by Jasper Gilley
I think there are currently a large cluster of suboptimalities and misconceptions surrounding food, at least in the first world and probably also in the third too (in the second world, there wasn’t much food to be misconceptioned.) I’ll focus here on my experiences of food in the first world, because for better or worse, everyone is shifting towards this paradigm. In quasi-listicle format, I present my problems with food.
Problem 1: Food is Expensive/Labor-intensive
Food delivered by vector of restaurant is both dumbly expensive and inhumanly labor-intensive, which, of course, are two sides of the same coin. Beginning with the latter, which is really the original causal factor, it’s ludicrous that, in an era of electric cars, iPhones, and Grand Theft Auto, 12 million humans would still be employed in the food services industry. When you think about it, preparing food for others (and getting paid very little to do it) is a fundamentally dehumanizing occupation, akin to working in a textile factory or something. I think it’s pretty unambiguously the worst job that a large number of people in the developed world still have. I’m not sure, but I might rather be homeless than work in the food services industry.
Food delivered by vector of grocery store is still pretty expensive and still labor-intensive, just this time, it’s you doing the laboring. Which also doesn’t make sense, because, if you’re reading this post, the value of your time is probably higher than $10/hr. When you factor in opportunity cost, grocery store food is actually probably more expensive than restaurant food for most people. Which is also silly.
I’m by no means a workers’ rights crusader, but this is something that probably needs to get fixed ASAP as possible.
Problem 1.5: The Bundled Nature of Dopamine and Nutrition
Part of the problem here is the way that food is programmed into humans’ minds. Food is fundamentally something that humans just need to survive, but it’s also something that humans get dopamine out of. This also helps drive up the price of food, since nobody wants just the nutrition part. Why do something you need to do without getting dopamine in the process when you can get dopamine in the process of doing it?
This isn’t to mention, of course, the incredible extent to which bundling dopamine and nutrition is a terrible evolutionary adaptation at this point in time. Gorging on sugary foods (probably fruit) made a lot of sense for hunter-gatherers, for whom the abundance of such foods was a rarity. Gorging on Oreos makes no sense, except that you get a lot of dopamine from it.
This bundling also selects for foods that humans get dopamine from, one of which is meat. This creates a lot of further problems. See below.
Problem 2: Food is Absurdly Unethical
If you want to look for the most morally despicable things that humans currently do, it’s pretty obvious that these things are done to animals in the name of getting cheap dopamine to everyone. However, 99% of people – as in, literally 99% of people – don’t want to look for the most morally despicable things that humans currently do. In fact, as long as they get their dopamine, they’re happy to actively turn a blind eye to absurdly unethical shit. Which is fine, except that in 100 or 200 years everyone is going to look at this point in history as a time of Great Moral Depravity.
If you do any research at all into factory farming, it becomes quickly obvious that, even by today’s standards (e.g., “animal rights”), we shouldn’t be proud of the actions that we’re incentivizing factory farmers to take by demanding great quantities of meat on the cheap. By tomorrow’s standards (when terms like “animal rights” are going to sound hopelessly trivial/weak/anachronistic), it’s conceivable that factory farming could be viewed as the single biggest moral atrocity ever committed by the human race.
How could one assign such moral significance to the shitty things done to animals? one might ask. Isn’t doing shitty things to humans inherently something like 100x worse than doing equivalent shitty things to animals? This is certainly the viewpoint held by most humans right now, and the viewpoint that has been dominant among humans for most of human history. However, it’s based upon our only having theory of mind for humans, not animals (which is understandable, since at the moment we can’t communicate with animals.) We have no reason to believe, though, that animals (at least those with reasonably large brains) don’t possess something very much akin to what we’d term sentience in humans, and this hypothesis is likely to be verified as soon as brain-computer interfaces allow rigorous evaluation of brains, human or otherwise.
