked daily by the in house bakery staff. All sorts of cheese sold by the pound. All sorts of fruits and vegetables although some are seasonal.
> America just sucks for foodies who don't have unlimited time to get through the slop.
I think by definition, being a “foodie” means you have, and enjoy finding, the time to sort the wheat from the chaff. Nobody has unlimited time for anything.
“I want to be be a ‘foodie’ but really I just want to be judgy” is a weak argument.
In America, google rating scores are straight up astroturfed to the point where the total number of ratings is far more important than their score.
When I travel to Japan, for example, I interpret a bad google maps review score for a location as a GOOD thing, because the average white tourists palette is incompatible with the local cuisine.
I can walk to basically any random place, anywhere in Japan, or France, or Singapore and get very high quality food that I don't have to worry about being full of bullshit. That's not true in America.
Depends on the grocery store. If you shop exclusively at Target, a company that caters primarily to those who ‘prepare’ as opposed to those who ‘cook’ you’ll find less healthy options than actual grocery stores.
That depends a lot on the Target. One location around me only has a very small produce section for their groceries with everything else pretty much being prepackaged products. Another location has quite a large produce section along with a deli, a butcher counter, and a bakery.
In my travels I've found even the size and quality of the produce sections of SuperTargets can be quite variable.
But yes, I do agree their range of choices for fresh food products is usually more limited compared to good, actual grocers. But that applies to their packaged goods as well, they often don't have as many choices of lots of things. I might find almost a dozen brands of pasta at an actual grocer but only have three or four brands at Target. To me it seems the ratio is about the same, its just the scale is different.
And to be honest, its the same story for practically all the stuff at Target. They don't have the widest supply of craft supplies compared to craft stores like Michael's and Hobby Lobby. They don't have the widest selection of bicycles compared to the bike store. They don't have nearly as many toys as what Toys R Us did. The book section is smaller than a Barnes & Noble. What else is new.
The comment is still true regardless of the fact that Whole Foods exists. It is genuinely more difficult to find healthy food in the US than abroad.
(i'm ignoring the additional fact that the US has many more food deserts than abroad. even within rich neighborhoods with many expansive grocery stores, those stores have more unhealthy options and fewer healthy options than abroad, unless it's specifically a "health food store")
I wholeheartedly disagree. Grocery stores in the US are typically much larger than grocery stores abroad. A Kroger, Publix, Piggly Wiggly, Schnuck's, or HyVee will typically have just as many healthy food options as a grocery store abroad. The difference is these US grocery stores also stock a much larger variety of unhealthy options.
As someone else in this thread used sweet yogurt as an example, it is trivially easy to find unsweetened yogurt in nearly any grocery store in the US. The difference is that there's also a very large selection of sweet flavored yogurt.
As a Canadian living in the US, I’d say your sentiment depends on where you live and what you’re willing to pay.
In the Seattle area there are overpriced grocery stores like PCC and Met Market that sell healthy food at a premium.
There is also Whole Foods.
Even normal grocery stores like Safeway and Kroger have a ton of healthy foods — you just have to read the label.
The one thing you have to know if that American grocery stores are giant — they carry way more SKUs than the average European grocery store. It’s on the shopper to find what they want. It’s usually there.
The quality of food (and price) of grocery stores in France make grocery stores in Norway feel like a cruel joke. I visited a carrefour(?) in France and I swear the fruit and vegetables were so fresh they looked like wax stage food... honestly it was a highlight of my trip and selection of cheese made me feel a little unkultured.
It isn't hard if you buy the actual raw ingredients and cook for yourself. Produce is fine. Cuts of meat are fine. You can get plain old beans just fine for your vegetarian needs.
It is just people in this country have forgotten how to cook. Grandmother made her own mayonnaise. Mom bought kraft. To you making mayonnaise is a black art since mom never did it, so you also buy kraft. Extend that to most other food products.
just as a datapoint: we learn to carefully (compulsively perhaps) read labels stateside, for all the reasons you mention.
i.e., these same revelations and frustrations are shared by a huge swath of people born in the States (probably Canada too), and it is indeed a pain in the neck being continually paranoid about what nutritional rubbish is included in ingredient lists.
Food labels in the US and Canada suck as well compared to the UK and Australia. How big is a serve, who's percent daily value? Those numbers just aren't useful.
Here in Australia we have a column for grams per 100g by weight. It makes it much easier to compare foods.
You could just have percentage per weight. ie. This product is 30% sugar.
Instead you have than x% of your recommended daily amount, if you are an average size American, eating an average size serving according to the FDA. How are you supposed to do anything with that.
>I assume for people who eat meat there's the additional concern of antibiotics resistance due to the antibiotics given to livestock.
The concern isn't eating meat from an animal treated with antibiotics infecting you with resistant bacteria.
The concern is treating animals with antibiotics puts evolutionary pressure towards breeding resistant bacteria that spill into the ecosystem and eventually get back to us. But not through meat consumption, it effects everyone regardless of diet.
Specifically: animal waste is sometimes used as fertilizer, and sometimes that waste isn't treated properly to eliminate pathogens. Sometimes you're eating antibiotic-resistant-waste-laden plants, and sometimes those plants are fed to animals that humans then eat. Same for aquatic plants/animals downstream of animal waste. Even drinking water can be contaminated.
Antibiotic resistant bacteria isn't the only harmful downstream effect of factory farms of course. Regular-old harmful bacteria are in the runoff, as well as super-high levels of nutrients that harm waterways, plants and animals. Algal blooms, oxygen dead zones, contaminated water table, etc.
All because we really like cheap pork, beef and chicken.
I'm not saying eating a bit of cow poop on your lettuce never gets anyone sick, but that's not the mechanism of concern.
One: poop is mostly bacteria, by mass. It isn't infected with ... it is. Some can be "pathogens" but that's what the last stage of digestion is, fermentation with mostly a wide array of bacteria.
The concern is these gut bacteria developing antibiotic resistance and bacterial infections in the animal developing resistance. Then infections are spread between animals and across species and the waste is reintroduced into the environment. Resistant bacteria in the environment share. Horizontal gene transfer between species of bacteria can lead to these resistance genes being popular and everywhere. It's not cow poop infecting you, its the genetics getting spread into the environment and eventually ending up in a human pathogen.
>animal waste is sometimes used as fertilizer
More or less all industrial farmed animal waste ends up as fertilizer. Also a major component of the kinds of soil we grow crops in is bacteria, much of which has been through the digestive system of an animal. Again I don't know what people think soil is. If you want "clean"(?) never been poop growth medium for your plants you have to go completely artificial. And manure isn't sterilized before it goes into fields, it's alive.
Just get plain unsweetened full fat yogurt. Every store has that. Yeah - the sweetened/flavored variety are more but the basic unsweetened is also easily available.
Bread is a bit of a shit show. Stick to something like sourdough for 0 adde sugars.
Hormones are banned for meat and poultry. I’m not sure how antibiotics are treated. Fwiw - with vegetarian food you also run the risk of pesticide contamination.
Either way, my point is that there’s a lot of options but do your research before you hit the store and in general try to limit highly processed food
In my experience the store has 10000 different kinds of sweetened yoghurt and exactly one that is “real” yogurt - often doesn’t have full fat yogurt at all.
Completely impossible to get normal bread unless you go to some hipster store that charges an insane amount for it.
It’s just really really hard to get decent food in America, which is crazy because the land is so rich in resources and nature.
Loaves of fresh bread are generally in the bakery section of the grocery store. If you're looking for a loaf of bread (often unsliced) that was baked that morning, has a much shorter ingredients list that's often solely the basic traditional ones, doesn't necessarily have any sugar added, and will not keep for anywhere near as long, that's where it is. I'm not promising it'll live up to your standards, of course.
The bread aisle is pretty much for sliced sandwich bread (+ buns + similar things) that has preservatives to last for at least a week, and was usually not baked on site.
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I think the secondary point to note is that you're also just running into cultural differences: Americans don't really eat that much bread. And it's not a staple of meals besides 2 slices if you want a sandwich for lunch.
Hard data is shaky but most sources I can find put American per-capita bread consumption at a small fraction of the consumption of somewhere like France.
Having far fewer standalone bakeries and far less "good bread" is not so much that people are eating a bunch of worse bread instead - no one's serving sandwich bread with dinner, they're often just not eating that much bread at all.
If you are into yogurt just make your own. I do it with an instapot. Started my batch with a scoop of chobani. I use whole milk and a scoop from the last batch to seed the next batch. Materials cost I'm probably paying maybe $1 for 32oz of yogurt.
I've lived in various American cities and in all of them there is some place that sells real food, but often it's not the obvious one with the bright sign and the galaxy-scale parking lot.
My weekly routine now consists of going to local farmer's market and buying stuff from farms I trust. Going to local butchers to get grass fed, naturally raised meats. Then off to the local grocery store to get whatever else I need that week for the stuff I prepare at home.
If you want to eat healthy, you certainly can, but takes quite a bit of effort and some additional cost. Processed and ultraprocessed food has just made us lazy - like eating at fast food restaurants became easier than going home and preparing something from scratch.
COVID and the huge surge in prices that have yet to come down essentially forced my hand to find a better, healthier way to eat. It sucks, but at the end of the day, I know myself and my family are eating healthier regardless of the effort it takes.
>My weekly routine now consists of going to local farmer's market and buying stuff from farms I trust. Going to local butchers to get grass fed, naturally raised meats. Then off to the local grocery store to get whatever else I need that week for the stuff I prepare at home.
>If you want to eat healthy, you certainly can, but takes quite a bit of effort and some additional cost.
It does, but you really don't need to go to farmers markets and buy grass fed beef from a dedicated butcher to "eat healthy". You can get 95-100% of the benefits of your routine by going to a regular supermarket and buying non-ultraprocessed foods.
I don't know why farmers markets are given such a benefit of trust. They are largely unregulated and uninspected. And you'll pay $8 for a head of lettuce.
My conspiracy theory is at healthier foods are deliberately made more expensive, to push people into the cheaper ultra processed foods. It's kind of like cigarettes, push them into the more addictive, cheaper products to hook them.
Its more a matter of whats subsidized. All that corn grown thanks to the corn and soy bills passed to support midwestern farmers are used for things such as plumping up cows/pigs/etc, used for a inefficient form of fuel (biodiesel, E85), and finally pumped into all the foods as HFCS among other things. The farmers can keep growing unproductive crops and stay in business (so politicians won't be hearing from them), the government can ensure the farmland processes will be available during wartime and they can check off their requirements of ensuring all citizens have a minimal required number of "calories".
Its a symptom of same thing that is messing up the US in all other areas. Poor governance caused by layers of people all along the stack taking their cut and not caring about the overall picture.
No need to invoke conspiracies here when the ultraprocessing makes food last longer, more delicious, and allows manufacturers to skimp on more expensive ingredients (eg. "ice cream" that use thickeners rather than actual cream).
With grocery prices going up, what little progress has been made might get reversed, unfortunately. Making America healthy again means making non-ultraprocessed groceries available to everyone & cheaper, and ensuring that working families have time to cook. Pressuring Coke to create a new product with sugar is not going to move the needle.
Canned and frozen vegetables are also non-perishable. While some extremely poor people lack a working freezer or storage space, most consumers can easily use these options.
Absolutely nothing I've seen anywhere justifies the idea that access to food is the problem. In most cultures, you don't need cooking classes because the food is ingrained into their culture, and recipes are passed down. Americans have a much weaker link to their heritage. You might know a few dishes, but in my experience, absolutely nobody knows how to cook.
By cook, I don't mean "can add one box of prepared goods to another box of prepared goods with a can of prepared goods on the side", I mean buying meat, veggies, fruit, and grains and cooking a dish from home, mostly from scratch.
edit: 13 million Americans are in food deserts. If the problem were that small, it'd be similar in size to people who are addicted to substances other than alcohol. This is affecting almost everyone. There MUST be another, bigger solution.
It's an observation, not a suggestion. That's literally how many low-income (not impoverished) people live in rural areas. They grow (and hunt) some food at home but not enough to be self-sufficient, and also have a regular job. Sometimes those jobs involve working long hours at peak times. This is a pretty normal lifestyle.
If you're having a hard time affording groceries, failing to plan ahead and instead throwing away food is a luxury you can't afford. (A blender and an affection for green smoothies is a good solution.) But that's still cheaper than paying for the health problems downstream of ultraprocessed food. Unfortunately my source for both claims is personal experience.
I'd like to have an app that estimates the cost of groceries, including the long term health effects of regular consumption, and interpreting early death as a cost rather than savings. For me I think ribeye would end up being cheaper than Doritos.
>I'd like to have an app that estimates the cost of groceries, including the long term health effects of regular consumption, and interpreting early death as a cost rather than savings. For me I think ribeye would end up being cheaper than Doritos.
Someone who bothers to input everything they eat into an app (basically calorie counting) probably already has enough intuitive sense of what's "healthy" that they don't need an app that they should eat beef rather than doritos.
Just like $50 shoes that last 6 months and $200 shoes that last 10 years, when you’re poor, you often have to chose the less expensive, short-term option because the more expensive, far far better option is literally out of reach.
I'm always skeptical when someone posts that little nugget about shoes. Maybe it used to be true but I don't think it still applies in the era of high-quality mass manufacturing. I have worn shoes that cost $50 to well over $200 and if anything the more expensive shoes tend to fall apart faster.
Walmart has plenty of shoes and work boots for about $50 that will last more than 6 months unless you really abuse them. They don't look great but they're functional and reasonably durable.
For anyone who doesn't know, the literal words are from a book, but its meaning is metaphorical and isn't limited to boots. The point is still that it's expensive to be poor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
Just taking a second to think about this, since we're in the context of groceries, here's another example: the bigger box of cereal will be cheaper per pound and last longer, but you have to pay more up front for it. Another example closer to the boots metaphor is comparing the longevity of cheap, used cars vs new cars.
Even outside of consumer goods, poor people are not able to hire accounts to find, um, ways to minimize your tax bill, or have the money for investments or even savings etc. Even middle class people who may be able to afford a mortgage that is less than their rent might take a while to save up for a down payment (and hopefully the housing market hasn't gotten too much worse in the mean time).
>But that's still cheaper than paying for the health problems downstream of ultraprocessed food.
It is unrealistic to expect the vast majority of humans to prioritize the long term in every single decision they make, especially if they have a dim view of the long term.
It is logical to want to enjoy life in the present, even if it will hurt in the long term, if you are being brought down by other aspects, such as stress about income volatility and belief in low probabilities of upward movement, etc.
