
A Plea for Culinary Modernism - ZeljkoS
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/05/slow-food-artisanal-natural-preservatives/
======
cwyers
I think a lot of people are missing the point of the article. It's not saying
that pumping food full of high-fructose corn syrup is this great and wonderful
thing that has no downsides. It's pointing out how technology has made food
more affordable and accessible, and asking to "go back" to how things used to
be means condemning lots of people to poverty. If we want to make food
healthier, we need to figure out how to make better food affordable, not try
to return to a past that never was.

~~~
briantakita
Subsidies are what makes industrial food "more affordable".

It's interesting that you bring up people "in poverty". People "in poverty" do
much better when they can grow their own food using more natural methods such
as polycultures. Centralized Industrial agriculture is what created the
situation where they were not able to grow their own food by decimating their
local markets, buying up all of their land, & destroying their ecosystems.

Also, till methods using monoculture annual monocultures is more resource &
energy intensive than no-till methods using perennial polycultures.

~~~
EliRivers
_People "in poverty" do much better when they can grow their own food using
more natural methods such as polycultures._

But having individuals, or small groups (ie. families) grow their own food is
_massively_ expensive compared to modern industrial techniques. The cost per
whatever you want to measure it in (if you're that poor, the question is "will
I stay alive or will I starve?" so calories is a pretty good measure) of a
small group growing their own food is huge.

I actually calculated it myself the last time I came back from a country with
an enormous proportion of agricultural labourers using broadly manual and
outdated techniques, in which famine is a recent event. They were spending an
enormous amount on trying to make enough food to stay alive. It takes me
literally between five and ten minutes to earn enough to buy food that will
keep me alive for a day. If I were to decide to create that food myself, it
would not be five or ten minutes of my time each day.

------
maceo
This is another very interesting article from Jacobin, but I'm not sure who
the author is arguing against. I've never heard of any "culinary luddites"
avoiding food products because they come from an industrial farm.

There's ALWAYS another reason. It could be because the consumer believes that
raising chickens without any sunlight or space to walk around is cruel. Or
because the industrial farm pays its migrant laborers under minimum wage. Or
because the brand under which the product is sold has a parent company that
spends millions lobbying for anti-consumer laws. Or because the final product
is so loaded with preservatives that its not as healthy as its fresh
alternative. Or perhaps someone favors local produce because transportation to
the market emits less carbon than the imported variety.

Sure, there might be some irrational people who don't like industrial farm
products because they're industrial farm products. But they're a tiny,
insignificant percentage of the "slow food" advocates.

~~~
lkbm
> Or because the final product is so loaded with preservatives that its not as
> healthy as its fresh alternative. ... Sure, there might be some irrational
> people who don't like industrial farm products because they're industrial
> farm products.

I think you just hit the nail on the head and then moved on without noticing.
People want things to be "natural" because that's "healthy", but they aren't
natural and natural doesn't mean healthy.

In my experience, these people are very, very far from being a tiny,
insignificant percentage Maybe you hang out with engineers instead of hippies,
but I can assure you that there's no shortage of baseless anti-technology
culinary Luddites. Try asking the average American (or European how they feel
about GMO crops. Sure, scientists overwhelmingly say they're safe to eat, but
the majority of Americans disagree[1], often very vehemently.

(I will admit that my situation, is certainly biased towards over-estimating
the number of "all-natural" proponents, but the data show it's not just the
people I hang out with--it's pervasive.)

[1] [http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/01/29/chapter-3-attitudes-
an...](http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/01/29/chapter-3-attitudes-and-beliefs-
on-science-and-technology-topics/)

~~~
MichaelGG
SF is full of this. I've seen places proudly announce they're selling tea (
_green_ tea at that) with sugar, but "not that chemical stuff". They literally
believe that eating sugar is better than sucralose or similar substitutes.
When pressed, it's because "it's a chemical", "it's unnatural", or my
favorite, "the FDA was corrupted into approving it". They claim all sorts of
maladies, but aren't ever able to cite anything. They also ignore how not only
the FDA, but every other food safety body, as far as Singapore, have also
approved it. I cut out all aspartame and sucralose for a few months, and those
people were shocked that I noticed no difference - so sure they were of evil
chemicals hurting my, I dunno, being. I actually carry sucralose around in SF,
as some restaurants won't have any zero glycemic index sweeteners.