Solving Food
What does solving food mean? Well, here are some things that it doesn’t mean:
- Eliminating GMO foods
- Eating organic
- Patronizing “small batch” bougie food brands that are almost always more expensive and objectively less tasty than the alternatives
I’m not saying that these things are inherently problematic in and of themselves. Actually, with two of these, I am. Organic foods are in some ways better and in some ways worse than non-organic alternatives (better on most metrics of healthiness, worse on metrics of resource intensity and price.) All other things equal, however, GMO foods are quantifiably better than non-GMO foods, and only somebody who’s trying to sell you something will tell you otherwise. On a related note, there are not many things in the world that irritate me more than the aforementioned bougie food brands. (If you’re wondering what I’m referring to, these brands are what Whole Foods largely consists of.) They’re essentially a byproduct of the rule that, if you slap an Instagrammable label on a jar and use meaningless buzzwords like “made with all-natural ingredients”, you can get people to pay 5x what they otherwise would pay for food of equivalent quality.
Case in point:
(Fig. 1 – bougie useless food. Retails for $7.50/bottle)
Harmless Harvest Coconut Water™ is great except for:
- Nobody fucking likes coconut water
- Only people who hate themselves will pay $7.50 for a bottle of something that tastes bad and gives you zero nutrition
- If you’re going to buy this, you may as well just spend your money on donating a building at your local Ivy League university because there’s about a 100% demographic overlap between people who do these two things
- Why would you pay extra for a product that’s ostentatiously Fair Trade™ and split the proceeds 70-30 between a for-profit corporation and some farmers when you could make a donation to an actual charitable cause of actual significance
- Also, nobody actually likes coconut water
Basically, patrons of Harmless Harvest Coconut Water™ and similar brands are following the Michael Scott model of philanthropy:
“…it’s for charity. And I consider myself a great philanderer. It’s just…It’s nice to know at the end of the day, I can look in the mirror and say, ‘Michael, because of you, some little kid in the Congo has a belly full of rice this evening.’ Makes you feel good.” – Michael Scott
Anyway, rant over, I think that solving food means – very generally – making food more industrial-capitalist. I use the term capitalist with tongue in cheek because it will irritate people who think parochially about economic systems. Here’s what capitalism is: the substitution of capital (i.e., investment) and technology for manual labor. What this means in the context of food production/preparation is automating the entire supply chain of food. Right now, food cultivation is wonderfully automated. According to one of my professors (read: I won’t bother fact-checking or citing), about 2-3% of the population of the world’s foremost agricultural superpower (the US) is employed in farming. However, by the BLS statistics cited previously, more people than that are employed in food preparation/serving (this also doesn’t factor in individuals not employed in food preparation who nonetheless prepare food for themselves, which really should be factored in if you want to get a complete picture of the market inefficiencies.) The extreme labor-intensiveness of food preparation/presentation is un-industrial-capitalist (or at least early-stage-capitalist) insofar as it necessitates large quantities of poorly-paid laborers. (A reminder: the early stage of capitalism, in which large numbers of people are paid in low-wage jobs, is also the one in which Marx argues that communist revolution is inevitable.)
Consider for analogy how humans heated their homes before and after the Industrial Revolution. For most people during most of the time prior to the Industrial Revolution, heating your home meant going out and chopping down trees and lighting them on fire in your house, or paying someone else to do it for you. Clearly, if you lived in northerly climes, it would be suboptimal to spend significant amounts of time or money on something so basic. Now, however, heating your home means paying a few bucks a month to the gas company, and tweaking your thermostat. Food right now is somewhat similar to pre-Industrial home heating: it necessitates a fairly sizable expenditure of either time or money to procure even kind of shitty food. What would be great is if one could do the equivalent of paying a few bucks a month to the gas company, but for food.
Of course, food isn’t a commodity – differentiation between products is very much a thing. But it seems like there should be a commodity version of food: something that tastes OK, provides you with at least some meaningful portion of your nutrition, and is super cheap. This only sort of exists right now. The closest thing I can think of is Soylent (or similar products), which ticks the first two boxes but not really the third. One shouldn’t expect a new product like Soylent to be commodity-cheap, but it’d be wonderful if it headed in that direction over the next few years.
And naturally, you should still be able to pay more money for novelty food, just like you can pay more money to get logs to put on your campfire when you go camping. But having to buy logs from a gas station every time you want to heat your house would seriously suck, and I think that’s the kind of situation food is in right now.