No VPN partners or other bullshit, just great content enjoyed by a large variety of people. Most of military food interest, some use it for sleeping, or for better apetite under medical treatments.
Never gets old :')
I've never been a regular smoker, but I bet that for someone who was, smoking a single cigarette every few months would be an almost religious experience. You'd be getting all of the sensory associations, plus the chemical stimulation unblunted by accumulated tolerance.
Like all drugs, there are bad parts and good parts to it. Since most people are hopefully never going to be shot, it's positive effects are mostly useless and the long term negative effects will kill you. But if you have a reasonable suspicion that you are going to be in mortal danger soon, yeah, I'd have a cigarette.
We’d sit in his yard in summer eating, drinking, soaking in the sun, then in the evening have the hookah out with some relaxing music. Or some prog rock. He loved that stuff.
The buzz really is amazing. I was a serious runner at the time clocking something like 50k a week, and a session on that thing would be felt later on. It was brutal for lung health. I recall being grateful that I could tell how harmful it was because it otherwise might seem compelling to keep doing it.
Even if you don’t smoke, tobacco plants are definitely something to trying growing in the garden once. They are beautiful and their scent is wonderful and carries quite a ways. They start off as night flowering for hawkmoth pollination, then switch to day flowing for hummingbirds when they start getting fed on by hawk moth larvae.
I understand why Native Americans used tobacco in religious ceremonies.
The worst of both words, while slowly killing you. Which is good, there are tons of great things in life, no need to waste time and hitpoints on such crap.
If you decided to get addicted to vintage MRE tobacco you'd probably have a pretty tough time sourcing enough of it to give yourself cancer.
This means that there are parts of the paper wrapper that have vinyl compounds that are intended to allow them to self-extinguish.
Compared to the cigarettes of yore, these taste like fried dick cancer.
But old tobacco doesn't always age well. It can survive for centuries if stored at the appropriate temperature and humidity and away from things that would impact the taste, or it can turn stale and fairly blah in weeks or months when stored poorly.
(One can make them themselves, just as one can make anything else by oneself, but then one would not be purchasing them as completed items.)
The cigarette reviews tend to be a bonus segment - most MREs don't include them today (for good reason) and it's not the intended purpose of the channel anyways. That being said, I have never craved a cigarette more than the moment I laid eyes on a box of 1944 Chesterfields.
Honestly I'd just recommend all the episodes, MRESteve defines "peak YouTube" for me. It's a really relaxed and fun exploration of the different survival meals and basic kits distributed to soldiers around the world.
Tom Scott did a video in 2019 entitled "This Video Is Sponsored By [redacted] VPN" where he explains why a lot of the ad copy at that time was often misleading, and why he didn't take money from them:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY
In 2022 he made video with an ad read from a VPN provider with more honest claims about their use cases:
It'll be great for customers. Prices should continue to come down.
For instance, an embassy with clear telephone and telegraph lines knows they're being listened to, and subsequently is very careful about what they transmit. An embassy who has bought Crypto AG (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG ) equipment thinks they are secure and transmits information they would never dream of sending if they knew they were being listened to.
Some jerk in a cube farm in Maryland does.
Specifically:
* there is a presumption that a VPN, esp. a commercial one used by the average person for non-work related activities, is doing something shady. not entirely unfounded, though "shady" could simply be watching Brazilian Netflix
* the ISP can't see what you're doing, but the VPN can, and they're almost certainly using some sort of specialty firewalls / VPN aggregators / custom devices. Chances are those devices can do some deep packet inspection, and any lag would be perceived as using the VPN. Might even be able to MITM connections, maybe.
* DNS is often just as interesting or damning as actual traffic, and most VPNs will configure you to use their DNS to prevent leaks. but that means they know you're looking up "totally-legit-bitcoin-trade-site.com", or maybe "hardcore-gay-pronz.net" 3 times a day. they don't know what you're looking at while on those websites -- maybe you're ssh-ing to their server to fix apache? -- but they can make assumptions.
You may want to consider this Helloween deal: 3 years for 65 Euros: https://airvpn.org/buy/
I use AirVPN myself. It is not as comfortable and convenient as Astrill but works for me. (Disclaimer: No affiliation and I have not tried AirVPN in China yet)
1. During WW2 the British established a ration of "standard bread" to eliminate wheat imports. This is still the price-controlled bread type, and led to the replacement of some pita consumption.