Sorta like MSG. Double blind trials of people that claim MSG sensitivity show
no problems. Yet "No MSG" is touted all over and people swear it's real.

To be really annoyed, read up on Golden Rice. Here's a rice mod that can
literally save thousands of children annually, but anti "GMO" try to stop it
because "we should just give all the kids supplements".

~~~
EdwardDiego
> Yet "No MSG" is touted all over

I try to avoid MSG to limit the amount of sodium in my diet, I get enough
through salt already.

------
dasil003
The problem is there is no incentive for industrial food to find out how to
truly make things healthier, it's primarily about taste and marketability. So
whatever the latest scientific study says is just fodder to be reduced to a
small change and a bullet point (witness gluten-free), while the lab
scientists continue to pour effort into synthesizing better and better tastes
and addictive qualities to the food. We can demand healthier foods yes, but
it's nigh impossible to ensure that the best nutritional and scientific
knowledge makes it from the lab all the way through the food design process to
the products that end up on the shelves.

Plus, even if we did, nutrition is not a simple thing that we have all figured
out. So even assuming the best of intentions from everyone involved, it's
still a big leap that chopping everything up into its constituent parts, then
reformulating it to be as tasty as possible (while still meeting nutritional
standards of course!) is going to result in a healthy diet.

In this light, eating whole foods is not about declaring the superiority of
"natural" foods, it's just a hedge against the ignorance and mis-aligned
incentives that exist in the industrial foods industry.

~~~
pron
Much of "the best nutritional and scientific knowledge" is hardly science and
mostly magical thinking. Nutrition studies are probably the most misleading
"scientific" papers out there. When John Ioannidis demonstrated in 2005 that
most medical research findings are false, he singled out two particularly
grievous offenders: genetics and nutrition. Yes, we know a few things about
what's healthy and what's not, but precious few.

Most of nutritional "findings" are based on sketchy statistics run on
inaccurate data obtained from really bad experiments. If anything, what little
evidence there is suggests that there may not even be such a thing as
"healthy" or "unhealthy" food, but food that may be more or less healthy for a
specific individual. And what is more certain (from large scale statistics) is
that the effect food has on our health (within a reasonable margin) is quite
small in most healthy people without some genetic anomalies. What makes it
seem large is simply magical thinking (or placebo, if the two are different).

Which raises the far more interesting question of why is it that otherwise
scientifically minded people treat nutrition as a science rather than the
"science" it really is? The psychologist and anthropologist Jonathan Haidt
believes that this is a psychological manifestation of a drive for "purity"
(one of several common moral drives he's classified in many societies) as it
expresses itself among some people, especially liberals. He says conservatives
channel purity to sex and liberals to food. He says people in all cultures
believe that some behaviours contaminate us; conservatives tend to think those
behaviors are sex related, and liberals think they're food related. Which is
why accounts of people "feeling more energetic" after changing their diet read
just like conversion stories -- they are simply two manifestations of the same
phenomenon. And just like _what_ religion people convert to doesn't matter,
the accounts of being "more energetic" and "feeling better" are the same no
matter what diet people switch to (of course, sometimes you read other
accounts, but such is the nature of placebo -- it's complicated). As long as
there is the slightest excuse to justify a particular choice of diet -- and in
the case of science fans that can be a "science" paper -- psychology kicks in.

~~~
paintrayne
Really? So would you like to explain the widespread trend of increasing adult
onset diabetes, and do you consider having diabetes to be healthy or
unhealthy?

~~~
pron
First, I don't need to provide an explanation to demonstrate that other
explanations are completely unfounded. If you don't have sufficient data to
justify your statistical explanation or if your statistical reasoning is
fundamentally flawed, then your explanation is unfounded whether or not I can
provide an alternative one. Your statement is like an ancient Greek man saying
to another: "Really? So if you don't believe in Zeus, what else could explain
lightning?" If we don't know then we don't know. That someone comes up with
one bogus explanation doesn't mean it's valid -- or even a good working
hypothesis -- until someone else comes up with another bogus one. It is the
magical mind that expects an explanation -- _any_ explanation -- to any
phenomenon. Science readily accepts that we just don't (yet) have an
explanation for many things.

