quiddities and agonies of the ruling class - a rolling new york times thread

i'm pretty grateful that my parents always found a way to cook for us as kids cuz i feel like that's something that definitely gets passed down, at least based on the eating habits of friends my age.

xp well it's hard not to. the key reasons I live in/adjacent to NYC are that I don't need a car/great food/a job market that values my skillset/great art and culture/amazing diversity and depth of the citizens... but i spent 25 years living in a world where i ate fast food because it was the best and cheapest alternative and when i visit home, all my friends weigh more than i do.

my friend has a theory (gotten from some food writer, I think) that a lot of great food inventions came during times of hardship. stuff like cured meat and fish, pickled vegetables, brined anything, preserved sauces. those are ways to eat cheaply and tastily.

and yeah big props to my mom and dad for always cooking 7 days a week while at the same time holding down 9-5 jobs.

well most of human history was hardship compared to now xp

yeah but that doesn't make preserved foods less tastier!

a lot of staples of various cuisines more or less started out as poor people food

sure: soul food (from any culture) is basically discards or the cheapest options cooked and spiced well

I guess my point is that eating on a budget doesn't mean peanut butter and jelly every day. at least from what I like to eat, stocking a pantry with soy sauce/vinegar/cooking wine/spicy sauces/fermented beans/tofu/ginger/garlic doesn't cost a lot, and a bottle of soy sauce goes a long way, and costs like $2.

I think that's kind of where we went wrong with food: Stuff like fried chicken was at one point a treat, then we reconfigured the system so that the supply is able to give us fried chicken daily, and then we put foods like that in mass-market pre-prepared overly-preserved and salted versions for fast food and tv dinners. So now we have a sometimes-food that is even worse for you than the original version, that you can eat daily.

I buy soy sauce by the giant jug

xp and which doesn't depend on the absolute freshness of the food. (which, during january in new york or the northern united states, means what exactly? produce that's delivered to your door the moment it comes off the ship where it spent 5 weeks on its way up from south america? or after spending 6 weeks on a train from mexico?)

when I go home, and my parents cook meat, it's usually from meat that's been frozen for a few months, bought at the last time that ground pork was on sale at the local shoprite. still tastes great!

yeah... well you're right, dayo, but a lot of what you're talking about boils down, more or less, to education. to understand how to season and cook things... that really takes effort to educate yourself and a lot of ppl, even ppl my age w/o kids or much responsibility after finishing work, aren't interested in that. it sucks because it's a great way to live in many respects, but it's just not something that tons of families get into. idk, i got lucky, my dad went to culinary school, but i don't know many ppl my age that understand, like, how to cook on a nightly basis or even want to. let alone actual families.

still missing the point d. the bigger point is 'people should be able to spend their meager incomes however they like, even if it's fried chicken or drugs.'

'I know how to eat well for less money' or 'people *should* be buying this instead of that' is just sorta self-congratulatory

I think that's kind of where we went wrong with food: Stuff like fried chicken was at one point a treat, then we reconfigured the system so that the supply is able to give us fried chicken daily, and then we put foods like that in mass-market pre-prepared overly-preserved and salted versions for fast food and tv dinners. So now we have a sometimes-food that is even worse for you than the original version, that you can eat daily.

― mh, Sunday, January 29, 2012 11:15 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah... something related to this is that big box supermarkets almost all have premade things that you can pick up and take home but it's like... fried chicken and macaroni and cheese and shit like that. i don't think many places are making take-home shit that's anywhere near healthy.

true, that c-p

I mean, x-p to iatee

yeah I agree j0rd, which is why I find american food culture to be very problematic!

iatee, I don't know if I can fully get behind that - some kinds of behavior are pretty self-destructive and I wish people would stop doing them. but I do agree that people should be free to spend their money however they like, but that doesn't mean I can't tsk tsk at them.

I was just trying to point out that eating healthily and tastily on a budget doesn't mean always going to whole foods and buying organic produce. but if you want to strawman me as being paternalistic saying that people should eat less fried and fatty food, I'm okay with that, because I believe that! nobody - people with meager, adequate, good, or obscene income levels - should eat fried food all the time!

self-destructive is in the eye of the beholder. I'm sure you can find some responsible fried chicken eaters or drug users on ilx. I think it's pointless and sorta in bad taste to judge people for not being more like you (exception: not owning car). instead it makes sense to talk about what the best policies would be to achieve the best outcomes (vegetables should be subsidized, etc.) xp

i don't have any way to prove this, but i do get a sense that companies have figured out ways to make frozen dinners easier and better... like you can make a generally good and healhy-ish meal if you go went to the frozen food section at any big store, grabbed a bag of frozen meat and veggies, and went home and cooked a quick pot of rice or noodles or something

I think it's pointless and sorta in bad taste to judge people for not being more like you (exception: not owning car).

iatee very much in character

is blowing up every mcdonalds and burger king considered "policy"

trader joe's has definitely figured out how to make good frozen food that's not pumped full of fat - well, it's still salty... but you look at the list of ingredients on an average TJ prepared food box and it's actually pretty reasonable!

I think if someone wants to live their life eating crappy foods and understands the health consequences I can't see why they shouldn't be allowed to. no different from legalizing drugs or w/e

I think it's pointless and sorta in bad taste to judge people for not being more like you (exception: buying tons of records)

self-destructive is in the eye of the beholder. I'm sure you can find some responsible fried chicken eaters or drug users on ilx. I think it's pointless and sorta in bad taste to judge people for not being more like you (exception: not owning car). instead it makes sense to talk about what the best policies would be to achieve the best outcomes (vegetables should be subsidized, etc.) xp

― iatee, Sunday, January 29, 2012 11:34 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah - I agree with the larger push, but unfortunately it's easy ammo to point out ways in which benefactors of government assistance don't use that assistance in acceptable ways. and going back to my original point, if the goal is to write a piece that tries to strip away the stigma of government assistance, you shouldn't leave landmines in your article for the other side to point out. or at least do more to defuse them (maybe, as you suggested, by pointing out that access to fresh and/or organic produce should not be a luxury good.)