2. The austerity years coincided with (and were in large part caused by) a rapid doubling of the population by expellees from Arab countries. Lots of them were used to rice, but with food rationing and price controls were in place, rice would have been a strain on government finances. So the state pushed "Ben Gurion Rice", aka Israeli/pearl couscous, a good-enough substitute that could be made from cheap American wheat imports.
I'm sure there's more hiding under the surface, I just don't know all the history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_...
I'm guessing that is what they are talking about.
The population of Israel approximately doubled from 1949 to 1965. It did so because of immigrants from places like Egypt, Iraq, and Yemen.
The overwhelming majority of those immigrants were not voluntary, but were forced to leave by formal expulsion (Egypt, semi-formal in Iraq); revocation of citizenship (Algeria, Libya); massive official discrimination (eg Syria); or simple mob violence (Libya again, Tunisia, Morocco). In Egypt there was a wonderful trick of forcing expellees to sign papers saying their departure was "voluntary".
In countries where only mob violence was involved (Morocco, Tunisia), some Jewish communities remained. Then there's the interesting Lebanese case, where the Jewish community thrived until targeted during the civil war.
But yeah, don't pretend that the complete nonexistence of Jewish communities in Yemen or Iraq or Egypt happened by chance.
And anyway, the Iraqi government had already begun and, after the bombings, accelerated a program of expulsion. Unless you're going to disavow Nuri as-Said as a "Zionist", the actual causes are Iraqi state policy.
(Pre-1948 Iraq was also, despite your insinuation, not exactly friendly to Jews. cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farhud, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawud_Pasha_of_Baghdad.)
Anyway, I'm done with this side tangent. Enjoy your fantasies about how 99% of Jews left Iraq and Egypt and Yemen, and 90% left Tunisia and Morocco, because of evil foreigners and the local Jews' disloyalty.
> The theory that "certain Jews" carried out the attacks "in order to focus the attention of the Israel Government on the plight of the Jews" was viewed as "more plausible than most" by the British Foreign Office
Hundreds of thousands of people, whether Palestinian, Jewish, Desi, or German, don't tend to move en masse without violence.
People who hold a mental model of Israel as a White European Colonizer seem to simply reject the idea that it absorbed more than a half million fleeing Black & Brown Jews in its first decades of existence. If they even accept that 90% of the Jews in Arab countries suddenly left without their property and money, they insist that it was a voluntary move due to inherent Jewish disloyalty to their broader societies.
Interestingly, the term "ethnic cleansing" wasn't coined until the 1990s. The 20th century push for ethnic self determination came with an understanding that people would have to be moved to form concentrated and contiguous populations that could self determine. Millions of people were forced to move in the 1940s to establish India, Pakistan, and a more Slavic Soviet Union.
Rationing was necessary because pricing laws stopped prices from climbing. So demand was higher than supply.
Today there would not be rationing. Prices would be allowed to float, so things in short supply just get expensive. Fears of exhaustion cause people to stock-pile.
This is exactly the approach taken during, and after, the pandemic. It's simpler to let people complain about shortages and prices, and the rich can get whatever they like, as much as they like.
Look at the varied response to "stay home and mask up" - actions which are literally trivial to follow. No sane US govt would attempt "rationing" - the population would simply ignore them.
is that what happened during covid for masks and toilet paper?
Retailers mostly didn't raise prices even when they could have, because it wouldn't have been worth the bad optics.
Some people skirted the rules, bought out store shelves and set up their own at higher prices, but they were pretty thoroughly shunned and some were later taken to court.
we lack the ability to make sacrifices for the communal good.
But with the 'rona it wasn't presented as such; there was a clear propaganda push from some corners telling people that their freedoms were being taken away, that they were suffering, etc.
People’s freedoms were, literally, being taken away. Whether the extent to which freedoms were curtailed was worth the extent to which doing so helped slow the spread of the virus is a subjective question that reasonable people can debate. It’s unfair to dismiss either side of that debate as “propaganda”.