Perhaps this is a function of "easy to find". Food deserts are a problem with regards to a lot of families only having little access to fresh foods. When you have to drive 30 min to the IGA, maybe you overbuy compared driving the 5 min to shop at the dollar general. The consolidation of big supermarket chains contributes to the creation of food deserts.
Imo it isn't an availability issue. Polling my friends who are not poor of course but very few of them actually cook. They have the means to, the time to, and they still don't because they don't know how to cook. Greatest generation was still cooking at home and they were far from wealthy especially at the end of their lives living on fixed income and still making meals for all the relatives. It is just like we have collectively forgotten how to cook. Not just cook but to make the sort of intermediary ingredients you use to make many other meals too.
Many times the ultra processed crap is more expensive. Don't forget "convenient to buy" in addition to "convenient to cook". For example, a cliff bar bought from a corner store could be $3, and is basically a candy bar. A company I like is called Farmer's Fridge, and they basically have vending machines in convenient places with fresh made healthy foods like salads.
I couldn't possibly disagree with your last point harder. What's with people and blindly trusting that the pharma companies found a holy grail medicine and didn't rush it to market well before the necessary research is in?
Even more than that, dosing hundreds of millions of Americans for life is one insanely expensive and ridiculous solution.
Side note, is there good research on the effects of microplastics on the body? I'm holding out adding that to my plate of concerns until this is the case, and last I heard we were pretty in-the-dark on the topic.
People in the US are so trained by the food industry, that they do not know what good food is. Yogurt for example. Here is an experiment you can do at home if you want to disbelieve my statement.
Step #1 Make good yogurt and eat it.
1. Go buy a quart of milk, full fat.
2. Buy some yogurt culture. Bulgarian preferred.
3. Follow the directions. You need to keep the temp at around 110F, warm water bath, heating pad, hot water bottles, put it in a cooler, whatever.
This is one of the best foods there is.
Step 2.
Go to your grocery store or stores and try to find some yogurt that is as good.
You can repeat these steps for other foods. Coffee - roast your own. Cheese. Just go to a gourmet cheese store. Get something that does not come in a plastic bag.
Or go to Europe and try real croissants. Everyone in Paris can get real croissants almost anywhere every day. And not to mention real bread - again the plastic bag.
We are so used to what is available here that we have come believe it is "food" when really it is just adulterated to have a long shelf life. Sorry, but really just try it.
In the Northeast corner of the US, there are tons and tons of bakeries. I was really bummed when I moved away and discovered most of the country just eats crappy bread.
Still, almost every grocery store I've been to (even the lower-cost ones in my region, like King Soopers) has a fresh bakery area. It's such a profitable product to sell, it really makes no sense not to add it if you have any space at all to spare. Even Target has one.
I'm cheap, so I go like 30 minutes before closing time and get the bread for like 80% off because it doesn't have the shelf-stabilization stuff, so it will go bad in a couple days.
Finding full fat, no sugar added yogurt is quite easy, and completely subjectively up to taste. You may make your own yogurt yes. But perhaps the flavor difference you are experiencing is due to the intensive labor you spent time to produce said yogurt.
As for roasting beans, that is an immensely deep rabbit hole that will #1- not give you better results than specialty roasters and #2- cost you much more than specialty roasters. Not to mention you will have a tough time getting high quality beans unroasted.
Edit: also all of these grocery stores I listed I can guarantee have fresh bread made daily to buy. Not "white bread", but "real" "European" bread.
Intensive labor? It is one of the easiest things to do. Here is my process step by step:
1) 32oz of whole milk into a pot, set burner to 6, set a 7 min timer (whats optimal for my burners), walk away.
2) Come back, check temp with thermometer, should be between 180°-190°f. Shut off burner. Set 10 min timer. Go do something else.
3) Come back, put burner on low simmer, set 20 min timer, do something else.
4) Come back, shut off burner, crack lid of pot open, do something else for about a half hour.
5) Come back, check temp, should be around 110°f now. If not wait. If it is, add last scoop from last batch of yogurt to pot.
6) Pour into mason jar. Put in instapot. Put in 1 cup water into instapot. Hit yogurt button. Get yogurt in 12 hours.
This is like less than 5 mins of actual hands on work. Probably the easiest thing you can do in the kitchen beyond like making spaghetti. I started my initial batch with one of those premium yogurts so I stole their cultures.
I mean there are things you can reasonably do better than the grocery store but something things are unrealistic. Like "just go to a gourmet cheese store" is not something you can do in most of the country.
I live in one of the largest metro areas with quite a few Michelin star and recommended eateries, lovely food culture, and we love our dairy. I think there are two dedicated cheese mongers you can walk into in the entire area, neither are particularly accessible.
If you live in a metro city then your regular old kroger/vons/ralphs whatever will have cheese monger tier cheese cut from wheels and sold by the pound. Hard, soft, moldy, sheep, goat, all of that stuff is pretty widely proliferated in this country. Maybe not if you lived hyper rurally but in a city of at least 100,000 this should certainly be possible.
The suggestion was just to try good cheese so you know what it is. $35 a pound is a bit pricey for cheese. Another option is to make your own. It is a skill, not a recipe, but most mistakes are extremely edible and tasty.
The biggest obstacle is that you need a cheese cave to age the cheese. This can be a small dorm refrigerator with something like an inkbird temperature controller.
I do know one family that makes cheese and then just eat it without the aging. Store it in the refrigerator. They think it is much better than store bought.
I think dedicated cheese mongers are a lot more accessible than you are envisioning based on your experience. I live in Denver, which is a large city but by no means one of the largest in the country. We have no Michelin star restaurants that I know of, we don't have a dairy industry or anything like that. We still have multiple dedicated cheese stores in the area that one can get to. It's not that niche to enjoy good cheese.
I wouldn't call it niche I just don't think "gourmet cheese store" is accessible to the average American. You can buy plenty good cheese at the supermarket.
yeah, I think it's one of those annoyingly over stylized articles that animates/loads as you scroll and Archive doesn't preserve the javascript (or whatever) to make it look & work right
For anyone having gastrointestinal issues from processed foods in America, I implore you to take a trip to the EU and experience the lack of digestive issues their foods have on your gut.
It really changed my relationship with food knowing that it’s not my gut malfunctioning but stems from what I’m putting in me.
My ancestors are from Asia. Over there, a saying goes something like this if I can translate it without the color of the language: "Give a man a solid breakfast and he will not make noise around the kitchen rest of the day". Even less colorful way to say it is if you want to be healthy, start with a healthy breakfast.
As much as there are all the science around low carb diet and optimizing calories, macros and what not, I think there are some wisdom to it in the long game view.
Someone that had a good nutritious breakfast (you will notice every major culture has its variant of breakfast akin to "English breakfast"), would have less difficulty resisting food with empty calories and doing frequent snacking. Contrary, if you had packaged "cereal" with questionable ingredients and nutrition density, no wonder by 11 you will feel the need to snack. And then if you happen to have a lunch in one of the typical take out restaurants optimized for cost at the expense of quality, a 3pm snacking is more likely than not.
By the end of the day, you had racked up calories intake with bunch of empty calories from those snacking episodes that could be entirely prevented with a solid dense breakfast.
The American version "Breakfast is the most important meal of the day" started as a breakfast cereal marketing line, not an endorsement for eating an "English breakfast".
I will take the science over old wives tales and marketing bs any day. Even if the science is as poorly done as most nutrition science is.
I always thought the emphasis on breakfast originated in cultures or times where it would be followed by a long day of manual labor.
This also ignores that most European countries emphasize breakfast even less than Americans, and that the British (home of the English breakfast) have a lower life expectancy than most of their western European peers (but not as low as Americans).
Funny I recently ditched my rice cooker and got a clay pot, in response to the rising food price at restaurants. While I am chasing a perfect clay pot rice with golden crispy but not greasy and burnt bottom and fluffy center, I found out cooking rice on gas is not as complicated as we imagine. Soak the rice for a while, cook on high heat till water is evaporated on the top, dial down to low flame, put on toppings, closed the lid simmer for a while, then let the residual heat of the clay pot to finish the job. The result is perfectly serviceable, of course extra care would elevate the dish a lot. Also you can use a bowl and steam the rice, with toppings if you like.
Instant Pot Garbanzo beans/chickpeas with a tiny bit of salt are a favorite in my home. Creamy, savory, and delicious! Cannellini beans are also lovely.
Similarly, get a sous vide setup with vacuum sealer. Buy chicken breast and dump it into a bag with a bunch of seasoning. Because sous vide heats it just above bug-killing temperature and will not burn the meat, you can leave it in for an indeterminate amount of time (on the scale of hours, not days) and take it out when desired.
I don't get the rice cooker hype. Its so easy to make rice in the pot already. Cup of rice. Cup and a half of water. Pinch of salt. Bring to boil then set to simmer. Put lid on. 15 min timer. Perfect rice.
The way people talk about making rice online and having to seek out a rice cooker makes me wonder what they are even doing when they fail at making rice.
We are talking about a cup of water here. And cleanup wise its pretty easy. I use a stainless steel pot. After I've finished with it, soak in water, come back in 10-20 mins, it just sloughs out.
Not sure this is a good post, but might be so taking the risk. I am snacking right now on some UPF - my 10% vice. However, my 90% is pretty good. One NOT-UPF staple is steel cut oats that are slow cooked. Very easy, healthy and likely as NOT-UPF as you can get. Recipie: 3 cups steel cut oats (I use Bob's Red Mill Organic), 1+ Qt water, 1 Qt Skim Milk, 1+ Teaspon salt. Combine everything into a suitable pot. Slow cook at 150F for six hours. Stir occasionally. Explore ways to eat. E.g. warm in microwave with some blueberries, and a bit of brown sugar. Stores in the Fridge for a long time. HTH, NSC (+ means "a bit more than")
A really nice brand of healthy foods that are trustworthy and less processed is Primal Kitchen. I have zero affiliation with them, just is a brand I trust. Its so hard to shop for things that are healthy. For example, their Ketchup is just Tomato, Vinegar, Salt, Garlic Powder, Onion Powder, and Spices. No sweetener substitutes needed. https://www.primalkitchen.com/products/organic-unsweetened-k...
I just opened up www dot amazon dot com and filled my cart with $50 worth of food that will be delivered to my door in a few hours: rice, potatoes, farro, beans, peppers, ginger, onions, garlic frozen peas, frozen carrots, plain low-fat yogurt, chicken thighs, and good bread. I don't want to hear anyone telling me that American capitalism has robbed us of real food. If anything, American capitalism has heaped upon us the cheapest and most convenient selection of food imaginable, but some people just can't stop shoveling down Flamin' Hot Froot Loops.
If you make a system that has 1,000 nudges towards Fruit Loops and hides the healthy thing, then it isn't just an individual choice. Nudges include advertising, availability, addictive ingredients, misleading marketing claims, food engineering, etc. I recommend reading this to get an understanding of how much effort goes into making people make the wrong choices: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinar...
My prices weren't very different from those, but my quantities were higher: 5lb (2.25kg) potatoes, 4lb (1.8kg) dried beans, 15lb (6.8kg) of rice, yogurt 1kg by weight not sure of volume, etc.
> some people just can't stop shoveling down Flamin' Hot Froot Loops.
If over a third if the country has serious problems with this then it seems to me there is a systemic problem, and you can't only chuck it to individual failure.
Doesn't mean there is no individual responsibility at all – but there's a reason obesity rates have risen so sharply and why there are quite big differences between countries of comparable levels of development.
I don't think anyone claimed that it's impossible to eat healthy food – certainly the article didn't.
Explain to me how socal works then. For $12 you can get a massive burrito. A plate of excellent tacos. A decent amount of sushi. All sorts of sandwiches. Pupusa. Kebab. Salads. Ramen. Bahn mi. All from local businesses making real food made to order in maybe 10 mins.
And yet, mcdonalds still does tidy business in this environment despite everyone saying mcdonalds is more expensive than ever.
Explain to me how that doesn't reflect widespread individual failure? Why does mcdonalds even exist in this market where you can eat amazing food from around the world in about the same time for about the same price? It isn't like these people are devoid of choice or limited by price. They are actively choosing mcdonalds over other options that are objectively better. I mean its like smoking cigarettes still despite all the information out there.
Not to say that bad food should be illegal, but you can constrain portion sizes, you can constrain ubiquity (limit the # of fast food places per square mile/per population), you can constrain ingredients, you can constrain their marketing, you can limit how they decorate their buildings, you can do all sorts of things if the public will is there.
Now, whether or not the public will is there is another matter entirely. Policy prescriptions are easy, patient compliance is harder.
Edit: And frankly, I think we're in more agreement than you might realize. I grew up in the Bay Area, and it still drives me crazy how many of my peers would eat Chipotle. McDonalds is one thing, it's bad but at least it's unique, but Chipotle is just bad, expensive Mexican food. What's the point?? But, eventually, you have to accept that people will have bad taste and make bad decisions, and once those bad decisions start affecting society as a whole it's a policy issue, not an individual issue.
I don't have to buy it online. I live in Berkeley, California where, if anything, we have a totally unsustainable flood of food outlets that keep going out of business because the competition is too great. I only point to Amazon because it's a website, anyone can order from it even if their local grocers are bozos.
I didn't realize how obscenely spoiled I was with Berkeley Bowl until I moved. Sure, I knew the quality was good, but I didn't realize that the produce and the bulk sections were actually comparatively quite cheap too! It's ridiculous.
I grew up with a lot of ultra-processed foods and these days have found several places where I can get good quality food. I am fortunate to live in an area with a decent farmer's market "community" and some bespoke shops. Generally, I've found that mixing farmers market with ethnic markets (for meat) seems to provide significantly better quality than your average chain.
I suppose that the article hits on it a bit but a lot of the popular brands were great depression era hits. Most of us grew up on various forms of slop: hamburger helper, velveeta mac n cheese, spam, etc. The common link between everything I ate was it was easy, and allowed you to significantly stretch the meat in a dish. These days, now that we can afford more, it's most likely a matter of simplicity and brand affiliation. When you have 2/3 of an average store stuffed with ultraprocessed crap and even in the remaining 1/3 you have to be careful it's pretty easy to eat poorly. A perfect example would be "wheat" or "rye" bread which is basically the same as white bread with a little extra added. Though, these days, many even major supermarket chains offer reasonably high quality bread.
Why is someone so determined to force this "ultraprocessed foods" meme? Is it just so they can get a government definition of "ultraprocessed foods" that somehow doesn't include foods that are 1/3 teflon by weight?