Second, there's a world of difference between saying something is related to
nutrition in general, saying it relates to some global nutritional variable
such as calorie intake, and saying something relates to a more specific
nutritional variable such as intake of animal fat. While making each of these
statements may be dubious due to the inherent difficulty of doing any sort of
nutritional research (it must be observational and longitudinal, and there are
too many confounding variables), at each of these three levels of nutritional
explanation, there are so many more variables being added, so that to prove
the third one you'll probably need many more samples than there are people on
this planet. The dimensionality is just too big to tackle with statistics.

Imagine that the real explanation could be something like: amount of animal
fat consumed between the ages 0 and 13, and unrelated to anything consumed
later. Or it could also be that the same causes of diabetes also reduce the
chance of, say, brain cancer, and so what we're seeing is actually a good
thing. There are just too many variables, especially that we know food
interacts in very complex ways with anything from hormones to gut flora.

What we _can_ say with certainty is that life expectancy has been increasing
steadily (not at a steady pace, of course) since the industrial revolution,
and that it is very similar among all industrialized countries. The variations
are hardly more than a couple of percentage points in spite of sometimes very
different diets, different levels of pollution, different amounts of sunlight,
different occupations, different leisure activities etc. So countries are so
different, yet life expectancy is almost the same everywhere (in the
industrial world, of course). Another thing we know for sure is that life
expectancy in the developing world is much, much lower.

Of course, rather than clinical studies -- or "clinical", as nutritional
studies are observational and wildly confounded -- one could try to study
nutrition through biological metabolism, but we're probably decades away from
having a really good grasp of human metabolism.

------
beloch
I live in a place where nothing fresh or natural grows for 7 months of the
year, and for most of the other 5 what's fresh is still growing and "not ready
yet". The "eat local" movement is therefore directly opposed to eating "fresh
and natural". It's not surprising that practically nobody eats local here.
Yet, people have lived here for thousands of years.

Nomadic natives hunted buffalo, and you can bet they got sick of pemmican and
jerky after a few months of being snowbound. It's no wonder that they
considered liver, plucked fresh and warm from the body of a still-quivering
kill, to be a delicacy. Settlers subsisted on stored grains and potatoes
stored underground. They ate the occasional cow or chicken too and hunted for
venison, but meat was not had with every meal. In the first half of the
previous century canning techniques allowed them to greatly expand their diet
by storing everything they could lay their hands on in the month or two of
plenty. In the latter half of the twentieth century refrigeration let them
expand their diet again. Today, fresh food from around the globe is brought in
by plane, train, and automobile. Meanwhile, this province produces vast
amounts of grains and beef for export all around the globe. By eating
globally, we all eat better.

I don't know what global trends are like, but locally we're in the midst of
another big transformation. When I was a child, almost everyone made their own
meals. Eating out was expensive and rare. There was no local equivalent to
England's fish&chip shops or the street vendors of Thailand. Even McDonald's
was expensive when compared to home-cooking. That's changed. Restaurant fare
has become so affordable that it's almost cheaper to eat out. The main
downside to doing so is health. Restaurants always put in that extra pound of
butter if the outcome will taste better. There are a few fledgling restaurants
trying to carve out a niche for healthy fast-food. It will be interesting to
see if they succeed.

~~~
mikekchar
Food, as a commodity, is much cheaper than most people think. The price of
rice is hovering around $400 per metric ton. Wheat is less than $250. Soybeans
about $400. Pork is about $1500 per metric ton, Beef about 3 times that.

According to random sites I googled, the average american eats just under a
metric ton of food a year. Depending on what you eat, you could potentially
eat for a year on considerably less than $1000, if you bought food at
commodity prices.

The reason we can't buy food at that price is because of all of the processing
and handling that goes on between the farmer and the plate. A restaurant is
just another level of processing and handling, so it appears to the average
consumer that it isn't much more expensive than cooking at home. In reality,
it is possible to source food in large quantities and to do all the processing
yourself at a significantly reduced cost. There are even groups of people who
do this for fun. With the advent of the internet it is now easier than ever to
do it.

However, the reason that this is not so popular is that most people in the
western world are comparatively rich and have no free time. Most people don't
care if they can cut $1000 a year from their food budget if it means that they
have to invest 2 hours a day to do it. Many, many families have dual incomes,
so even if we say that we could cut their overall household food budget by
$4000, they wouldn't do it because they would have to give up one of those
incomes.

So, I don't think restaurants have gotten cheaper -- people have gotten
richer, but have given up time to get the money.