I think if someone wants to live their life eating crappy foods and understands the health consequences I can't see why they shouldn't be allowed to. no different from legalizing drugs or w/e

― iatee, Sunday, January 29, 2012 11:39 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

this is where I diverge - I'm paternalistic, prescriptivist, and probably fascist in this sense!

the big problem in this sentence is the 'understands the health consequences' part - which means changing the culture. which is a hard thing to do! I don't think people fully understand the harm associated with going to 7-11 every day. (hi markers!)

this is like, Asia vs America, man

I find this interesting but Jennifer is getting mad at me cause she wants to leave the house so I gtg

my overall point is that people should be allowed to do whatever they want to do within their given constraints. a good way to argue w/ this is by pointing out that 'whatever they want to do' is partially an illusion and people are easily influenced etc etc

I can't imagine how huge the supporting-old-ppl problem would get in 30 years (not that it isn't going to hasten the End, anyhoo) if so many of u fuckers weren't still killing yourselves with smoking. Flame on!

heh yeah - secretly I think that people will follow the shiny piece of tinfoil, the red laser light on the walls. even if that means jumping off a cliff. and that's easy to do in america. I refrain from making that argument because it makes me seem like a giant cynic and misanthrope*. which I guess I just revealed myself to be. oh well!

*NB I also kind of believe that a good way to guard against this is by establishing good habits at a young age - an issue of culture, or of 'hygiene' - like in the same way that people are taught that taking a shower every day or brushing your teeth is good for you, so should people be taught from a young age that there is other good food besides mcdonalds. the problem is I think more young kids are being taught the value of brushing their teeth than the value of not going to mcdonalds. oh well!

I think if someone wants to live their life eating crappy foods and understands the health consequences I can't see why they shouldn't be allowed to. no different from legalizing drugs or w/e

― iatee, Sunday, January 29, 2012

What about the effect on what we are all paying and will be paying for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security disability and health insurance

yeah that is true. some 'self-destructive' behaviors like playing video games all day have relatively few external effects, some like a habit of poor eating directly put a load on other services of society.

"I think it's pointless and sorta in bad taste to judge people for not being more like you (exception: not owning car)"

still catching up but this is one of the dumbest things I've ever read on ILX

guys plz cultivate rekkanizing winks btwn the lines on the intranets

I do believe that everybody should be more like me and I will judge you for not doing so

haha I don't see any winking there, besides the car bit, unless iatee is just trolling, in which case there's no further point in engaging here.

i don't think it's misanthropic to say that people will follow the laser light off a cliff if the laser light is really spectacular and sophisticated and physically addictive. you can only expect so much from us. and it's a tricky question, what to do with our natural impulse to allow people choice when over time the machine built to provide choice starts to remove it. after a few decades of success selling people food pumped full of stuff they like, when it turns out that the mere physical presence of this food in a neighborhood or town helps destroy nearby attempts to sell food without the benefits of a global distribution network or a vast advertising budget or a system of obscene hyperefficient mechanized deathcamps for chickens or a whole lot of pandering to humans' most basic fat/salt pleasure+addiction centers, and when it turns out that hey pace how you feel when you're eating it this food is not actually that good for you, the companies selling it quite reasonably point out that it is of course Your Choice to eat it! we didn't make you eat it. we just loaded it with pleasurable chemicals, and made it cheaper and easier than everything else, and spammed your towns and cities with it, and hired anthropologists to help us convince your children to eat it, and came into your homes every day to smile at you and play music and tell you how delicious and cheap it was, and watched as all the other available options gradually became less available -- but we didn't put it in your mouth and make you chew. you did that! we're only here because you want us to be. you made us, with your wanting! and if you -- as a species thrown in the space of less than a century into a world where friendly machines who won't leave or shut up are constantly offering to satisfy your immediate sensual desires -- find it kind of difficult to make successful choices about what is actually best for you, or worry that the bodies and minds that evolved for scarcity and hardship aren't very good at dealing with abundance and ambient manipulation... well, we can't be responsible for your personal failings. and we know you certainly wouldn't want any kind of authority to restrict your choice, because your entire culture is designed around that never happening unless you're gay or a girl! so idk. seems like you are in kind of a predicament? collective prisoners of your ids or something? go ahead and let us know if you've decided what should be done; we'll just be over here making money.

i know you guys already know all that though

lol @ eis taking car joke seriously

iatee, you should think of cheap fried and salty and fatty food as being like cheap gasoline

;)

tho I'm not trolling when I say that judging poor people on how they spend their money is prob 'a bad thing' xps

According to George Orwell, the British poor used to live on little more than strong tea and bread with margarine.

that's just bullshit paternalism of its own kind, iatee: "those people are poor so we shouldn't judge them".

alternately, it's bullshit relativism: "don't judge anyone"

iatee, you should think of cheap fried and salty and fatty food as being like cheap gasoline

;)
--dayo

sure, which is why they should be treated in a similar manner (made more expensive)

when driving to mcdonalds becomes more difficult and expensive than walking to a food co-op, peoples' preferences will change.

taxes aren't the only way of solving things, iatee!

if judging people is paternalism and not judging people is paternalism I'm not sure how you avoid paternalism, Euler

and in a lot of these places, people aren't driving to the mcdonalds, they're walking! dictating people's behavior through taxes is its own form of prescriptivist paternalism

I'm a paternalist for everyone, not just for the poor.