There are plenty of specific processes that are extremely questionable and probably dangerous. Europe bans a lot of them, or to be fair almost everybody bans them but the US. But somehow, when the references to food additives and processes get specific, outlets like the NYT start using phrases that include "right-wing," "corners of the internet," "rant," "outburst," "conspiracy theories," "...but the science actually says...," "the consensus," "...that the vast majority of scientists agree to be safe..." etc...
Also, dangerous additives and processes are an entirely different question than talking about people eating fatty, sugary, salty foods because they like them. They're on the verge of turning "ultraprocessed foods" into a moral crusade against the tastes of the lumpen, which their upper-middle class audience loves because it allows them to feel superior (and deserving.)
Also, preservatives are good. They make food cheaper and make it last longer. I want dangerous preservatives banned.
Due to the paywall I couldn’t get beyond the first image claiming convenience. I’ve no idea what the rest says so I’ll speak disconnected from the content and just to the concept.
People assume ultra processed came about due to demand side factors but it’s actually more about supply side supply chain management and the scale in size of the US. By processing the food into more constructed ingredients they always enter a state where they’re easy to package and distribute across vast distances in that state. They can then be combined into food that is palatable through additives. Indeed the process disrupts the natural structure and content of the food - but that was necessary to feed everyone at a reasonable price a variety of foods grown across a vast distance at a reasonable price.
Obviously this led to demand because the food was more complete and varied than was generally available at the fresh grocer. Convenience was a side effect as well that was well capitalized.
These arguments actually hold until pretty recently. Even in my lifetime grocery stores growing up were pretty stark affairs with a few expensive fresh products that you splurged on for a special dinner like thanksgiving. Daily food was basically processed rations with a fancy box. It’s only in my adulthood, and the lifetime of the millennials, that there was really much optionality as supply chains globally and fresh food distribution with widely available refrigerated trucking with ethylene gas storage proliferated, free trade opened, etc.
Before all this, in my parents generation, the other option for ultra processed foods was malnutrition and wide spread rickets. It was when we tried to draft for WWII and the majority of rural young men were so malnourished as to be unfit for war that things really changed.
To sit today and compare the options of fresh food available and wonder how we got here ignores the reality of how we got here. But we are here so indeed, eat fresh and be happy we have free trade!
That's a bit too naive considering how bad food became during the last decade. Formerly perfectly fine products now have artificial ingredients to increase profits.
How is it naive? You were literally unable to eat the foods because they rotted in delivery and refrigeration was so expensive it made fresh foods unaffordable to the consumer. Even then they were not edible because they were not ripened due to the lack of ethylene.
I’m not discussing the last decade, in fact in the last decade the availability of fresh food is absurdly better vs say 1930-1995 or so. The article also starts in 1950.
We are at a point where we can turn the tide, but the prevalence of fresh food in the store is counter balanced by the fact affordability is decreasing as inflation, restrictions on free trade, and stagnation of lower income takes the fresh foods away as an option. Add into it cultural inertia of 70 years of processed food prevalence as a staple food, you end up in this situation.
I can only see the beginning due to the paywall and weird article layout interfering with archive, and the start is an image of a person holding a 1950’s TV dinner. If it then moves in narrative into the 1886’s, it started in the 1950’s.
This all has very big "uncured bacon" energy to me (if you didn't already know: there's no such thing; vendors of uncured bacon performatively drive the same chemical nitrite reaction using vegetable extracts). For example: yogurt becomes a UPF simply by dint of adding carrageenan, which is on the order of calling dashi a UPF because of the kombu.
It's not that there isn't a very legitimate issue underneath all this: packaged, hyperpalatable, low-nutritional-density low-satiety foods are probably a major driver of health problems. It's just that "UPF" isn't the right metric for isolating those foods, and with the wrong metrics you end up in a similar place as California does with the Prop 65 warnings.
We went through a similar thing with "pink slime" (transglutaminase preservation techniques).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-a9VDIbZCU
>which is on the order of calling dashi a UPF because of the kombu
when you use a comparison like this, you choose an example that people will understand so they can then, by analogy, extend that understanding to the point you are trying to make...
like the kombu in the dashi, you say? dash-it-all, that's a combunation I hadn't considered!
If you don't do a lot of cooking, just think "this is a definition that suggests virtually all traditional Japanese cooking is UPF".
I found it a helpful analogy. Cooking almost any Japanese food will quickly introduce you to dashi and kombu, and I didn't know what carrageenan was.
Yeah to go to Japanese cuisine with words we don’t use otherwise in English is quite funny.
> It's just that "UPF" isn't the right metric for isolating those foods
I've heard this criticism a fair bit, and I sort of agree. The only thing is, what is the right metric? And if we don't have one, and know these foods are causing harm, should we just use UPF as a term anyway?
There is perhaps some rough correlation but as soon as you define an objective metric then consumer packaged foods companies will figure out a way to game the metric by engineering foods to get good scores and be highly palatable while still not being very healthy. Another way of thinking about it might be ultra-formulated versus ultra-processed: what matters is the contents rather than how you got there.
https://peterattiamd.com/davidallison3/
One thing I would like to see is a clear categorization of to the concept of chemically reduce ingredients into unreconizeable components, and then recombine them into the original product while presenting it as nothing has happened. If you take milk and reduce it down to fat-free milk powder, then introduce additional fat and rehydrate it with additional cream aroma, it doesn't turn back into fresh cream. Similar, if you take fruit and reduce it down into pure fructose, then reintroduce water and aroma extracted from the same kind of fruit, it may be similar but not quite like freshly squeezed fruit juice.
Canned Jalapeño often deploy a similar (but much less noticeable) trick in that the manufacturer grows Jalapeño without capsaicin, and then reintroduce chemically created capsaicin into the can in order to control for spiciness.
I don't know, it's a hard problem, but I think there's good public policy evidence that when you do these things wrong (as with Prop 65 cancer warnings and nitrates) you lose all the benefits the labeling tries to provide.
The thing is that, although the list used (the "Nova classification") is obviously somewhat arbitrary, the fact that everybody uses it makes research results comparable to each other.
Comparable how? If I compare one meaningless number to another meaningless number on the same scale then I can see which one is larger, but I won't learn anything scientifically valuable or practically useful.
Meaningless how? A lot of significant effects were found, it can't be entirely meaningless.
Correlation != causation. Your correlation can identify a hugely important effect without pinpointing its mechanism. In this case: I think it's very likely that ultraprocessing has not-very-much to do with food health, but UPF foods tend to be hyperpalatable and low-satiety, which almost certainly does. The ultraprocessing isn't what's making the foot hyperpalatable or low-satiety (the macronutrient mix and sweetening is).
The previous comment was pointing out that there's an agreed-on definition of what "ultra-processing" means. There is. But there is no such agreement on mechanistic effects of ultra-processing.
Yes, I think much of the research is trying to find out what thr cause is, and I agree itslikely to be that hyperpalatable part.
Which statistically significant casual effects have been found?
Honestly, UPF feels like a food industry plant word to make legislation a hot mess full of holes.
Just regulate added sugar and saturated/trans fats and be done with it.
The book Ultra-Processed People by Chris van Tulleken really opened my eyes about UPF. I highly recommend it. Here is a video of him delivering a lecture at the royal institution about the topic: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j1oOoYnCfJs
I don't think adding kombu to dashi would count as UPF according to the book's definition.
I don't know that it does, but I do know that carrageenan does, and they're both just seaweed extracts.
Later
This video is really frustrating. The first half of it is making relatively banal arguments about the importance of food to health. He's setting up an argument that I think basically everybody agrees with (hyperpalatable packaged food are a major driver of illness). But then he gets to UPFs, says the definition is totally agreed on, and then says they're all made by investor-driven large corporations.
That's just straightforwardly false. I made a mac & cheese out of some stored roasted cauliflower (never put a raw cauliflower in your fridge). To melt the aged cheddar I used, I added a half teaspoon of sodium citrate (a miracle ingredient). My cauli-mac is now a UPF. No giant corporation made it.
My argument isn't that packaged food isn't exactly as much of a problem as the UPF people say it is. My argument is that "UPF" is not the right axis on which to determine which foods are and aren't healthy.
I think it’s misleading to suggest a substance is okay because it’s “just” an extract. Normal foods contain lots of substances that when extracted, are obviously bad if concentrated and consumed in larger quantities than would be had during normal consumption of whatever the source is.
Additionally, even if that substance is perfectly safe, the extraction process may effectively increase (as a %) the amount of byproducts. For example - and this is totally made up - suppose ice cream normally contained 1ppm microplastics, but adding carrageenan increased that to 10ppm because of the microplastics in seawater and the failure of the extraction process to remove them. Or even things that are “good” in their normal dosages might be “bad” at higher doses found in extracts.
In general, I would suggest it’s a good heuristic to avoid foods containing ingredients added for stability, preservation, or color. Maybe it’s fine but the benefit vs just eating fresh food that doesn’t need it is basically nil even in that case. Carrageenan would fall into this category. (It seems like there is some research suggesting carrageenan is not great for you but I’m not an expert: I’d not heard that and avoid it simply because it’s not anything I would add to a food I made.)
At some point with this line of reasoning you fall into the precautionary principle and the naturalist fallacy. I'm fine with people being squicked out by food additives that are products of petroleum chemistry, like benzaldehyde. You can get carrageenan simply by rehydrating and simmering seaweed and then filtering it through cheesecloth.
Whatever else is going on with carrageenan-stabilized yogurt, the carrageenan itself isn't doing anything to drive the health problems this speaker is talking about.
This is actually I think a really good illustration of the problem. There is absolutely a (primarily message-board-driven) literature of concerns about specific variants of carrageenan. But those concerns --- which I don't think are well-founded --- have nothing to do with the wave of concern about "UPFs" generally. The UPF thing isn't about IBD (some think kappa carrageenan exacerbates intestinal inflammation with susceptible people) --- it's about people eating hyperpalatable low-satiety packaged food, which are obesogenic. Getting rid of carrageenan does precisely nothing to address that problem; getting rid of cane sugar, which is not a UPF ingredient, absolutely does.
> At some point with this line of reasoning you fall into the precautionary principle
Is there something wrong with the precautionary principle? It would be one thing if the supposed benefit was something really incredible, like extending lifespan or curing cancer. Then maybe we should be less cautious. But we're talking about adding something to your ice cream to make it look nice for longer.
> it's about people eating hyperpalatable low-satiety packaged food, which are obesogenic. Getting rid of carrageenan does precisely nothing to address that problem; getting rid of cane sugar, which is not a UPF ingredient, absolutely does.
I'm not advocating anyone eat tons of sugar, but sugar consumption and the obesity epidemic are not very well correlated. I would agree that we should eliminate "hyperpalatable low-satiety packaged food", but if you were to hypothetically ban basically all non-salt/sugar preservatives, stability agents, flavor enhancers, colors etc. then you almost eliminate this entire product category, because it's no longer practical to produce and sell, easy to consume, or as marketable. Even banning corn syrup in packaged food (as a UPF ingredient) would be a positive move because forcing its replacement by cane sugar (regardless of whatever alleged health problem HFCS s may or may not have) would mean that such products become less economically viable, because its more expensive and less stable.
> the naturalist fallacy.
The naturalistic "fallacy" is approximately true for diets. We are animals that evolved in a way that optimized for the consumption of various foods in our environments. We're some of the most wildly complex chemical systems in the world, and we have remarkably broadly adapted digestive systems with a pretty good tolerance, so you can get away with throwing a lot of stuff down the pipe without anything bad happening. But that's exactly why "eat the same foods people always have and not bizarre lab concoctions" is a useful heuristic for health. It's entirely possible that various additives are perfectly fine or even pro-health, but it's not the way to bet as a general principle, and it's impractical to conduct meaningful long-term nutritional studies to find out with any real assurance.
If you believe that about the naturalistic fallacy, you should be fine with carrageenan-stabilized yogurt; the carrageenan is arguably more "natural" than the yogurt.
But all this just shows to go you: this whole "UPF" thing is a sort of motte and bailey deal. We all broadly agree that packaged hyperpalatable low-satiety foods (along with liquid calories) are a danger to human health; that's the motte. The bailey is all this stuff about how we need to rid the food chain of stabilizers and glutamates and nitrates and preservatives because "bizarre lab concoctions" endanger people.
The right food classification scheme wouldn't have this problem, and wouldn't be a way for people to smuggle in proscriptions against sodium citrate or transglutaminase while coming up with "UPF-free" logos for cane-sugar-sweetened beverages.
> The bailey is all this stuff about how we need to rid the food chain of stabilizers and glutamates and nitrates and preservatives because "bizarre lab concoctions" endanger people.
In my case, I'm arguing that doing away with these things, regardless of any health effects they may have, has the effect of eliminating the entire class of foods you have a problem with.
> "UPF-free" logos for cane-sugar-sweetened beverages.
I'm not arguing that people should drink coke (which is full of all kinds of stuff besides HFCS I doubt people should be consuming), but the obesity epidemic is not well-correlated to soft drink consumption. The latter has been in decline since around the mid-90s.
My point is that you're arguing for something far outside of the mainstream, but the "UPF" framing makes it hard to tell; it sounds at first like you're saying we should stop subsidizing Takis (fair enough!) but in reality you're also saying all the yogurt needs to be reformulated (not gonna happen). I'm not trying to engage with your theory of health; I'm trying to establish that the UPF thing has Prop 65 vibes.
The Prop 65 people make a lot of the same arguments you are --- most especially that we should more formally adopt the precautionary principle. Which is why you get cancer warning labels on bags of organic sweet potato sticks. And so nobody takes those labels seriously anymore.
>The latter has been in decline since around the mid-90s.
I'm curious about this. Do you have a reference for this? What is in decline specifically? Number of people drinking sugary soda? Number of sugary sodas consumed per person (on average)? Amount of sugar consumed by drinking sugary soda? I'm curious because it seems the amount of sugar per can of soda has drastically increased since the 90's. If my memory serves me well, a can of soda 20 years ago was like 26g of sugar, today they're like 53 g per soda. At least in the United States.
I don't think your memory is serving you very well. A 12oz can of Coca-Cola contains 39g of sugar, which hasn't changed in a long time. (Some people claim that switching the sugar from sucrose to high-fructose corn syrup had harmful effects but there's little evidence for that.) Other brands have a little more or less sugar but that's probably the one most commonly consumed.
https://www.coca-colacompany.com/about-us/faq/ingredients
Sugar consumption per capita has been trending up slightly in the last few years. But ironically it was actually higher back in the 1970s when the population was less obese.
https://www.helgilibrary.com/indicators/sugar-consumption-pe...