~~~
vram22
Good points about the cost of food.

"comparatively rich and have no free time"

That depends on the definition of "rich".

------
lkbm
I grew up with wild strawberries growing in my back yard. You could eat them,
but they were sparse, the size of medium-sized blueberries, and tasted
similarly to a green modern strawberry. I'm quite happy with the $0.98/LBs
modern strawberries I can now buy at my local grocery store. (Less intrigued
by the $4+/LBs organic ones they try to sell me.)

I watched a TEDx talk (I think) by some lady talking about the pre-human-
intervention foods and how this one's toxic and that one's gross and so on.
I've been unable to find the video since, though. If anyone knows the talk I'm
talking about, I'd love a link.

~~~
BinaryIdiot
> I watched a TEDx talk (I think) by some lady talking about the pre-human-
> intervention foods and how this one's toxic and that one's gross and so on.
> I've been unable to find the video since, though. If anyone knows the talk
> I'm talking about, I'd love a link.

If it's a TEDx talk then don't bother; there is no scrutiny regarding the
talks they allow and most are quite embarrassing displays of science
ignorance. I'm actually surprise TEDx hasn't damaged the TED brand more than
it has.

~~~
enraged_camel
It's a shame you're getting downvoted so heavily, because you're absolutely
correct. The overwhelming majority of TEDx talks I've watched or listened to
have been pretty terrible. I actually knew someone who was a TEDx organizer,
and she confided in me that their selection criteria basically comes down to,
"does the proposed talk sound scientific and/or inspirational?"

------
3pt14159
Telling someone to eat fresh tomatoes instead of tomato BBQ sauce is simpler
than getting many people to understand that diabetes comes from sugar and
simpler that making them try to stick to keeping track of how much sugar they
intake. Also, it isn't just sugar. In the presence of fiber sugar can be less
damaging, so telling someone to eat a banana is simpler than telling someone
to keep track of the amount of sugar they eat, and to make sure that they have
some oatmeal when they have a snack.

This is what we're dealing with:
[http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0210.p...](http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0210.pdf)
40% of people my age are over 200 pounds. It's mind blowing. And then there is
this graph:

[http://www.google.ca/imgres?imgurl=http://bradpilon.com/wp-c...](http://www.google.ca/imgres?imgurl=http://bradpilon.com/wp-
content/uploads/2009/11/Picture-4.png&imgrefurl=http://bradpilon.com/weight-
loss/body-fat-when-average-isnt-good-
enough/&h=336&w=514&tbnid=DMYoh1KPPBZL2M:&zoom=1&docid=W_Rd6jq4QrV_EM&ei=0MxgVd7vBs-
kyASQ7YLYCA&tbm=isch&ved=0CBwQMygAMAA&biw=831&bih=496)

