During Englands industrial revolution people rushed into the cities and there were many more people to feed. Wars restricted trade which led to a huge boom in the alcohol industry in England, along with this many dairy establishments moved into the city. This led to dairy establishments attached to breweries and distilleries where the cows were being fed waste products from the distilleries. The cows were living in horrible conditions being fed brewery slop(yes that is literally what they called it). Unsurprisingly this milk made many people sick, particularly children. Two camps emerged to solve the problem, the first a group of doctors emerged and insisted on a certification for milk that it was raised in safe conditions and not fed waste products. The second a group of wealth men who promoted pasteurization as the solution. Pasteurization is a shitty short cut that allows people to survive off of poor quality food without getting sick, and even this is debatable. It seriously damages the nutritional quality of food.
Currently we see similar issues with the organic food movement being ruined, current standards for organic food are laughable, giving rise to the "Beyond Organic" standard. The organic movement was originally demonized as being anti-patriotic because organic standards would be difficult to scale and would case issues during war time. When given a choice it seems that big business will chose to take the short cut and sacrifice everyones health. Is this issue even solvable? There are clearly pros and cons to each approach and sometimes you need to take the short cut, but the issue is business will never even admit they are taking the short cut. Jack Kruse is attempting to get a law in the El Salvadorian constitution guaranteeing health freedom to the citizens there. I think this will be a bigger issue going forward as peoples health gets worse and worse. We cannot take short cuts forever.
There was a good thread >>1612 a while back about the dietary wisdom of the ages. It didn't discuss the impact of industrial scale on the staple foods of the philosopher's diet though, and this is a good starting point.
I agree that many of the things Americans do to our food are very bad. Pasteurization is a corrupting process on the substance that comes straight out of the cow. Grocery stores do all kinds of shady shit to make meat look red through the glass panes in the butcher's section. Fruit is genetically / eugenically engineered to have candy-like qualities and make it through shipping without bruising / rotting. Everything has plastic in it. Cooking meat is a form of processing that is not actually required and may be absolutely inferior to eating it raw. Where do these considerations end? My primary question when faced with dietary advice, because of its inherently religious quality, is when are we in a holiness spiral vs when are we extracting real gains?
It is a good questions which depends in a case by case basis. What are you goals? Are you talking about at the group level or individual level? What other concerns do you have? What resources do you have? There continue to be benefits as you get more and more serious about the quality of the food and the line in which you cross over into holiness spirals cannot be defined rigorously but rather with some rough rules of thumb. When the effort/resources could be better spent else where, for example if you are spending 30 minutes each morning making vegetable juice but the time would be better spent preparing for a job interview in which you could 1.5x your salary. Another rule of thumb would be when it has a clear religious feel to it that goes beyond the practical concerns of health. If someone is upset with someone else for drinking pasteurized milk instead of raw but the person if healthy and has no issues with it, that is in the realm of purity spiral bc health is not the concern, it is clearly about the emotions and religious nature of this stuff.
On the group level it is much harder. Certainly the country has bigger concerns than this stuff currently, but if you keep kicking the can down the road eventually it will be clear weve really fucked up. I mean were already somewhat there. The average American woman weighs 170.8 lbs and has a 38.7 inch waist. The men are no better. I have heard the military has trouble recruiting people because everyone is fat. The healthcare costs of this must be insane. These short cuts taken up front benefit the business but long term we all pay. I think minimum standards for our food are certainly not purity spiraling and benefit everyone on a personal level aswell as the country as a whole long term. Some basic standards would be:
ban seed oils legalize raw dairy and work with farmers to transition over in safe ways end the FDA war on small farmers ban whatever black magic they use to make spoiled meat look red end the mass vaccination of wild game(okay this is a separate issue but still) limit vaccination of factory farmed animals
These would be good steps forward with long term gains but I'm not sure they would do that much to reverse the obesity issue short term. The RFK jr thing of sending people who are on medications they want to quit to work on farms is honestly amazing and if done well could be a really good model if done well. Enforcing super strict standards on farmers would be purity spiral currently.