Gallons of soda per capita.
I think what you're observing is larger cans and bottles are available now. I haven't seen an increase.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/americans-drinking-way-less-s...
I suppose it would not be bacon without curing. But I suppose uncured bacon would be thinly cut pork belly...
For curing you really need only salt(or nitrite or sugar). Nitrates do have benefits in longer processes.
You can go to any Asian grocer and get thin-sliced pork belly and cook it up yourself to see the difference. It is not subtle. For American bacon flavor, you need nitrites (nitrates are a slow-release source of nitrites).
Also you need to smoke it.
I only get the bacon that says "No nitrates, no nitrites"
If you're talking about American-style bacon, and it tastes like bacon, there's no such thing. They're just exploiting labeling rules by selecting very specific nitrite sources. Nitrites are what give bacon (and ham) its flavor.
<strike>This is before we get to the whole premise of avoiding nitrates. Would you eat a beet? That's a serving of industrial bacon's worth of nitrates right there.</strike>
Later
(Actually, super bad example, since the concern is nitrosamines which are formed in the presence of proteins. The point about the illegitimacy of nitrite-free bacon stands!)
This is partially true. The use celery extract or whatever they can get away with legally. Smoking is what gives bacon the flavor. Buy your cut of meat, season, and smoke it with a very low temp for long time, you have bacon. No nitrates.
No you won't. You'll have smoked pork. Nitrite curing is the difference between ham and pork, and is part of the source of American bacon's flavor. You can make or buy unsmoked bacon; it will still taste like bacon.
It is weird to me that people try to make an issue out of this, because it's not like the flavor change in cured meat is hard to miss. Just buy some pink salt! Corned beef tastes like corn beef because of nitrites.
This is false, buy some pork belly and smoke it. I've done it.
If there is a thing a reasonable person can do with pork belly, I have done it. I think you have the higher evidentiary burden here, regardless of our respective experience. You can check Ruhlman's Charcuterie and Salumi books, you can check AskCulinary, you can check the food Stack Exchange, you can just notice that literally every packaged bacon product, whether or not it claims to be cured, is in fact cured (usually with celery powder), or, of course, you can just take some sliced pork belly and make a 5% pink salt/salt mix and throw it in a zip in your fridge overnight and see.
I get that you like smoked pork belly. I do too. I don't even object to you calling it "bacon". All sorts of things that aren't American bacon are called bacon. But nitrites are absolutely part of the distinctive flavor of American bacon.
The whole thing is silly, because we can just point to ham and corned beef, two products where the debate doesn't even make sense; we only see it with bacon, and we only see it because vendors lie about whether their products are cured.
I fucking hate beets.
For bacon, what do you think of these?
Applegate:
https://www.raleys.com/product/10400628/applegate-naturals-h...
Coleman:
https://www.raleys.com/product/103101180/coleman-natural-bac...
The Coleman bacon doesn't list ingredients. But the Applegate bacon lists celery powder because that is a source of nitrates. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celery_powder
Found an image of coleman bacon ingredients list, celery powder is on it as well.
The Coleman one is the one I usually get these days, I used to get the Applegate.
I don't know much about either brand but there are good reasons to buy fancy bacon instead of Smithfield and Hormel, just because of the quality and ethics of the livestock inputs. But nitrites aren't one of those reasons.
Celery powder / extract / etc. are nitrites.
Applegate is notoriously celery-extract-cured. Same chemical endpoints in your body as industrially produced nitrite powder.
There's a really easy way to tell: does it taste like American bacon? Then: nitrites.
I just learned to pickle canned beets to have in salads, and they work really well as a salad add in.
Counterpoint: I fucking love beets. (and bacon. but not together. yuck)
A burger with the lot here in Australia will have beets and bacon. And an egg, probably pineapple too. Lettuce, tomato, cheese. hmm.. I know what I want for lunch today.
I could understand the beetroot when I was Down Under, but the pineapple just had me go "?" similarly to when I was served eggs, pasta, and mushrooms for breakfast.
> Nitrites are what give bacon (and ham) its flavor.
Are you sure about that?
Because it's the first time ever I stumbled upon this argument.
The explanation I heard is that there are legit bacterial food safety concerns (salmonella and listeria, IIRC) that justify using nitrites even if they are by themself harmful, the benefit/risk ratio is simply favorable to nitrites.
Pretty sure. I make bacon and dabble with salumi. It's definitely not strictly a food safety issue. I sometimes put a pinch of pink salt in with my duck confit cure, and it comes out distinctively hammier. Nitric oxide interacts with myoglobin in ways that alter your taste perception; sort of the way I understand miracleberries make things taste sweeter (by cutting off your perception of bitterness), nitrites do to the metallic flavor compounds in meat.
It's both. Curing is a preservative technique and it gives bacon and ham the flavor people enjoy. Like a lot of food preservation techniques (jam, etc) curing was most likely developed for preservation first, and then people came to enjoy the flavor it gave.
That means they use celery powder as the source of nitrates, not that it has no nitrates.
You're still getting the industrial levels of nitrates/nitrites. They just stuff it in as an extract from celery.
The problem isn't the curing, per se. In old school hand curing, almost all the nitrate/nitrite has reacted and is gone by the time you buy the meat.
The problem is the industrialization of the process. In order to not have to inspect the cured meat (as that would take people--the horror!), industry injects a massive amount of curing agents such that even when the meat is "fully cured" there is still a ton of it left in the meat itself.
Why does yogurt need carrageenan though? The bacteria already solidifies the milk.
Some yogurt formulations will separate without it.
Yeah you get whey sure. Not an issue either dump it out or stir it.
Are you confusing pink slime and meat glue?
No, "pink slime" refers to processed meat trim that is packaged and made palatable with meat glue.
carrageenan has however been shown to induce radical microbiome changes in those consuming it.
As a European who moved to Canada and spends a fair amount of time in the States, one thing that really surprised me is how hard it is to find healthy food options compared to the unhealthy ones. Food was a bit of a concern before moving, but I didn't know just how frustrating it would be.
Even something as simple as Yogurt is usually insanely sweet / sugary compared to European variants. Ingredients that are banned in Europe are regularly found in products, and something as simple as bread has a ton of preservatives (as the article shows).
And I'm vegetarian, I assume for people who eat meat there's the additional concern of antibiotics resistance due to the antibiotics given to livestock.
Every grocery store where I've shopped has yogurt with no added sugar. It's right there on the shelf, just look at the label.
Antibiotic resistance is a concern but the FDA has made progress in that area.
https://www.fda.gov/animal-veterinary/safety-health/antimicr...
The EU bans routine antibiotic use for promoting animal growth but antibiotics are still widely used for other purposes.
https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/news/first-report-eu-wide-sales...
The US still used 6.1 million kilograms of medically important antibiotics for animal farming in 2023. It was only down 2% from the year before. https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/antimicrobial-stewardship/fda-rep...
That sounds like a lot but what's the comparison to another country adjusted per animal (or weight of meat produced?)?
This paper[0] (from a UK activist group but well referenced) says:
> US farm antibiotic use is 2.6 times higher than the median use in European countries and 60% higher than the average use throughout Europe.
[0] https://www.saveourantibiotics.org/media/1830/farm-antibioti...
They exist but are a small minority of the shelf. You have to really look for them.
My nearby Kroger has four brands of greek yogurt with no sugar added and three brands of plain yogurt with no sugar added. Each of these brands sells yogurt of varying fat contents in quart and cup containers. This takes up like eight feet of width on the shelves.
This begs the question - is it reasonable for the consumer to put in a little work - reading labels and doing research outside of the grocery store?
I find that you do the research once, and then you know what to buy next time.
Well, the supermarkets know know what the effect of their product placement is. If they change it, the customer buys different things, on average.
So, we can say it's reasonable for people to do some research and pick the yoghurt they consider best, but we know most people don't do that. And that supermarkets prefer to give the best spots to sugary yoghurts.
What's wrong with doing the research once for the average person and then regulating the supermarkets so they give those the eye level space? People can still make different choices if they want.
It could be the result is people buy more danishes and doughnuts from the bakery section for breakfast instead of now harder to find sweetened yoghurt.
The amount of work the consumer puts in is matched by food makers. You'll see the deceptive marketing on so many foods. "No sugar added" no longer means no added sweetening agent. It means that sugar was replaced by alternative sweeteners.
It's exhausting being a consumer these days.
If the issue was only about choices adults make about their own bodies and there were no externalities from those choices, then IMO it would of course be reasonable.
I think the point is more that the norm is sugary, and so it's necessary to do what you describe to find plain (not to say 'normal') yoghurt.
Look for plain yogurt, it never has sugar added. Easy to spot too.
Ridiculous.
Look? As in open your eyes? It's literally right on the front of the package in large letters. You can see exactly what you're getting without even squinting at the fine print on the back.
> You can see exactly what you're getting without even squinting at the fine print on the back.
So the nutrition facts and ingredients list doesn’t convey any new information? The designers managed to cram all that info into an appealing front facing label? And the marketers refrained from soft deceptions and convenient omissions, prioritizing truth and clarity over sales numbers? Sure.
Sure, if you want plain yogurt with no added sugar then you can find that just by looking at the front label. Have you ever been to a supermarket?
Lots of people in this thread missing that unsweetened yogurt options are probably not distributed evenly across US supermarkets.
Your local coastal city store might have a half dozen plain greek yogurts but I bet there are plenty of areas where they are not stocked because they know it won't sell.
You would lose that bet. I eat plain unsweetened yogurt. I have seen it on the shelf in supermarkets everywhere, not just coastal cities.
But hey, don't take my word for it. Most large supermarkets now offer online ordering. Pick a few small Midwestern cities at random and look what dairy products the major local supermarkets have in stock. It's hilarious how people keep posting uninformed comments here without taking 5 minutes to do some trivial fact checking.
half the time, no sugar means sugar substitute. It is definitely confusing.
Glad you're hear to tell people they are dumb and they should work around systemic problems instead of trying to fix the system.
It's marked as "plain" yogurt. You can still find adulterants in it, just not added sugars. For example Trader Joe's "plain yogurt" is a mixture of yogurt and buttermilk.
I don't understand your comment. Trader Joe's sells plain yogurt with no added buttermilk.
https://www.traderjoes.com/home/products/pdp/greek-whole-mil...
Or you can buy essentially the same thing for less at Walmart.
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Mountain-High-Low-Fat-Yogurt-Vani...
While there are some people who live in "food deserts" with very limited options, complaints by most HN users about the difficulty of finding healthy food don't align with reality.
Not sure if they carry it anymore but yogurt marketed as "European style" often has buttermilk: https://oatmel.com/products/European_Style_Smooth__Creamy_Pl...
But not sure I would consider fermented milk to be an "adulterant" in a different fermented milk product...
FWIW, Greek Yogurt is not the same as Yogurt, it's a different product. Those two items are not "essentially the same thing". Also, low/zero-fat yogurts dominate the market in the US. Plain Whole-Milk traditional yogurt is more available now than it was a decade or two ago, but it's still nowhere as common as the high-sugar flavored ones.
It's the same thing with the additional step of straining out some whey
In Europe it's also Greek (as in, literally from Greece) milk, or else labelled 'Greek-style'.
the original is, but in the usa 'greek' yogurt is often thickened with additives instead.
I am continually astounded that zero fat/low fat yogurt is just seen as normal. Ditto for oatmeal with added sugar.
I hate the obsession with low/no fat that has stuck around for decades here. Taking out the fat makes the food less tasty and less satiating. Not to mention that extra sugar tends to be added to try to compensate for the taste, thus making it at least as bad for you if not worse than if had more fat.
Even if they did add buttermilk, it would almost undoubtedly be cultured buttermilk, which is really nothing more than very thin yogurt. So I'm not seeing what the issue would be with Trader Joe's adding yogurt to yogurt.
The Walmart thing has pectin in it as a stabilizer/thickener, which, benign as it may be, qualifies as an adulterant. And it's not permitted in plain yogurt in Germany (though usually added in fruit/flavored yogurt).
> While there are some people who live in "food deserts" with very limited options, complaints by most HN users about the difficulty of finding healthy food don't align with reality.
Some… Most…
You’ve made some broad assumptions here. I’ve lived in various neighbordhoods in one of the largest cities in this country and near and far suburbs of the same. Only when I’ve lived in ritzy or trendy areas have I had no issue eating healthy (according to my definition of healthy), and always at significantly greater financial cost.
My guess is either your concerns are less restrictive than mine annd others’ on this thread. Or you’ve been privileged enough to not have a clear perspective on just how large, dispersed and discontinuous, the American “food desert” truly is.
I haven't made any broad assumptions. You can buy healthy food like frozen vegetables, raw chicken, ground beef, potatoes, beans, rice, apples, olive oil, plain yogurt, etc pretty much anywhere. I travel a lot and have seen these foods widely available in neighborhoods that are not remotely ritzy or trendy. They are usually inexpensive, and if you have a little storage space then you can stock up when stores have discounts to save even more.
There are a small fraction of people who do live in food deserts and we ought to help them out. Probably the best thing we could do to make many food deserts "bloom" would be to fund the police and strictly enforce shoplifting laws, especially against organized retail theft gangs. Good grocery stores have been driven out of some neighborhoods partly by high shrinkage rates (not the only problem but a major contributing factor).
Plain yogurt is strictly defined by the FDA. It's when you have flavored versions that the rules get loose.
For example this contains only milk, cream, bacteria: https://www.traderjoes.com/home/products/pdp/plain-whole-mil...
This is basically sugary milk with thickeners added to make it vaguely like yogurt: https://www.yoplait.com/products/original-single-serve-straw...
> Every grocery store where I've shopped has yogurt with no added sugar. It's right there on the shelf, just look at the label.
Large parts of the US are designated as food deserts, where one's best option for groceries might be the convenience store attached to a gas station. Good luck finding plain yogurt with no sugar added there. Your specific experience is exactly that.
[1] https://ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-deta...
Food deserts do exist but appear to have no meaningful effect on eating habits.
https://news.uchicago.edu/story/food-deserts-not-blame-growi...
You made a claim that plain yogurt is generally available in US food markets, attempting to make an inference about grocery store selections drawing from your own experience. I pointed out that it is not actually generally available and noted that your experience does not generalize.