Almost 90% of men are over the ideal weight (not to confused with "overweight"
which is a complete misnomer due to the normalization of high body fat), and
it is even worse for women. This is the largest source of preventative deaths
in America and much of the world and it is primarily due to the rise of
processed foods which remove things like fibre and other nutritious food-
elements.

~~~
throwawayaway
although the body of text does little to explore the full sub-title it is:

"The obsession with eating natural and artisanal is ahistorical. We should
demand more high-quality industrial food."

in that sense i feel the author cannot be accused of saying "let them eat
tomato bbq sauce", rather they are imploring industrial food manufacturers to
provide food 'on par' with fresh produce - like tomatos.

------
bane
I've found that people don't fundamentally understand what "processed food"
means, on any side of the question. Even people who try to follow a "Raw
Fruit" only diet, pit their cherries, cut the skin and hard parts off of
pineapples and peel bananas. Turning grain into flour and then into bread is
processing, so is fermenting things, salting them, smoking them, drying them
and so on. Do you take all raw, fresh, organic, home garden grown ingredients
and put them in a pot of boiling water? Or how about making a reduction by
boiling the water off, or making a gravy by mixing fat and flour together
under heat?

Processing is what animals do so they can eat their food. Even squirrels crack
nuts and lions separate meat from bones. But humans have also learned to
process food to even out uneven food harvests and bring some measure of surety
to eating.

I'm frequently surprised at the creativeness and inventiveness of Koreans, a
culture I married into -- and a culture that's come into refrigeration much
later than the U.S. A surprising amount of their traditional food preservation
culture carries on today, earned through centuries of hardship and resulting
in remarkably stable and healthy foodstuffs year round. Kimchi, the national
dish is a prime example of this heritage. Even the kings of old had acres of
food preservation and fermentation operations on the palace grounds [1].

Soy sauce, brought up in the article, is a supremely processed food -- the
good stuff takes years of continuous processing to make. But on the path from
Soy Beans to Soy Sauce, there's half a dozen stages where food stuffs can be
rendered out of the process, making appetizers, side-dishes, snacks, main meal
proteins, condiments, soup stock, and more. Soy sauce is the _most_ processed
outcome of this trail, a necessary thing to make inedible soy beans human
consumable.

However, very few people arguing against processed food would compare Doenjang
and American Sliced Cheese. The former might be called a quaint but tasty
traditional foodstuff, the "cheese" considered spawn of hell in some circles.
But an easy argument can be made the Doenjang is probably _more_ processed
than Kraft sliced American cheese.

1 - [https://imgur.com/r/korea/SUpPmts](https://imgur.com/r/korea/SUpPmts)

------
golemotron
I'm amazed at the number of people who reflexively hate chain restaurants. I
don't believe it can possibly be about the taste of the food - there's a lot
of variety among chains. It just looks like social posturing.

~~~
jules
Variety doesn't equal quality. Chain restaurants have common characteristics
that make the food bad:

\- it has to be cheap

\- cooked by a largely untrained worker in a couple of minutes, who does not
really care about what is served to you

