Be Healthy or Else: How Corporations Became Obsessed with Fitness Tracking

Re:Be Healthy or Else: How Corporations Became Obsessed with... by lovich on Sunday January 01, 2017 @03:52PM (#13297278)

A lot of the cheapness of food is coming from using natural resources at an unsustainable rate, like draining the Ogallala Aquifer at far beyond its replenishment rate. I'd call that more along the lines of kicking the problems along for someone in the future to deal with all at once and not "doing very well"

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Re:Be Healthy or Else: How Corporations Became Obsessed with... by WalterBright on Sunday January 01, 2017 @04:13PM (#13297383)

The spectre of famine ended in the US around 1800 with free market agriculture, long before anyone heard of the Ogallala Aquifer. It also ended for every other country that adopted free market agriculture.

Non-free market agriculture, on the other hand, has a pretty sorry historical record with no evidence that it was more sustainable or equitable.

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Re:Be Healthy or Else: How Corporations Became Obsessed with... by lovich on Monday January 02, 2017 @12:42PM (#13302764)

US food production is decidedly non free market with the amount of subsidies the industry gets.

Additionaly, you can say the system is working great now, but if it's only doing so by pushing off externalities in an unsustainable way into the future in a forseeable manner, that does not mean the system is doing a great job

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Re:Be Healthy or Else: How Corporations Became Obsessed with... by hackuser on Sunday January 01, 2017 @04:38PM (#13297515)

> The spectre of famine ended in the US around 1800 with free market agriculture

I'm not sure how you define "famine", but many people have been malnourished since; some are right now AFAIK. Think of the Great Depression, for example, for a much greater scale problem. I would bet some have starved.

But most of all, any research you have would be appreciated; I feel like everyone, including me, is a bit naked out here.

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Re:Be Healthy or Else: How Corporations Became Obsessed with... by WalterBright on Sunday January 01, 2017 @05:54PM (#13297893)

One objective way is to look at average height, which increased throughout the 19th century in the US, and increased in other countries when they adopted free market agriculture. Height is a good proxy for having sufficient nutritious food.

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Re:Be Healthy or Else: How Corporations Became Obsessed with... by hackuser on Sunday January 01, 2017 @10:01PM (#13298765)

> One objective way is to look at average height, which increased throughout the 19th century in the US, and increased in other countries when they adopted free market agriculture. Height is a good proxy for having sufficient nutritious food.

An insightful way to look at it; thanks. However, the question at hand isn't about the average, but the low end: Was there malnutrition or starvation? Yes, there was and is.

EDIT: See this post for some numbers:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13298775

I'm not debating whether free market food works very well for 90% in wealthy countries (just a guess at a number) and far better than whatever was done in the 18th century, but that doesn't mean we should call it sufficient or the 'best of all possible worlds'. If millions (tens of millions?) of people in wealthy countries and (hundreds of millions? billions?) in other countries are not getting sufficient food, that's failure - just less failure than we experienced before.

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Re:Be Healthy or Else: How Corporations Became Obsessed with... by WalterBright on Sunday January 01, 2017 @10:52PM (#13298928)

Compare free market food production with any other system. Starvation in the world is in countries without free market agriculture.

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Re:Be Healthy or Else: How Corporations Became Obsessed with... by hackuser on Monday January 02, 2017 @12:29AM (#13299265)

I don't get the impression that you read my comment.

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