I am not sure why you mention eating habits, since this is not what is being discussed
> I pointed out that it is not actually generally available
Actually, you pointed out that food deserts exist, and asserted that that meant that plain yogurt is not generally available, the thing you pointed out does not support the conclusion drawn from it.
Food deserts appear to roughly correlate inversely with population density[0]. I don't interpret the existence of food deserts as evidence that food choice is not 'generally' available. Assuming we are serving people and not geographies.
[0]https://vividmaps.com/us-block-level-population-density/
My claim was 100% accurate and my experience does generalize. Plain yogurt with no added sugar is generally available at the vast majority of supermarkets throughout the country. I have actually seen it in both poor and affluent areas all over.
But you don't have to take my word for it. Instead of making things up you can literally just go look.
Wow, 100% accurate? OK, I definitely can't argue with that. Nor I suppose can I argue much with overinterpreted anecdotes and absolutist analysis from a non-expert about a nuanced topic. You should start a Tiktok or a Substack or something, you are leaving money on the table.
People that live near gas stations drive to grocery stores for their groceries.
While I don't live in a food desert where these kind of stores are the only option, I have, in fact, regularly found plain yogurt in gas-station convenience stores, the even smaller refrigerated-food sections in urban drug stores, etc.
Now, fresh produce, except—if you are very lucky—extremely expensive (for the quantity), relatively small packs of cut carrots and other things people might reasonably purchase as snacks, anything usable as a cooking fat excepted salted butter, and lots of other things, sure, you are going to be SOL, but plain yogurt (both the usually watery American kind and strained "Greek” yogurt) seems pretty common.
I have also found plain yogurt in gas station convenience stores
My issue was less with the plain yogurt specifically and more with the logic of the parent, namely that "X product has been available in every grocery store I have shopped in" implies that "X product can be found in every grocery store"
Looking at your source, it seems as though food deserts exist almost exclusively when you're very far from civilization.
In which case you can just grow the food.
A good example of a food desert would be an inner-city neighborhood, the first time I heard this term, they were talking specifically about places in Oakland, CA. Which ironically is a short train ride away from the Food Mecca of the USA.
If it's a short train ride away, what's the qualifications fir food desert?
Here's a very detailed article
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/537685fafa614d80ac83a60...
> There are no set few factors, but some other influences that affect food deserts may include: mobility, existing health issues, working irregular hours, fast food culture, lacking adequate knowledge about nutrition, and many more.
Seems like the qualifications are whatever they want them to be.
It actually says right at the top that overwhelmingly they are in urban areas
It doesn't, actually. It says most people who are in food deserts are in urban areas. The vast majority of food deserts, however, are absolutely not in urban areas.
Even if it were true, it still only affects 13 million people. There are 330 million in the US, so it's a non-issue with regard to our obesity problem.
OK, point taken re most people vs most food deserts
In any case, I am talking about the availability of items in response to the parent's obviously absurd implication "every food market I have been to sells X, therefore every food market sells X".
I am using food deserts as a counterexample since definitionally these are regions where certain items are hard to find. I know (hope?) that the person I am responding to likely doesn't believe every grocery store in the United States carries plain yogurt, but I also know that people here often forget that not every place enjoys the same level of choice that is enjoyed in places like the SF Bay Area
I truly don't understand why you are bringing up obesity, this feels very remote to what is being discussed.
I'm bringing up obesity because the overarching topic is UPFs, which are a primary cause of obesity, which is the main reason they are bad.
"...how hard it is to find healthy food options compared to the unhealthy ones."
Sure, if you limit your purchases to Dollar General and Casey's. If you spent time in an actual grocery store, you'd find that your comment isn't true.
The problem is that to a European citizen this is a bit unexpected. In Europe, in all countries, you can find roughly the same level of "safeness" of food across all tiers of stores. Go to a cheapest one and the most expensive one, and the yogurt, tomatoes or meat would be approximately the same quality and have the same nutritional components. The only difference would be that expensive store would additionally carry some imported fancy tomatoes or some fancy steak cuts. But those steak cuts would be subject to the same standards as a cheap chicken meat in the cheap store.
Romanian here: the tomato quality varies by a lot. All stores have crappy "plastic" tasting tomatoes. It's not that easy to find really good tomatoes (in summer you can find them at local markets, in winter... Fancy imports I guess).
Even in the SF Bay Area, we have this problem. The best tomatoes are from someone's backyard.
They actually taste like tomatoes.
Unfortunate that they can be a bit difficult to grow. Very weather dependent.
My wife doesn’t let me buy tomatoes in winter. And even summer tomatoes are bland in comparison to the ones one would get in a mediterran region or the ones she grows in our garden. It’s not even the same ballpark.
Tomatoes are, imo, the prime example and possibly the only one of popular produce, of bland produce in the US.
I think it's a combination of having them year-round (they are picked before they ripen for shipping) and the emphasis on color/look being very high. A good tomato tastes much better than most store bought to the point I didn't know I liked tomatoes until I had a garden grown one. Now I eat store bought as well but it's not the same.
I don't find most other fruits/veggies to suffer nearly as much from that though.
I mean, in most of the US, they're an extremely seasonal product. If you go to Pete's (a commodity big-box grocery chain in Chicago) in August, you'll get very good tomatoes. There's basically nowhere you're going to go to get very good fresh tomatoes (maybe cherry tomatoes) in April.
Really? I grow blueberries, strawberries, several cultivars of hot/sweet peppers, zucchini, yellow squash, tomatoes, garlic, bush beans, and several different herbs, and without fail ALL of them taste way better than the store bought version. That isn’t to say the store versions are always bad, but you know the home grown ones every single time.
Its not just a "tier" of store, its a "genre" of store. Stores like Dollar General are not really grocers, they just happen to carry some food products. They typically do not carry any fresh foods. So its not a matter of their tomatoes are somehow worse quality, its that they do not sell tomatoes. Its not that their meats are worse quality, they do not sell fresh meat. They practically only sell pre-packaged goods. Think about the few isles of junk food and small packages of household products (soaps and what not) you might find at a gas station, and scale that up ~800m^2.
If its not something that is OK to sit on a shelf for a few months, you won't find it at a Dollar General.
When it comes to actual fresh foods (which can be found if you go to actual grocery stores), those are highly regulated. You'll find fancier varieties at fancier grocery stores, but in the end a yellow onion at Kroger is about the same as a yellow onion in Safeway or Publix or Albertsons or HEB or Whole Foods.
Certain Dollar Generals do carry fresh foods and there’s a sub brand called Dollar General Market that targets the grocery dollar.
>But those steak cuts would be subject to the same standards as a cheap chicken meat in the cheap store.
Speaking also as an European, not they would not. There's a pretty big difference in the quality of the meant across the board between shops and brands(suppliers) of meat depending how the animals were raised, fed and cared for.
Here in Austria there's been plenty of scandals covering the poor conditions of animals in meat factories (living in feces, infections with puss, etc) yet the meat cuts receive the AMA seal of approval. I also did some work for the farm tech sector and the conditions of animals in some (most) EU countries I saw were indeed as appalling as those in the stories. It almost made me go vegan.
Sure, it's all(probably) technically safe to eat due to all the antibiotics they pump in those animals, just like in the US, but quality varies a lot.
And like sibling said, there's also a big difference between the quality of fruits and vegetables you find in supermarkets depending on where they come from and the conditions under which they were farmed.
That's why I dislike these over generalist "In Europe it's like this and that" blanket statements. No it isn't, it's just one point on the graph, but in reality it varies A LOT, it's a friggin continent ffs.
In large swaths of the country, these "non-grocery stores" are a lifeline, as they are the only option. In others, you don't even have that -- gas station convenience stores might be that lifeline instead. [1]
I am familiar with what the grandparent is referring to, having spent a decade running purchasing teams in US grocery stores. Even in urban areas with many different food retail stores, a typical supermarket in the US is a fairly difficult place to shop for someone with specific food sensitivities. Hopefully folks here who live in the SF Bay Area appreciate that it's a total outlier in both the diversity of stores available and the assortment of products sold in a typical Bay Area supermarket
[1] https://ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-deta...
Is there a better source for that data? I appreciate that you're at least bringing data to the discussion, but honestly I kind of don't buy it, having lived all over the US from rural farm communities to Manhattan. I think I can identify where I live right now on that map, by virtue of being right on the border of IL/IN and Lake Michigan, and it has a little indication of "food desert", but it certainly isn't.
For most US supermarkets, shop around the perimeter and avoid anything in any of the center aisles. While individual floor plans vary, that tends to route you to the fresh produce and meats and dairy and avoid most of the ultraprocessed packaged stuff.
I give this advice to anyone I meet who just moved here from overseas.
The SF Bay Area is hardly an outlier. There may be more specialty grocery stores here, but the large supermarkets where most consumers buy most of their food are the same as anywhere else. If you compare a Safeway in Mountain View, CA to a Publix in Daytona Beach, FL or a Kroger in Toledo, OH there isn't much difference in the products available.
Safeway has an in-house organic brand, "O Organics". I can easily go to Safeway and pick up only organic foods. I don't know if that's true for Publix or Kroger.
UPDATE: ChatGPT tells me that at Publix it's called "GreenWise Organic" and at Kroger it's called "Simple Truth Organic"
I hope that you recognize that your casual-outsider evaluation of the assortments of these stores is deeply flawed and not based on actual data. If you think about it even just a little bit, you'll recognize that it wouldn't make sense for a supermarket in one of the highest median income cities in the country to have assortment parity with a chain targeting cost conscious shoppers. The devil here is in the long-tail, which is definitionally less visible to you as a shopper, and in fact may not exist at all for certain retailers -- especially those targeting cost-conscious shoppers.
I lived in rural areas a large portion of my life. What you are describing is limited to areas with extremely small populations. Meaning even my hometown of a few thousand has a Walmart (put up when I was a kid in the 90s) an Aldi, and two local grocery stores with tons of healthy options.
So yeah, there are a lot of towns that fit that criteria (less than 1000 residents). But as a portion of U.S. population it is not substantial in any way.
i lived in one of those small towns through highschool, just a blinking yellow light and a gas station. What we did, and everyone did, was drive the 20miles to the large town with a Walmart and get groceries there. It only takes 20min because there's no lights or traffic in those areas so the time commitment is about the same as living in a city. My mom made meals from her recipes using basic ingredients so it's certainly feasible to eat how you want in these areas. Only in the most rare/extreme cases are people forced to grocery shop at a gas station.
I've got family in the rural Midwest. It would surprise me if their town wasn't a food desert by these definitions. You might go grab a thing of milk or sliced bread in a pinch at the convenience store, but yeah otherwise you just make the short drive into "the city" to get food at a regular grocery store.
Or you just ate the food you were growing on your own lot, or what your neighbors were growing, or from the farmer selling stuff off the highway.
I hope you recognize that your claims are deeply flawed and don't align with the reality that most middle-class grocery shoppers experience. Regardless of what you think makes "sense", major supermarkets throughout the country have rough assortment parity (with minor differences for regional consumer preferences). In some cases the long tail is actually longer in lower median income cities because labor is cheaper and stores are physically larger (cheaper real estate). That Publix where I shopped in Daytona Beach is enormous.
Instead of making things up you can just go look. Many supermarkets have online ordering now so you can see exactly what they stock at each local store.
Yes -- I know that my experiences don't align with most middle-class grocery shoppers: I worked in the food business for a decade where assortment was literally my job. There is a lot that casual shoppers like you don't notice! That's actually built in.
In any case, I love most of what you have written here.
Online ordering enables larger long tails. In which market do you suppose online ordering is more common, Daytona Beach or Mountain View?
If you were managing assortment at a Publix in Daytona Beach, how would you structure your long tail? Would you look to a Safeway in Mountain View as a model to follow?
Safeway is the cost conscious option in Mountain View, compare it with the other options (Whole Foods, Nijiya). The comparison between Publix and Safeway is apt.
Safeway in the Bay Area regularly comes up very close to the same cost as Whole Foods, unless one regularly uses the app and clips the saving coupons for Safeway.
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Whole-Foods-vs-Safeway-W...
Ranch 99 and the little De Martini's produce shop undercut Safeway prices on produce in Mountain View. The comparable items work out to be less expensive at Trader Joe's versus Safeway, too, last time I looked. Produce at Costco is regularly less than all of the above but I only buy a few produce items that I can freeze for later use there. For me the two advantages to Safeway are the extended hours of operation and the locations being convenient.
The "cost conscious" option in a city with one of the highest median incomes in the US is very different from a cost conscious shopper in a city like Daytona Beach, where practically a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line!
I will also point out that "cost conscious" is one of several shopper profiles that Safeway targets, but broadly speaking Safeway targets a more affluent shopper (although cost conscious isn't the same as non-affluent). The degree to which a particular location services these targets varies by area. But no, these stores target fundamentally different shoppers and think very differently about assortment, at least with regard to the long tail
Ironically in SF it seems inversed. Whole Foods is second cheapest to Trader Joe’s, and Safeway is the most expensive.
I live in Los Altos next to Mountain View and Safeway is very expensive compared to every other option except Whole Foods. There are a few items they have that are the same as others, like bananas so I sometimes walk to the closest Safeway to stock up on those but otherwise one has to be wary of the pricing.
Heh, in Mountain View you also have these choices:
- La Plaza Market
- 99 Ranch
- Grocery Outlet
- Rose Market
- Nob Hill
- Lucky
- Smart & Final
- Walmart
- Target
- India Cash & Carry
- Bharat Bazar
I'm probably leaving out a ton.
This just doesn't align with reality; your chart is practically meaningless.
Yes, in rural areas you often need to drive further than 1 mile to get to a grocery store. That doesn't mean that normal food doesn't exist for these people.
But it's more than a mile away!
>If you spent time in an actual grocery store, you'd find that your comment isn't true.
Also as "an European" whatever that means, I only spent a couple of months in the US as a tourist, and had no issues finding healthy foods from leafy greens, to good meats in places like Wholefoods.
If he couldn't find it while actually living there, tells me he's not commenting in good faith.
I mean, Whole Foods targets upper middle class folks, you’re far away from the average American experience
Leafy greens and cuts of meat are not something exclusive to whole foods.
The real issue is people don't cook for themselves and seek out premade shelf stable offerings of what their grandparents were making from scratch decades ago. It is like knowledge has been lost.
I thought that Whole Foods targets folks who like their food flavored with rat droppings?
https://www.siliconvalley.com/2025/06/26/cupertino-whole-foo...
Yeah, when I visited USA I was shocked to find lots of larger "grocery stores" didn't even stock the basics. In Europe that isn't a thing, everything larger than a regular room has fresh vegetables and meat and other staples, even in immigrant areas.