\- the taste has to be such that most people will not dislike it

Every time I've tried a chain restaurant the quality was mediocre at best
except for foods that fit well within those constraints (e.g. potato fries,
and even those weren't great). If you can recommend a chain restaurant that
has good food I'd love to hear it.

~~~
beachstartup
in-n-out, chipotle, five guys, that's pretty much all i eat at when i'm in a
hurry. luckily there's one of those nearly everywhere.

maybe OPH (a much, much higher quality IHOP, though it varies by location)
also.

------
squeeze
Industrial processes are not necessarily bad. So, too, do many methods exist
outside of them that end in a unique product. Know the process and science of
your food, and how it relates to the greater system in which you live. The
failures and successes of food culture, and its influential place in
civilization, can be traced back to our understanding of them and which
intentions we have to affect them.

------
coldtea
> _The Luddites’ fable of disaster, of a fall from grace, smacks more of
> wishful thinking than of digging through archives. It gains credence not
> from scholarship but from evocative dichotomies: fresh and natural versus
> processed and preserved; local versus global; slow versus fast: artisanal
> and traditional versus urban and industrial; healthful versus contaminated
> and fatty. History shows, I believe, that the Luddites have things back to
> front._

No, they don't. And his work is less historical than ideological.

We have lots of historically verified facts to know that modern processed
foods are unhealthy and created to maximize profit. From corn syrup
everywhere, to things like this:

E.g. [http://www.amazon.com/Tomatoland-Industrial-Agriculture-
Dest...](http://www.amazon.com/Tomatoland-Industrial-Agriculture-Destroyed-
Alluring/dp/1449423450)

------
arturnt
The article misconstrues multiple food movements from by taking three words,
natural, fresh, and local, and not understanding the context around them. The
article therefore boils down into a straw man argument.

The slow food movement particularly is a tiny minority, it’s like bringing up
the Tea Party, for a political debate. There is a much larger movement against
fast food, and that’s mostly because of chemicals used in fast food. Nitrate
preserved meat has links to cancer. Azodicarbonamide, a dough conditional,
banned in Europe/Australia, was in US Subway sandwiches till last year. Then
of course there is soda, a food engineered to be over-consumed, which leads to
diabetes and obesity.

No one outside of Raw Vegans, again another tiny minority, is against
preservation of foods. In fact, it’s common and promoted. The mechanism though
is typically through bacterial fermentation and pickling with vinegar which is
how most of the foods (soy, tofu, kimchi, sauerkraut, pickles, herring, yogurt
etc) are prepared, stored, and used during winter times when no vegetation is
available. Synthetic preservatives have been linked to negative health
outcomes.

The local food movement is really just about eating produce locally _when
possible_. Why should? Typically it’s cheaper, more varied, and more
nutritious. All of the words agriculture is bred for maximum shelf life. You
aren’t getting the best tasting food, you are just getting the food that won’t
go bad. That also means it’s less genetically diverse. There 10k varieties of
tomatoes, you can only buy about 5 commercially. Emphasis here is on produce,
no one is abstaining from imported spices.

Most of these movements come at the heels of rising obesity epidemic in the US
and around the world against an industry that’s for profit and not for pro
health. Some are extreme, but that helps swing the pendulum the opposite
direction. You can see the rise of more ingredient conscious and more
delicious Chipotle, which sources all ingredients within 350mi and the fall of
the heavily processed McDonalds. This is a net positive and not something we
should be condemning.

------
tripzilch
(I agree with most of this article, the author should take care not to fall
into the same trap as the "culinary Luddites" he describes, stating something
they merely believe to be the case, that isn't actually based in fact)

> prompting him to wonder whether they would really like things the way they
> naturally used to be. Natural was unreliable. Fresh fish began to stink.
> Fresh milk soured, eggs went rotten.

Eggs don't work that way. They don't go rotten unless they're damaged. An egg
is like a really big cell, and it's sterile on the inside.

US eggs are washed clean, to protect against Salmonella--which lives in
intestines and spreads through faecal matter, therefore occurs strictly on the
outside of an egg shell, and washing it probably works well against that.
Except it also removes/damages a protective layer (cuticle) in the shell,
allowing the rotting process to enter the inside.

In Europe the eggs aren't washed (I guess we take our chances with the
Salmonella?), and can therefore be stored unrefrigerated up to (at least) 21
days.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_%28food%29#Storage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_%28food%29#Storage)

I have heard (but never tested! so take this with a grain of salt) that with
an unwashed egg, in the end it is the yolk that sinks down, touches the shell,
making the membrane more permeable, that allows for the rotting to start. I've
been told (but again, never tested, own risk, etc) that if you _turn_ those
eggs weekly, keeping the yolk floating in the middle, you can even keep them
for 1-2 _years_. I suppose it might lose some of its flavour though :-P

If I were to look _purely_ at the health-factors of rotting vs Salmonella, I'd
have to prefer washing. At least if your egg is rotten, you'll immediately
_know_ it's rotten as soon as you open it (the smell is either there or it
isn't), while with Salmonella, you won't know until half a day after eating.
But I do like being able to keep my eggs at room-temperature in the kitchen
cupboard, though :)

------
rhaps0dy
I agree. Technology has always made our lives better, and I cannot find a
reason why technology applied to food would not be the same.

It is also true, though, that modern ultra-processed foods are often the ones
that are not healthy. Potato chips, sugar-laden pastries, not to speak of the
now almost unseen trans-saturated fat.

Look at Soylent though. Not sure about its tastiness, but it's supposed to be
all you need to eat.

~~~
throwawayaway
it's a truism that just because something is new, or just because something is
old - does not mean it is better or worse for that reason alone. perhaps with
the notable exception of archaeological or other historical artifacts.

another great truism is that value is subjective.

~~~
rhaps0dy
>perhaps with the notable exception of archaeological or other historical
artifacts

And those are good not because they are old, but because they provide
knowledge of the past.

