if you're from the usa, your grandparents could buy corn oil and margarine, and didn't see them as luxury items; but their generation didn't make a diet out of it

conventional convenience foods like mcdonalds hamburgers, coca-cola, and twinkies are about 3, 0.5, and 4 kilocalories per gram; olive oil and butter are 9. healthier foods like whole-wheat bread, eggs, eggplant, and fatty steak are 2.5, 1.5, 0.4, and 3.5 calories per gram. calorie density is not what makes eggs healthier than coca-cola

your hypothesis would also imply that people on low-carbohydrate diets consisting of fatty meat and cheese would rapidly gain weight, but instead they lose it

in case it wasn't clear, i think the explanation that the obesity pandemic is due to a sudden decline in willpower is unlikely

The amount of calories available per capita has gone up by c. 20% over the last 60 years.

Meanwhile, the amount of fat available has gone up 40%, while protein supplies have risen closer to c. 10%.

It is absolutely anti-data to imply that previous generations had access to the same amount/mix of food/calories as we do today.

https://ourworldindata.org/food-supply

> Culture has simply changed, and (bad) food has gotten to be incredibly cheap and easy to access.

It’s Gresham’s “law”: “bad money drives out good”, but applied to food.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham's_law

people hoard good food in their vaults while giving other people their bad food as quickly as they can, because the government has decreed that bad food is equivalent to good food?

that's total nonsense. gresham's law doesn't apply to food

It's also the simple fact that the average blue collar worker hasn't seen rising wages since the 80s. All the money accrued to the top, and the workers were left trying to make the same value of take home pay stretch farther and farther.

The reason most people think inflation sucks is because modern society would rather collapse than pay workers in line with historical norms.

>It's also the simple fact that the average blue collar worker hasn't seen rising wages since the 80s.

You probably need to define what you mean by average blue collar worker as there are many ways of looking at this data (and it is often difficult to even find the estimated levels of transfer payments being given). For example, this Fed chart shows CPI adjusted median household income rising from around 57 thousand to around 75 thousand today: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

Every real wage chart I see looks like workers have made slight but reasonably steady improvements since 2000 and are 10-15% ahead of the 1980s.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

I’ve always assumed the problem is that price increases don’t count as inflation if they come with a “quality” increase, but that doesn’t help someone who now needs to spend more to survive.

So it can both be true that inflation-adjusted wages are rising and it is becoming harder to make ends meet.

A wage that supported a cowboy with two sets of clothes, a house that wouldn’t pass any building codes, a horse instead of a car, and no phone is not going to support a modern worker even if “adjusted” for inflation.

Your comment makes me wonder what the relative total cost of a horse vs a car is.

historical norms were that workers were slaves with no civil rights that nobles or citizens could kill or rape with impunity

so fuck historical norms actually

> Even my grandparents saw things like olive oil and real butter as luxury items.

That "real" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Where I grew up we rarely use “real” for food. We take it for granted it is : butter, mayonnaise, mustard.