Sure it might be possible to find that in USA as well, but its so much harder as not every store has it.
Were you actually visiting what Americans would consider a grocery store?
I'm not saying this is specifically the case for you, but it is remarkably common for visitors from other parts of the world to visit, go into what we consider a "convenience store", and then be confused that there's basically nothing in terms of actual groceries in there, with probably 80%+ of the "consumable" shelving devoted to snack/"junk" items.
Those stores are intended pretty much entirely for stuff people want while on the go, and the few "groceries" they stock are basically aimed at the kind of things a drunk/stoned person is craving at 3AM when nothing else is open (say, a frozen pizza), or the few things you might run out of by surprise in the morning/when about to eat and be willing to greatly overpay for being able to grab somewhere close by before your meal/schedule is ruined. (ex: milk, condiments, maybe eggs).
I do wonder if people are stopping into a CVS or Walgreens and thinking those are grocery stores. In a lot of the rest of the world, a small corner market like that would be a grocer, but in the US grocers are much larger stores.
What kind of "basics" did you find missing in actual grocery stores, and what were the actual stores in question?
Not GP, but I can offer: real cheese (not squares of individually wrapped plastic, nor grated and mixed with whatever to prevent caking), Walmart.
Real cheese is not rare. It is a little pricey though. Usually north of $15 a lb.
What makes the cheese in the links I provided below not "real cheese"? None are >$15/lb, at least around me.
Note, I agree, they're not fancy cheeses, they're quite basic, plain, and common varieties. But how are they not real cheeses?
Just my choice of words nothing too serious.
What? Just about every Walmart with a grocery I've been to sells blocks of cheese. These are all available at multiple Walmarts around me.
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Block-Sharp-Cheddar-C...
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Low-Moisture-Part-Ski...
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Frigo-Parmesan-Cheese-Wedge-5-oz-...
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Tillamook-Medium-Cheddar-Cheese-B...
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Swiss-Cheese-Block-8-...
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Dutchmark-Smoked-Gouda-Cheese-7-o...
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Castello-Gourmet-Creamy-Danish-Ha...
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Kerrygold-Grass-Fed-Dubliner-Iris...
and on and on and on and on and on...
It might not be right next to the pre-shredded cheese (usually those house brand blocks of cheddar and what not are), sometimes they're in a fancier part of the deli area. But I can't think of a time I've gone to a Walmart looking for a block of cheese and not found any cheese.
Its not going to be the fanciest varieties, but once again the question was for "basics" that don't exist. Having cheddar, swiss, parmesean, gouda, etc. is having the basics.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Please provide some, or retract your claim.
To be clear, "actual" grocery store for the purposes of finding reliably fresh and healthy food includes one of the following:
1. Upscale western grocery stores and markets, ideally located within the biggest and most affluent city possible. Pikes place market would be a great example of what I'm talking about for you seattle folks.
2. Asian grocery stores, like "H-mart"
3. Farmers markets, but these are hit and miss, especially in smaller communities
Most other grocery stores, including Costco, Trader Joes, etc are full of extremely unhealthy trash slop. It's still extremely hard to find reliable low sugar options nearly anywhere, including at health and "organic" oriented grocery stores.
America just sucks for foodies who don't have unlimited time to get through the slop.
Trader joes and costco aren't really the same thing as grocery stores. I know this is confusing for foreigners. Kroger/publix/vons/ralphs/albertsons/giant eagle are the real grocery stores. You can get all sorts of good eats there. baguettes and sourdough loafs cooked daily by the in house bakery staff. All sorts of cheese sold by the pound. All sorts of fruits and vegetables although some are seasonal.
> America just sucks for foodies who don't have unlimited time to get through the slop.
I think by definition, being a “foodie” means you have, and enjoy finding, the time to sort the wheat from the chaff. Nobody has unlimited time for anything.
“I want to be be a ‘foodie’ but really I just want to be judgy” is a weak argument.
Being judgy is a uniquely American trait that's become popular over the past 20 years.
I thought that, an an American. Then I went to Paris in 2013, and realized it was a learned trait!
In America, google rating scores are straight up astroturfed to the point where the total number of ratings is far more important than their score.
When I travel to Japan, for example, I interpret a bad google maps review score for a location as a GOOD thing, because the average white tourists palette is incompatible with the local cuisine.
I can walk to basically any random place, anywhere in Japan, or France, or Singapore and get very high quality food that I don't have to worry about being full of bullshit. That's not true in America.
As long as you realize this is opinion, sure thing.
Depends on the grocery store. If you shop exclusively at Target, a company that caters primarily to those who ‘prepare’ as opposed to those who ‘cook’ you’ll find less healthy options than actual grocery stores.
Target (and Wal-Mart) are not grocery stores. Sure they have groceries, but a limited select selection compared to a proper store.
That's not quite true for Wal-Mart.
There exist Wal-Mart Supercenters which are basically a full-blown grocery store combined with a traditional Wal-Mart store.
There also exist Wal-Mart Neighborhood Markets which are regular grocery stores.
It's not uncommon for some people to refer to all of them as simply "Wal-Mart", especially if only one of them exists locally.
That depends a lot on the Target. One location around me only has a very small produce section for their groceries with everything else pretty much being prepackaged products. Another location has quite a large produce section along with a deli, a butcher counter, and a bakery.
I was speaking about SuperTargets, not standard Targets.
And I’m not sure why folks are downvoting this; objectively, Target has limited and terrible selection compared to standalone grocers.
In my travels I've found even the size and quality of the produce sections of SuperTargets can be quite variable.
But yes, I do agree their range of choices for fresh food products is usually more limited compared to good, actual grocers. But that applies to their packaged goods as well, they often don't have as many choices of lots of things. I might find almost a dozen brands of pasta at an actual grocer but only have three or four brands at Target. To me it seems the ratio is about the same, its just the scale is different.
And to be honest, its the same story for practically all the stuff at Target. They don't have the widest supply of craft supplies compared to craft stores like Michael's and Hobby Lobby. They don't have the widest selection of bicycles compared to the bike store. They don't have nearly as many toys as what Toys R Us did. The book section is smaller than a Barnes & Noble. What else is new.
The comment is still true regardless of the fact that Whole Foods exists. It is genuinely more difficult to find healthy food in the US than abroad.
(i'm ignoring the additional fact that the US has many more food deserts than abroad. even within rich neighborhoods with many expansive grocery stores, those stores have more unhealthy options and fewer healthy options than abroad, unless it's specifically a "health food store")
I wholeheartedly disagree. Grocery stores in the US are typically much larger than grocery stores abroad. A Kroger, Publix, Piggly Wiggly, Schnuck's, or HyVee will typically have just as many healthy food options as a grocery store abroad. The difference is these US grocery stores also stock a much larger variety of unhealthy options.
As someone else in this thread used sweet yogurt as an example, it is trivially easy to find unsweetened yogurt in nearly any grocery store in the US. The difference is that there's also a very large selection of sweet flavored yogurt.
"Ultra-processed food staples dominate mainstream U.S. supermarkets. Americans more than Europeans forced to choose between health and cost" - https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.02.16.24302894v...
As a Canadian living in the US, I’d say your sentiment depends on where you live and what you’re willing to pay.
In the Seattle area there are overpriced grocery stores like PCC and Met Market that sell healthy food at a premium.
There is also Whole Foods.
Even normal grocery stores like Safeway and Kroger have a ton of healthy foods — you just have to read the label.
The one thing you have to know if that American grocery stores are giant — they carry way more SKUs than the average European grocery store. It’s on the shopper to find what they want. It’s usually there.
> they carry way more SKUs
Not compared to France :) you can buy a dishwasher a tv and stuff for your car all in the same supermarket...
Don't ask me why, just stating a fact
Those are the larger format stores in France. In the US they are called Fred Meyer, Meijer, etc.
The quality of food (and price) of grocery stores in France make grocery stores in Norway feel like a cruel joke. I visited a carrefour(?) in France and I swear the fruit and vegetables were so fresh they looked like wax stage food... honestly it was a highlight of my trip and selection of cheese made me feel a little unkultured.
this sounds like a "super" walmart or target in the US. everything from garden furniture to broccoli to laptops
It isn't hard if you buy the actual raw ingredients and cook for yourself. Produce is fine. Cuts of meat are fine. You can get plain old beans just fine for your vegetarian needs.
It is just people in this country have forgotten how to cook. Grandmother made her own mayonnaise. Mom bought kraft. To you making mayonnaise is a black art since mom never did it, so you also buy kraft. Extend that to most other food products.
just as a datapoint: we learn to carefully (compulsively perhaps) read labels stateside, for all the reasons you mention.
i.e., these same revelations and frustrations are shared by a huge swath of people born in the States (probably Canada too), and it is indeed a pain in the neck being continually paranoid about what nutritional rubbish is included in ingredient lists.
Food labels in the US and Canada suck as well compared to the UK and Australia. How big is a serve, who's percent daily value? Those numbers just aren't useful.
Here in Australia we have a column for grams per 100g by weight. It makes it much easier to compare foods.
The RDV is based on a 2000 Calorie / day diet as noted on the same labels.
Units in the US make comparisons hard... Same problem in recipes...
You could just have percentage per weight. ie. This product is 30% sugar.
Instead you have than x% of your recommended daily amount, if you are an average size American, eating an average size serving according to the FDA. How are you supposed to do anything with that.
that sounds actually useful!
Exactly my impression. And on top of things I need to keep a strict gluten-free diet. It’s a horrible experience.
>I assume for people who eat meat there's the additional concern of antibiotics resistance due to the antibiotics given to livestock.
The concern isn't eating meat from an animal treated with antibiotics infecting you with resistant bacteria.
The concern is treating animals with antibiotics puts evolutionary pressure towards breeding resistant bacteria that spill into the ecosystem and eventually get back to us. But not through meat consumption, it effects everyone regardless of diet.
Specifically: animal waste is sometimes used as fertilizer, and sometimes that waste isn't treated properly to eliminate pathogens. Sometimes you're eating antibiotic-resistant-waste-laden plants, and sometimes those plants are fed to animals that humans then eat. Same for aquatic plants/animals downstream of animal waste. Even drinking water can be contaminated.
Antibiotic resistant bacteria isn't the only harmful downstream effect of factory farms of course. Regular-old harmful bacteria are in the runoff, as well as super-high levels of nutrients that harm waterways, plants and animals. Algal blooms, oxygen dead zones, contaminated water table, etc.
All because we really like cheap pork, beef and chicken.
Not really no.
I'm not saying eating a bit of cow poop on your lettuce never gets anyone sick, but that's not the mechanism of concern.
One: poop is mostly bacteria, by mass. It isn't infected with ... it is. Some can be "pathogens" but that's what the last stage of digestion is, fermentation with mostly a wide array of bacteria.
The concern is these gut bacteria developing antibiotic resistance and bacterial infections in the animal developing resistance. Then infections are spread between animals and across species and the waste is reintroduced into the environment. Resistant bacteria in the environment share. Horizontal gene transfer between species of bacteria can lead to these resistance genes being popular and everywhere. It's not cow poop infecting you, its the genetics getting spread into the environment and eventually ending up in a human pathogen.
>animal waste is sometimes used as fertilizer
More or less all industrial farmed animal waste ends up as fertilizer. Also a major component of the kinds of soil we grow crops in is bacteria, much of which has been through the digestive system of an animal. Again I don't know what people think soil is. If you want "clean"(?) never been poop growth medium for your plants you have to go completely artificial. And manure isn't sterilized before it goes into fields, it's alive.
Just get plain unsweetened full fat yogurt. Every store has that. Yeah - the sweetened/flavored variety are more but the basic unsweetened is also easily available.
Bread is a bit of a shit show. Stick to something like sourdough for 0 adde sugars.
Hormones are banned for meat and poultry. I’m not sure how antibiotics are treated. Fwiw - with vegetarian food you also run the risk of pesticide contamination.
Either way, my point is that there’s a lot of options but do your research before you hit the store and in general try to limit highly processed food
In my experience the store has 10000 different kinds of sweetened yoghurt and exactly one that is “real” yogurt - often doesn’t have full fat yogurt at all.
Completely impossible to get normal bread unless you go to some hipster store that charges an insane amount for it.
It’s just really really hard to get decent food in America, which is crazy because the land is so rich in resources and nature.
Loaves of fresh bread are generally in the bakery section of the grocery store. If you're looking for a loaf of bread (often unsliced) that was baked that morning, has a much shorter ingredients list that's often solely the basic traditional ones, doesn't necessarily have any sugar added, and will not keep for anywhere near as long, that's where it is. I'm not promising it'll live up to your standards, of course.
The bread aisle is pretty much for sliced sandwich bread (+ buns + similar things) that has preservatives to last for at least a week, and was usually not baked on site.
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I think the secondary point to note is that you're also just running into cultural differences: Americans don't really eat that much bread. And it's not a staple of meals besides 2 slices if you want a sandwich for lunch.
Hard data is shaky but most sources I can find put American per-capita bread consumption at a small fraction of the consumption of somewhere like France.
Having far fewer standalone bakeries and far less "good bread" is not so much that people are eating a bunch of worse bread instead - no one's serving sandwich bread with dinner, they're often just not eating that much bread at all.
Depends on where you shop. But I think even Walmart has organic options these days.
If you are into yogurt just make your own. I do it with an instapot. Started my batch with a scoop of chobani. I use whole milk and a scoop from the last batch to seed the next batch. Materials cost I'm probably paying maybe $1 for 32oz of yogurt.
I buy unsweetened yogurt then sweeten it myself with a very small amount of actual syrup from a tree (yes, there is fake syrup).
I've lived in various American cities and in all of them there is some place that sells real food, but often it's not the obvious one with the bright sign and the galaxy-scale parking lot.
You don't think a place like Kroger sells real food? Come on. Enough with the tired hyperbole.
My weekly routine now consists of going to local farmer's market and buying stuff from farms I trust. Going to local butchers to get grass fed, naturally raised meats. Then off to the local grocery store to get whatever else I need that week for the stuff I prepare at home.
If you want to eat healthy, you certainly can, but takes quite a bit of effort and some additional cost. Processed and ultraprocessed food has just made us lazy - like eating at fast food restaurants became easier than going home and preparing something from scratch.
COVID and the huge surge in prices that have yet to come down essentially forced my hand to find a better, healthier way to eat. It sucks, but at the end of the day, I know myself and my family are eating healthier regardless of the effort it takes.