~~~
throwawayaway
yes in that case, the uniqueness is the valuable thing. if an artifact is one
of many, like a chinese terracotta solider - it is less valuable than
something more unique.

------
Vegemeister
>Meanwhile, the rich, in search of a more varied diet, bought, stole,
wheedled, robbed, taxed, and ran off with appealing plants and animals,
foodstuffs, and culinary techniques from wherever they could find them.

Yup, that's Jacobin!

------
anabis
Culinary Luddism is slaughtering a chicken at home and having your children
abhor chicken meat forever (a few people I know).

~~~
EdwardDiego
A while ago I decided that if I couldn't kill and prepare my own meat because
I was too squeamish, I had no moral right to eat store-bought meat.

So when I found processing my first rabbit a little challenging (they smell
bad on the inside, and their teeth are long, yellow and very definitely rodent
teeth), I kept the thought of steak and bacon in my mind and pushed on
through.

But I still find it interesting how I had trouble reconciling the fact that my
meat used to be a corpse - when you're cooking game animals, the meat often
retains a flavour that you can smell while processing the carcass. The first
few times I ate something I had prepared, I ate sparingly, while my family
tucked in. I think it was due to my own mental assocation of corpses with
disease and decay.

So yeah, I think a fair few people who eat meat would not do so if they had to
process it from living animal to carcass to meat.

~~~
jessaustin
Perhaps we shouldn't take this squeamishness to signify anything other than a
simple discomfort with novel sensory input, rather than any deep moral
insights. I've butchered fish and game since I was in grade school. While I
recognize the odors, textures, and sights involved as specific to that
process, they don't put me off in any way. (Although perhaps in sufficient
volume they would; I've never been in a Tyson chicken plant.) Does that mean
that it's moral for me to eat all the meat I want, while more squeamish people
must eat less? Frankly I'm not sure either way. Maybe the squeamishness of the
most delicate among us indicts meat-eating for all of us?

------
asanagi
I didn't really read the article, I just Ctrl-F'd for "Japan". Japanese is
among the healthiest food cultures in the world, if you go by obesity
prevalence and life expectancy, and one I happen to know very well.

Predictably, the author mentions something about "sushi and soy sauce" because
that's the only thing he cared to learn about.

Forgive me a short anecdote. About ten years ago to the day, I was backpacking
around Kyushu with a friend of mine. One afternoon we had grown particularly
thirsty, and when we happened upon a farm with cows we sought the owner to see
if there was any milk. She was extraordinarily gracious and invited us into
her home. They had milk, of course, but far more interesting to me was the 90+
year old grandmother of the house, who was just about to arrive from picking a
kind of wild vegetable that grew everywhere and happened to be in season that
week. When she entered the house and saw the two of us, she presented us with
the crop and kowtowed such that her face, knees, and hands were all on the
floor, to honor us. Remarkably spry for a 90 year old.

In Japan there is a time and a season for every ingredient. We (Americans) go
to the supermarket every week and expect the same boring vegetables because we
have no idea how to make dinner unless it's tomatoes, onions, and broccoli, if
we are even making our own food at all. If those things aren't in season we
have them shipped from other countries. In reality the food we need is all
around us, or at least it is in places the environment hasn't been completely
destroyed. Industrial food will never lead us to the kind of richness of
variety and sensitivity to season you will find in Japan, or France, or almost
anywhere that isn't the USA really.

Yes, industrial factory food makes life 'easier' for us, but does it really
make life better? We like to eat our chicken without contemplating the fact
that all our animals are spending their entire lives in an abattoir.

Take a look at what actual food looks like (it's not sushi and soy sauce):
[https://www.google.com/search?q=%E5%89%B2%E7%83%B9%E6%96%99%...](https://www.google.com/search?q=%E5%89%B2%E7%83%B9%E6%96%99%E7%90%86&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=IC9hVdLpK4y_sQTd_YOAAw&ved=0CAgQ_AUoAg&biw=1280&bih=861)