There are bigger concerns currently however long term this has to get solved. Do you want your coworkers, your neighbors, your kids friends to be obese, with fibromyalgia, germaphobes who run on energy drinks. It's only a matter of time before even the upper classes are like this too.
>>3531 Instead of suggesting changes on the national level, which I don't believe any of us have control over, let's turn this into practical advice for people reading the thread. If we should ban seed oils, we should not consume seed oils, if the FDA should end the war on small farmers, we should buy our food from small farmers, etc. I'd also like to know the practical benefits of each of these things rather than just take them as gospel from an internet anon. Maybe we return to the Milk Question and concretize it.
You claim (and I believe) that pasteurization is a shortcut to get around the fact that our cows are fed with profit-maximizing slop and their milk is bad. So what do I do if I'm poor and have young kids? What do I do if I'm single and rich? What are the gradations of milk improvements that I, a sofiechan poster, can make to my life and the lives of those I care about that will result in our mutual prosperity?
>>3534 Regarding raw vs pasteurized milk, the arguments have all been made people can do their own research. I think the more interesting question is are we doomed to repeat this sort of thing. What would it take politically for health minded individuals to win against short sighted business interests. It may required a large collapse in the populations health for people to really wake up to what the foundations of health really are. Perhaps we are meant to make the short term compromise and then later learn from it. We are seeing a big resurgence of interest in raw milk and alternative health in general.
On a personal practical level, Weston A Price tested raw dairy from the Swiss alps compared with American commercially raised dairy and found that the raw dairy had something like 5-10 times the fat soluble vitamins. So when we think about a budget diet we should still buy high quality expensive foods and then fill in the rest of the calories with rice/potatoes is my opinion. People should talk to their farmers and try to buy unfrozen, unground meat. Both of which damage nutrients.
Ultimately the best thing anyone can do for their health is to control and limit compulsive and addictive type behavior. There is no perfect answer here but many have benefitted from some sort of meditation.
If someone has plenty of money and are interesting in health they should spend it on high quality meat, fish, and oysters. Good enough quality meat and fish can be eaten raw with no sauce and should taste good still.
I would love for someone else to dive into the conflicts of business with health and give a take on it.
>>3537 Those are good resources to start with, thanks, and so be it if you want this to turn into different sort of thread.
>What would it take politically for health minded individuals to win against short sighted business interests.
This is obviously a big question. Diet is so core to life that figuring out the right strategy for it ends up being mostly the same as figuring out the right strategy overall. It's a convenient entry point though to notice the fundamental disconnect between the values of humans and the values of corporations whose sole goal is to maximize profit denominated in dollars. Money is a strange, logocentric abstraction. It is, at best, a lossy compression of what humans require for flourishing, and so we shouldn't expect that maximization of it results in maximization of human flourishing. This becomes especially obvious in the limit as the trajectories diverge, which in our world occurs most often in the context of corporations. So to answer your question of what does it take politically, well in the individual case it takes the assertion of your values over the conflicting values of other entities in your vicinity. Emerson has some advice in Self-Reliance:
>Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood? All men have my blood, and I have all men's. Not for that will I adopt their petulance or folly, even to the extent of being ashamed of it. But your isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation. At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door, and say, "Come out unto us." But keep thy state; come not into their confusion.
Yes, keep thy state anon, come not into their confusion. In the diet case, trust in Nature, which has molded you, and imbibe only its fruits. Deny the zogslop made of eldritch horror chemicals, and don't put it inside the body of your family. Uphold and encode your values in the things that you make with your own hands, and say "μολὼν λαβέ" when others come knocking. I believe that in any given 200 mile radius in the West there are producers who share many of our values, so we can just put in a bit more logistical work up front than driving to the local mart and give them our business instead. When done by enough families or individuals, I believe this sustainably maintains itself against the invaders.