>My weekly routine now consists of going to local farmer's market and buying stuff from farms I trust. Going to local butchers to get grass fed, naturally raised meats. Then off to the local grocery store to get whatever else I need that week for the stuff I prepare at home.
>If you want to eat healthy, you certainly can, but takes quite a bit of effort and some additional cost.
It does, but you really don't need to go to farmers markets and buy grass fed beef from a dedicated butcher to "eat healthy". You can get 95-100% of the benefits of your routine by going to a regular supermarket and buying non-ultraprocessed foods.
I don't know why farmers markets are given such a benefit of trust. They are largely unregulated and uninspected. And you'll pay $8 for a head of lettuce.
My conspiracy theory is at healthier foods are deliberately made more expensive, to push people into the cheaper ultra processed foods. It's kind of like cigarettes, push them into the more addictive, cheaper products to hook them.
It's exactly like cigarettes because it is the same companies. https://lsa.umich.edu/psych/news-events/all-news/faculty-new...
Its more a matter of whats subsidized. All that corn grown thanks to the corn and soy bills passed to support midwestern farmers are used for things such as plumping up cows/pigs/etc, used for a inefficient form of fuel (biodiesel, E85), and finally pumped into all the foods as HFCS among other things. The farmers can keep growing unproductive crops and stay in business (so politicians won't be hearing from them), the government can ensure the farmland processes will be available during wartime and they can check off their requirements of ensuring all citizens have a minimal required number of "calories".
Its a symptom of same thing that is messing up the US in all other areas. Poor governance caused by layers of people all along the stack taking their cut and not caring about the overall picture.
No need to invoke conspiracies here when the ultraprocessing makes food last longer, more delicious, and allows manufacturers to skimp on more expensive ingredients (eg. "ice cream" that use thickeners rather than actual cream).
They're cheap, easy to find and easy to prepare.
With grocery prices going up, what little progress has been made might get reversed, unfortunately. Making America healthy again means making non-ultraprocessed groceries available to everyone & cheaper, and ensuring that working families have time to cook. Pressuring Coke to create a new product with sugar is not going to move the needle.
Don't forget non-perishable. If you're already having a hard time affording groceries, it really hurts to throw away wilted veggies or moldy fruit.
Canned and frozen vegetables are also non-perishable. While some extremely poor people lack a working freezer or storage space, most consumers can easily use these options.
Absolutely nothing I've seen anywhere justifies the idea that access to food is the problem. In most cultures, you don't need cooking classes because the food is ingrained into their culture, and recipes are passed down. Americans have a much weaker link to their heritage. You might know a few dishes, but in my experience, absolutely nobody knows how to cook.
By cook, I don't mean "can add one box of prepared goods to another box of prepared goods with a can of prepared goods on the side", I mean buying meat, veggies, fruit, and grains and cooking a dish from home, mostly from scratch.
edit: 13 million Americans are in food deserts. If the problem were that small, it'd be similar in size to people who are addicted to substances other than alcohol. This is affecting almost everyone. There MUST be another, bigger solution.
As Gordon Ramsay put it: "Most people don't cook, they heat their food"
Look up food deserts. Access is absolutely a problem.
I know - the extreme majority of them are in rural areas where you'd have to drive a couple hours to get to a grocery store. My MIL lives in one.
Guess how they get most food? All that super-cheap rural land.
Are you suggesting that impoverished people with low income jobs and extreme hours should spend some of their missing time … farming?
Yes. A garden is a healthy and productive way to spend your free time. If you have land, EVERYONE should be growing some food.
What are you suggesting they do instead? Scroll tiktok?
>and extreme hours
This is not the problem in rural communities.
The most famously true thing about rural areas is that they’re all exactly the same and the people in them experience identical struggles.
It's an observation, not a suggestion. That's literally how many low-income (not impoverished) people live in rural areas. They grow (and hunt) some food at home but not enough to be self-sufficient, and also have a regular job. Sometimes those jobs involve working long hours at peak times. This is a pretty normal lifestyle.
If you're having a hard time affording groceries, failing to plan ahead and instead throwing away food is a luxury you can't afford. (A blender and an affection for green smoothies is a good solution.) But that's still cheaper than paying for the health problems downstream of ultraprocessed food. Unfortunately my source for both claims is personal experience.
I'd like to have an app that estimates the cost of groceries, including the long term health effects of regular consumption, and interpreting early death as a cost rather than savings. For me I think ribeye would end up being cheaper than Doritos.
>I'd like to have an app that estimates the cost of groceries, including the long term health effects of regular consumption, and interpreting early death as a cost rather than savings. For me I think ribeye would end up being cheaper than Doritos.
Someone who bothers to input everything they eat into an app (basically calorie counting) probably already has enough intuitive sense of what's "healthy" that they don't need an app that they should eat beef rather than doritos.
Being poor is expensive.
Just like $50 shoes that last 6 months and $200 shoes that last 10 years, when you’re poor, you often have to chose the less expensive, short-term option because the more expensive, far far better option is literally out of reach.
I'm always skeptical when someone posts that little nugget about shoes. Maybe it used to be true but I don't think it still applies in the era of high-quality mass manufacturing. I have worn shoes that cost $50 to well over $200 and if anything the more expensive shoes tend to fall apart faster.
Walmart has plenty of shoes and work boots for about $50 that will last more than 6 months unless you really abuse them. They don't look great but they're functional and reasonably durable.
For anyone who doesn't know, the literal words are from a book, but its meaning is metaphorical and isn't limited to boots. The point is still that it's expensive to be poor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
Just taking a second to think about this, since we're in the context of groceries, here's another example: the bigger box of cereal will be cheaper per pound and last longer, but you have to pay more up front for it. Another example closer to the boots metaphor is comparing the longevity of cheap, used cars vs new cars.
Even outside of consumer goods, poor people are not able to hire accounts to find, um, ways to minimize your tax bill, or have the money for investments or even savings etc. Even middle class people who may be able to afford a mortgage that is less than their rent might take a while to save up for a down payment (and hopefully the housing market hasn't gotten too much worse in the mean time).
>But that's still cheaper than paying for the health problems downstream of ultraprocessed food.
It is unrealistic to expect the vast majority of humans to prioritize the long term in every single decision they make, especially if they have a dim view of the long term.
It is logical to want to enjoy life in the present, even if it will hurt in the long term, if you are being brought down by other aspects, such as stress about income volatility and belief in low probabilities of upward movement, etc.
Perhaps this is a function of "easy to find". Food deserts are a problem with regards to a lot of families only having little access to fresh foods. When you have to drive 30 min to the IGA, maybe you overbuy compared driving the 5 min to shop at the dollar general. The consolidation of big supermarket chains contributes to the creation of food deserts.
Imo it isn't an availability issue. Polling my friends who are not poor of course but very few of them actually cook. They have the means to, the time to, and they still don't because they don't know how to cook. Greatest generation was still cooking at home and they were far from wealthy especially at the end of their lives living on fixed income and still making meals for all the relatives. It is just like we have collectively forgotten how to cook. Not just cook but to make the sort of intermediary ingredients you use to make many other meals too.
Many times the ultra processed crap is more expensive. Don't forget "convenient to buy" in addition to "convenient to cook". For example, a cliff bar bought from a corner store could be $3, and is basically a candy bar. A company I like is called Farmer's Fridge, and they basically have vending machines in convenient places with fresh made healthy foods like salads.
I love what Farmers Fridge is doing, I wish their prices were cheaper but Im glad that they exist and I hope they continue to grow.
Now if Coke was pressured to add 1g of fiber to products, we could be talking.
You can make America far more healthy by doing the following:
1. Mandating lower amounts of sugar, and significantly switching to zero calorie non glycemic sweeteners.
2. Removing plastic packaging and eliminating sources of microplastics and other endocrine disruption contamination of our food supply/
3. Banning most of the stuff that the European food agencies ban
4. Getting GLP-1's in the hands of every overweight person in America.
It's that easy, but "Make America Healthy Again" was made by a guy who had a worm eat his brain.
I couldn't possibly disagree with your last point harder. What's with people and blindly trusting that the pharma companies found a holy grail medicine and didn't rush it to market well before the necessary research is in?
Even more than that, dosing hundreds of millions of Americans for life is one insanely expensive and ridiculous solution.
Side note, is there good research on the effects of microplastics on the body? I'm holding out adding that to my plate of concerns until this is the case, and last I heard we were pretty in-the-dark on the topic.
If you're worried about the possible, unknown side effects of GLP1s, check out the inevitable, well-known side effects of being morbidly overweight.
Thankfully, this is not a binary problem where those are the only two options :)
You don't need to start with GLP1s. You can start with smaller portions. Folks need to learn how to eat, not another drug.
> switching to zero calorie non glycemic sweeteners.
I find it odd that people can think these are not bad for you. Telling your body you're eating sugar, then not eating sugar must do terrible things
Just from first principles
People in the US are so trained by the food industry, that they do not know what good food is. Yogurt for example. Here is an experiment you can do at home if you want to disbelieve my statement.
Step #1 Make good yogurt and eat it.
1. Go buy a quart of milk, full fat. 2. Buy some yogurt culture. Bulgarian preferred. 3. Follow the directions. You need to keep the temp at around 110F, warm water bath, heating pad, hot water bottles, put it in a cooler, whatever.
This is one of the best foods there is.
Step 2. Go to your grocery store or stores and try to find some yogurt that is as good.
You can repeat these steps for other foods. Coffee - roast your own. Cheese. Just go to a gourmet cheese store. Get something that does not come in a plastic bag.
Or go to Europe and try real croissants. Everyone in Paris can get real croissants almost anywhere every day. And not to mention real bread - again the plastic bag.
We are so used to what is available here that we have come believe it is "food" when really it is just adulterated to have a long shelf life. Sorry, but really just try it.
In the Northeast corner of the US, there are tons and tons of bakeries. I was really bummed when I moved away and discovered most of the country just eats crappy bread.
Still, almost every grocery store I've been to (even the lower-cost ones in my region, like King Soopers) has a fresh bakery area. It's such a profitable product to sell, it really makes no sense not to add it if you have any space at all to spare. Even Target has one.
I'm cheap, so I go like 30 minutes before closing time and get the bread for like 80% off because it doesn't have the shelf-stabilization stuff, so it will go bad in a couple days.
Finding full fat, no sugar added yogurt is quite easy, and completely subjectively up to taste. You may make your own yogurt yes. But perhaps the flavor difference you are experiencing is due to the intensive labor you spent time to produce said yogurt.
- https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/product/painterland-sisters...
- https://www.hy-vee.com/aisles-online/p/2284457/Siggis-4-Milk...
- https://www.jewelosco.com/shop/search-results.html?q=yogurt&...
- https://www.marianos.com/p/dannon-gluten-free-whole-milk-non...
As for roasting beans, that is an immensely deep rabbit hole that will #1- not give you better results than specialty roasters and #2- cost you much more than specialty roasters. Not to mention you will have a tough time getting high quality beans unroasted.
Edit: also all of these grocery stores I listed I can guarantee have fresh bread made daily to buy. Not "white bread", but "real" "European" bread.
Intensive labor? It is one of the easiest things to do. Here is my process step by step:
1) 32oz of whole milk into a pot, set burner to 6, set a 7 min timer (whats optimal for my burners), walk away.
2) Come back, check temp with thermometer, should be between 180°-190°f. Shut off burner. Set 10 min timer. Go do something else.
3) Come back, put burner on low simmer, set 20 min timer, do something else.
4) Come back, shut off burner, crack lid of pot open, do something else for about a half hour.
5) Come back, check temp, should be around 110°f now. If not wait. If it is, add last scoop from last batch of yogurt to pot.
6) Pour into mason jar. Put in instapot. Put in 1 cup water into instapot. Hit yogurt button. Get yogurt in 12 hours.
This is like less than 5 mins of actual hands on work. Probably the easiest thing you can do in the kitchen beyond like making spaghetti. I started my initial batch with one of those premium yogurts so I stole their cultures.
I mean there are things you can reasonably do better than the grocery store but something things are unrealistic. Like "just go to a gourmet cheese store" is not something you can do in most of the country.
I live in one of the largest metro areas with quite a few Michelin star and recommended eateries, lovely food culture, and we love our dairy. I think there are two dedicated cheese mongers you can walk into in the entire area, neither are particularly accessible.
If you live in a metro city then your regular old kroger/vons/ralphs whatever will have cheese monger tier cheese cut from wheels and sold by the pound. Hard, soft, moldy, sheep, goat, all of that stuff is pretty widely proliferated in this country. Maybe not if you lived hyper rurally but in a city of at least 100,000 this should certainly be possible.
The suggestion was just to try good cheese so you know what it is. $35 a pound is a bit pricey for cheese. Another option is to make your own. It is a skill, not a recipe, but most mistakes are extremely edible and tasty.
The biggest obstacle is that you need a cheese cave to age the cheese. This can be a small dorm refrigerator with something like an inkbird temperature controller.
I do know one family that makes cheese and then just eat it without the aging. Store it in the refrigerator. They think it is much better than store bought.
I think dedicated cheese mongers are a lot more accessible than you are envisioning based on your experience. I live in Denver, which is a large city but by no means one of the largest in the country. We have no Michelin star restaurants that I know of, we don't have a dairy industry or anything like that. We still have multiple dedicated cheese stores in the area that one can get to. It's not that niche to enjoy good cheese.
Denver absolutely has michelin star restaurants right now. It's a food mecca.
edit: https://guide.michelin.com/us/en/colorado/denver_1261491/res...
I wouldn't call it niche I just don't think "gourmet cheese store" is accessible to the average American. You can buy plenty good cheese at the supermarket.
https://archive.is/eWcpP
Is it just me or is this super unreadable?
yeah, I think it's one of those annoyingly over stylized articles that animates/loads as you scroll and Archive doesn't preserve the javascript (or whatever) to make it look & work right
For anyone having gastrointestinal issues from processed foods in America, I implore you to take a trip to the EU and experience the lack of digestive issues their foods have on your gut.
It really changed my relationship with food knowing that it’s not my gut malfunctioning but stems from what I’m putting in me.
My ancestors are from Asia. Over there, a saying goes something like this if I can translate it without the color of the language: "Give a man a solid breakfast and he will not make noise around the kitchen rest of the day". Even less colorful way to say it is if you want to be healthy, start with a healthy breakfast.
As much as there are all the science around low carb diet and optimizing calories, macros and what not, I think there are some wisdom to it in the long game view.
