Re:Indoor farming: Good for cannabis, not so good for food
by jerf on Saturday January 02, 2016 @11:11AM
(#10826572)
It's not a new phenomenon; it's actually a very old one. Much of this US food culture that you (IMHO rightfully) decry comes from our cultural heritage, which, despite our post-WWII wealth, was then a poor country. Go back a hundred years in the US and what you'll find is a country mostly full of farmers, who are mostly concerned about A: having any food at all and B: making sure they don't die from the parasites in the food, one way or another.
I was born in 1978, and I was still raised in a culture of blasting my meat until all the pink is gone, and boiling my vegetables until all flavor was gone. My influential-grandparents were both raised on a farm, which influenced what my parents ate. (To this day, neither of my parents will even consider trying sushi, because it's raw fish. That's it. That ends the argument for them. You Don't Eat Raw Meat. You don't even eat slightly pink meat.) While this may have produced generations of people with low standards, it was caused by trying to make dubious food safe-to-eat. Even today, many of our official government standards still source from this heritage, being rather excessively conservative and recommending cooking meat as if it's still full of parasites, just to be safe.
So, it's not that "Americans" don't know what food is "supposed" to taste like anymore... many of us have never known what food is "supposed" to taste like, for many generations. This isn't a situation created by "Big Food", it's a pre-existing situation that allowed Big Food to drop in, and offer Americans food that tasted better than what they were used to. That it turns out to itself have been quite mediocre is a measure of just how bad what came before it is!
The trend in the US is quite clearly upwards; I think perhaps if you aren't at least 30 right now that might not be obvious, but believe me, it's getting better, not worse. Yeah, you can still buy Doritos, which haven't hardly changed in 30 years, but the produce sections! Holy shit the produce sections. If you were presented with a produce section from 1985 you'd reach to clean your glasses, if you have them. Absolutely night and day. And the other selections too; I can't go back in time but I wonder if my mom could even have bought any sort of extra-virgin olive oil back then, to take just one example, let alone have 10 different selections.
I was born in 1978, and I was still raised in a culture of blasting my meat until all the pink is gone, and boiling my vegetables until all flavor was gone. My influential-grandparents were both raised on a farm, which influenced what my parents ate. (To this day, neither of my parents will even consider trying sushi, because it's raw fish. That's it. That ends the argument for them. You Don't Eat Raw Meat. You don't even eat slightly pink meat.) While this may have produced generations of people with low standards, it was caused by trying to make dubious food safe-to-eat. Even today, many of our official government standards still source from this heritage, being rather excessively conservative and recommending cooking meat as if it's still full of parasites, just to be safe.
So, it's not that "Americans" don't know what food is "supposed" to taste like anymore... many of us have never known what food is "supposed" to taste like, for many generations. This isn't a situation created by "Big Food", it's a pre-existing situation that allowed Big Food to drop in, and offer Americans food that tasted better than what they were used to. That it turns out to itself have been quite mediocre is a measure of just how bad what came before it is!
The trend in the US is quite clearly upwards; I think perhaps if you aren't at least 30 right now that might not be obvious, but believe me, it's getting better, not worse. Yeah, you can still buy Doritos, which haven't hardly changed in 30 years, but the produce sections! Holy shit the produce sections. If you were presented with a produce section from 1985 you'd reach to clean your glasses, if you have them. Absolutely night and day. And the other selections too; I can't go back in time but I wonder if my mom could even have bought any sort of extra-virgin olive oil back then, to take just one example, let alone have 10 different selections.