Someone that had a good nutritious breakfast (you will notice every major culture has its variant of breakfast akin to "English breakfast"), would have less difficulty resisting food with empty calories and doing frequent snacking. Contrary, if you had packaged "cereal" with questionable ingredients and nutrition density, no wonder by 11 you will feel the need to snack. And then if you happen to have a lunch in one of the typical take out restaurants optimized for cost at the expense of quality, a 3pm snacking is more likely than not.
By the end of the day, you had racked up calories intake with bunch of empty calories from those snacking episodes that could be entirely prevented with a solid dense breakfast.
The American version "Breakfast is the most important meal of the day" started as a breakfast cereal marketing line, not an endorsement for eating an "English breakfast".
I will take the science over old wives tales and marketing bs any day. Even if the science is as poorly done as most nutrition science is.
I always thought the emphasis on breakfast originated in cultures or times where it would be followed by a long day of manual labor.
This also ignores that most European countries emphasize breakfast even less than Americans, and that the British (home of the English breakfast) have a lower life expectancy than most of their western European peers (but not as low as Americans).
For convenience, my rice cooker has been a godsend. I'm basically making homemade chipotle bowls every day.
Funny I recently ditched my rice cooker and got a clay pot, in response to the rising food price at restaurants. While I am chasing a perfect clay pot rice with golden crispy but not greasy and burnt bottom and fluffy center, I found out cooking rice on gas is not as complicated as we imagine. Soak the rice for a while, cook on high heat till water is evaporated on the top, dial down to low flame, put on toppings, closed the lid simmer for a while, then let the residual heat of the clay pot to finish the job. The result is perfectly serviceable, of course extra care would elevate the dish a lot. Also you can use a bowl and steam the rice, with toppings if you like.
If you don’t have one, try an Instant Pot which can pressure cook (in addition to rice cooker features). Dry beans can be ready to eat in an hour.
Instant Pot Garbanzo beans/chickpeas with a tiny bit of salt are a favorite in my home. Creamy, savory, and delicious! Cannellini beans are also lovely.
Similarly, get a sous vide setup with vacuum sealer. Buy chicken breast and dump it into a bag with a bunch of seasoning. Because sous vide heats it just above bug-killing temperature and will not burn the meat, you can leave it in for an indeterminate amount of time (on the scale of hours, not days) and take it out when desired.
I like the idea but cooking in plastic bags is also somewhat of a concern for me.
Fancy (Asian) rice cookers use pressure
I don't get the rice cooker hype. Its so easy to make rice in the pot already. Cup of rice. Cup and a half of water. Pinch of salt. Bring to boil then set to simmer. Put lid on. 15 min timer. Perfect rice.
The way people talk about making rice online and having to seek out a rice cooker makes me wonder what they are even doing when they fail at making rice.
When Jobs came out with the iPhone were you like “I don’t get it just use a phone and a mp3 player perfect”
We are talking about cooking rice here...
Clean up is much easier with a ceramic vessel and properly sealing rice cookers use less water.
We are talking about a cup of water here. And cleanup wise its pretty easy. I use a stainless steel pot. After I've finished with it, soak in water, come back in 10-20 mins, it just sloughs out.
I do homemade Cava bowls in it! Less salt, fewer pesticides, and fewer preservatives than the actual thing.
Lately I’ve been using more microwave rice just because it’s less cooking and cleanup, but still good overall.
Take care of it, don’t scratch it too much while cleaning otherwise the non-stick can leak out. Then it becomes a serious health issue.
Yeah thankfully I went with ceramic, not nonstick.
You can make quinoa in a rice cooker also, turns out great.
Rice cooker is great. I also use my Instant Pot a ton. Incredibly convenient and an invaluable time saver.
We use our IP to make yogurt (discussed in depth above). Easy to make and when strained, better than any store bought Greek yogurt.
Also decent for sous vide. I use a big glass jar instead of plastic bags, which are a health concern.
Have you tried making kefir? It’s much easier and likely better if you’re going for probiotics.
Mēh
I used to cook a lot of rice and have always used a simple pot
Very easy....
Not sure this is a good post, but might be so taking the risk. I am snacking right now on some UPF - my 10% vice. However, my 90% is pretty good. One NOT-UPF staple is steel cut oats that are slow cooked. Very easy, healthy and likely as NOT-UPF as you can get. Recipie: 3 cups steel cut oats (I use Bob's Red Mill Organic), 1+ Qt water, 1 Qt Skim Milk, 1+ Teaspon salt. Combine everything into a suitable pot. Slow cook at 150F for six hours. Stir occasionally. Explore ways to eat. E.g. warm in microwave with some blueberries, and a bit of brown sugar. Stores in the Fridge for a long time. HTH, NSC (+ means "a bit more than")
Right there with you but in way less time w pressure cooker.
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A really nice brand of healthy foods that are trustworthy and less processed is Primal Kitchen. I have zero affiliation with them, just is a brand I trust. Its so hard to shop for things that are healthy. For example, their Ketchup is just Tomato, Vinegar, Salt, Garlic Powder, Onion Powder, and Spices. No sweetener substitutes needed. https://www.primalkitchen.com/products/organic-unsweetened-k...
Currently trying to track down a something I'm sensitive/allergic to and this is where I started - a wide but pretty bland whole foods diet.
Theory being that the issue is one of the billion colourants/flavourants/preservatives & cooking from scratch cuts most of them.
Too early to confidently tell (4 days in)...but the vibes sure feel promising
In case it’s useful, some healthy recipes by two people who’ve traveled around the world in a small boat:
https://grimgrains.com/site/home.html
That was incredibly difficult to read. Text would be nice.
I just opened up www dot amazon dot com and filled my cart with $50 worth of food that will be delivered to my door in a few hours: rice, potatoes, farro, beans, peppers, ginger, onions, garlic frozen peas, frozen carrots, plain low-fat yogurt, chicken thighs, and good bread. I don't want to hear anyone telling me that American capitalism has robbed us of real food. If anything, American capitalism has heaped upon us the cheapest and most convenient selection of food imaginable, but some people just can't stop shoveling down Flamin' Hot Froot Loops.
If you make a system that has 1,000 nudges towards Fruit Loops and hides the healthy thing, then it isn't just an individual choice. Nudges include advertising, availability, addictive ingredients, misleading marketing claims, food engineering, etc. I recommend reading this to get an understanding of how much effort goes into making people make the wrong choices: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinar...
Maybe pricing has something to do with it?
Total 27,00€ ($31.57)
1kg potatos, 0,99€
3pcs bell peppers, 1,03€ (x)
1pcs ginger, 0,90€ (x)
1kg onions, 1,59€
100g garlic, 1,45€ (x)
500g carrots, 0,89€
500g frozen peas, 1,09€
1 can white beans, 1,09€ (x)
fresh fancy bread, 3,69€
400g chicken thighs, 4,99€
1l plain low-fat yogurt, 2,55€
1kg rice, 3,79€ (x)
650g ”farro”, 2,95€
(x) imported, not local
Typical prices in Finland, which is considered to be expensive European country.
Could maybe go down to 20+€ with cheapest options.
My prices weren't very different from those, but my quantities were higher: 5lb (2.25kg) potatoes, 4lb (1.8kg) dried beans, 15lb (6.8kg) of rice, yogurt 1kg by weight not sure of volume, etc.
> some people just can't stop shoveling down Flamin' Hot Froot Loops.
If over a third if the country has serious problems with this then it seems to me there is a systemic problem, and you can't only chuck it to individual failure.
Doesn't mean there is no individual responsibility at all – but there's a reason obesity rates have risen so sharply and why there are quite big differences between countries of comparable levels of development.
I don't think anyone claimed that it's impossible to eat healthy food – certainly the article didn't.
Explain to me how socal works then. For $12 you can get a massive burrito. A plate of excellent tacos. A decent amount of sushi. All sorts of sandwiches. Pupusa. Kebab. Salads. Ramen. Bahn mi. All from local businesses making real food made to order in maybe 10 mins.
And yet, mcdonalds still does tidy business in this environment despite everyone saying mcdonalds is more expensive than ever.
Explain to me how that doesn't reflect widespread individual failure? Why does mcdonalds even exist in this market where you can eat amazing food from around the world in about the same time for about the same price? It isn't like these people are devoid of choice or limited by price. They are actively choosing mcdonalds over other options that are objectively better. I mean its like smoking cigarettes still despite all the information out there.
Widespread individual failure becomes a social problem, and social problems call for social, not individual, solutions.
You can say it's their fault all you want, but that doesn't actually help you fix it.
How would you solve the fact people seem happy to eat bad food even given better alternatives that compete on price and convenience?
Regulation.
Not to say that bad food should be illegal, but you can constrain portion sizes, you can constrain ubiquity (limit the # of fast food places per square mile/per population), you can constrain ingredients, you can constrain their marketing, you can limit how they decorate their buildings, you can do all sorts of things if the public will is there.
Now, whether or not the public will is there is another matter entirely. Policy prescriptions are easy, patient compliance is harder.
Edit: And frankly, I think we're in more agreement than you might realize. I grew up in the Bay Area, and it still drives me crazy how many of my peers would eat Chipotle. McDonalds is one thing, it's bad but at least it's unique, but Chipotle is just bad, expensive Mexican food. What's the point?? But, eventually, you have to accept that people will have bad taste and make bad decisions, and once those bad decisions start affecting society as a whole it's a policy issue, not an individual issue.
Sad that you have to buy this stuff online. I can go downstairs to a grocery store and just buy it from real humans, not lining bezos pockets.
I don't have to buy it online. I live in Berkeley, California where, if anything, we have a totally unsustainable flood of food outlets that keep going out of business because the competition is too great. I only point to Amazon because it's a website, anyone can order from it even if their local grocers are bozos.
I didn't realize how obscenely spoiled I was with Berkeley Bowl until I moved. Sure, I knew the quality was good, but I didn't realize that the produce and the bulk sections were actually comparatively quite cheap too! It's ridiculous.
> I don't want to hear anyone telling me that American capitalism has robbed us of real food
they didn't rob it, they hid it and put zillions of billboards selling their ultra-proccessed ultra-palatable anything with a huge profit margin.
Almost every grocery store I've been to in the US has either the produce or bakery section right at the front door.
Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/10/16/well/eat/ultr...
Relevant
"The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food"
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinar...
I grew up with a lot of ultra-processed foods and these days have found several places where I can get good quality food. I am fortunate to live in an area with a decent farmer's market "community" and some bespoke shops. Generally, I've found that mixing farmers market with ethnic markets (for meat) seems to provide significantly better quality than your average chain.
I suppose that the article hits on it a bit but a lot of the popular brands were great depression era hits. Most of us grew up on various forms of slop: hamburger helper, velveeta mac n cheese, spam, etc. The common link between everything I ate was it was easy, and allowed you to significantly stretch the meat in a dish. These days, now that we can afford more, it's most likely a matter of simplicity and brand affiliation. When you have 2/3 of an average store stuffed with ultraprocessed crap and even in the remaining 1/3 you have to be careful it's pretty easy to eat poorly. A perfect example would be "wheat" or "rye" bread which is basically the same as white bread with a little extra added. Though, these days, many even major supermarket chains offer reasonably high quality bread.
Why is someone so determined to force this "ultraprocessed foods" meme? Is it just so they can get a government definition of "ultraprocessed foods" that somehow doesn't include foods that are 1/3 teflon by weight?
There are plenty of specific processes that are extremely questionable and probably dangerous. Europe bans a lot of them, or to be fair almost everybody bans them but the US. But somehow, when the references to food additives and processes get specific, outlets like the NYT start using phrases that include "right-wing," "corners of the internet," "rant," "outburst," "conspiracy theories," "...but the science actually says...," "the consensus," "...that the vast majority of scientists agree to be safe..." etc...
Also, dangerous additives and processes are an entirely different question than talking about people eating fatty, sugary, salty foods because they like them. They're on the verge of turning "ultraprocessed foods" into a moral crusade against the tastes of the lumpen, which their upper-middle class audience loves because it allows them to feel superior (and deserving.)
Also, preservatives are good. They make food cheaper and make it last longer. I want dangerous preservatives banned.
I didn't read any of the points you're arguing against in the article.
Due to the paywall I couldn’t get beyond the first image claiming convenience. I’ve no idea what the rest says so I’ll speak disconnected from the content and just to the concept.
People assume ultra processed came about due to demand side factors but it’s actually more about supply side supply chain management and the scale in size of the US. By processing the food into more constructed ingredients they always enter a state where they’re easy to package and distribute across vast distances in that state. They can then be combined into food that is palatable through additives. Indeed the process disrupts the natural structure and content of the food - but that was necessary to feed everyone at a reasonable price a variety of foods grown across a vast distance at a reasonable price.
Obviously this led to demand because the food was more complete and varied than was generally available at the fresh grocer. Convenience was a side effect as well that was well capitalized.
These arguments actually hold until pretty recently. Even in my lifetime grocery stores growing up were pretty stark affairs with a few expensive fresh products that you splurged on for a special dinner like thanksgiving. Daily food was basically processed rations with a fancy box. It’s only in my adulthood, and the lifetime of the millennials, that there was really much optionality as supply chains globally and fresh food distribution with widely available refrigerated trucking with ethylene gas storage proliferated, free trade opened, etc.
Before all this, in my parents generation, the other option for ultra processed foods was malnutrition and wide spread rickets. It was when we tried to draft for WWII and the majority of rural young men were so malnourished as to be unfit for war that things really changed.
To sit today and compare the options of fresh food available and wonder how we got here ignores the reality of how we got here. But we are here so indeed, eat fresh and be happy we have free trade!
That's a bit too naive considering how bad food became during the last decade. Formerly perfectly fine products now have artificial ingredients to increase profits.
How is it naive? You were literally unable to eat the foods because they rotted in delivery and refrigeration was so expensive it made fresh foods unaffordable to the consumer. Even then they were not edible because they were not ripened due to the lack of ethylene.
I’m not discussing the last decade, in fact in the last decade the availability of fresh food is absurdly better vs say 1930-1995 or so. The article also starts in 1950.
We are at a point where we can turn the tide, but the prevalence of fresh food in the store is counter balanced by the fact affordability is decreasing as inflation, restrictions on free trade, and stagnation of lower income takes the fresh foods away as an option. Add into it cultural inertia of 70 years of processed food prevalence as a staple food, you end up in this situation.
The article's story begins in 1886.
I can only see the beginning due to the paywall and weird article layout interfering with archive, and the start is an image of a person holding a 1950’s TV dinner. If it then moves in narrative into the 1886’s, it started in the 1950’s.