Sitting around at home is much better than dying or suffering long-term effects of COVID-19 infection. How people did not see beyond this is beyond comprehension. What the hell was so important that it couldn’t wait a few months?
Yes, obviously, but that wasn't the choice. It was probabilistic: sitting around at home vs. some chance of dying or suffering long-term effects of COVID-19 infection.
> What the hell was so important that it couldn’t wait a few months?
Everything? I don't know if I even understand the question. Why do you think people don't like going to prison for example?
---
EDIT to explain further:
Let me give a hypothetical extreme example. Now I'm not claiming that the tradeoff in the case of COVID is this lopsided, but I'm just trying to illustrate the framework for thinking about these kinds of question. Imagine you are given two options:
OPTION A: You go to prison for 10 years. Separately, much later, you die at age 83.
OPTION B: You don't go to prison. There's a 99% chance that nothing happens (you stil dies at 83). There's a 1% chance that you die a year earlier, at 82.
In this extreme example, obviously, everyone would pick Option B.
Because of our self-preservation instinct, we don't like to think about the fact that we're inevitably going to die someday, so human moral intuition tends to think of saving a life as having infinite value. But that's not the case: the point of this reductio ad absurdum is that there is no such thing as saving a life, only extending it for some finite amount of time.
If you make V people's lives worse by W% for X time, to extend Y people's lives by Z time, whether it is "worth it" depends on the values of all the variables involved. Reasonable people can debate whether this was the case for the Covid lockdowns, and that is properly a political question, not a scientific one (though science can help inform it).
You wouldn’t have a picnic in the middle of a forest fire, just like you shouldn’t go out into some me-first in the middle of a pandemic. If you did, you’re going suffer consequences and use up resources of those that were caught up by a accident. Both can wait.
This Kantian mindset has to go.
Firstly, there is the issue of hindsight bias. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we had limited knowledge about the potential impact of the virus. Our understanding was primarily based on previous outbreaks like SARS and MERS, which had mortality rates as high as 50%, and alarming outbreaks on cruise ships and in apartment complexes which suggested fast spread of the virus through contaminated surfaces as well as through the air. The rapid global spread of the virus, facilitated by increased air travel, compounded these concerns.
Authorities were acutely aware that regions with less advanced healthcare systems would be particularly vulnerable. Even in countries with robust healthcare infrastructures, there was a significant risk that ICU units could be overwhelmed by the influx of severely ill COVID-19 patients requiring extended duration intensive care, with high-flow oxygen therapy often followed by intubation and a prolonged period of induced coma. This situation threatened to reduce the availability of intensive care for other critical cases.
Moreover, there was an initial shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) and oxygen supplies, exemplified by the oxygen shortages in India.
Finally, there was a real concern about the emergence of more lethal variants of the virus, particularly given the rapidly increasing number of infections and the vulnerability of immunocompromised individuals as potential incubators for new variants.
All these factors contributed to fears of a devastating societal and economic impact, as seen in the mass migrations of unemployed individuals in India returning to their hometowns and villages to support their families.
In my opinion, these considerations underscore why many measures taken during the pandemic were deemed necessary at the time.
How much runway do you think the average service industry business has?
How much runway do you think the people it employs has?
My favorite Chinese buffet is now an armed forces recruiting center. The adjacent movie theater is unoccupied. I can go on.
I'm not saying it should have been business as usual but to ignore that many parties lost big because of what was done is to be misleading at best.
Or maybe we learnt that there’s no common good.
Look at how money flows (and flew right after WW2 and kept flowing) and concentrates at a certain section of pyramid - yes even in developed countries, in fact especially there.
On the other hand, go look into the history of cannon fodder soldiers from colonies in both of the “great” wars of the West and look at what happened to those nations right after and even until now. In fact somewhere told “tough luck, we still feel like keeping you enslaved little more”.
Well that’d happening inside nation's now. Differently - the name could be exploitation or something else.
I think the world has finally had enough of recorded history to learn the exact “common and communal good”!
A century ago, old people would have made sacrifices so that young people could live their lives. Baby boomers are too self absorbed for that, far too selfish. I gave them two months, which is more than I should have. Give an inch and they'll try to take a mile. If it wasn't for the pushback we'd all still be isolating to make baby boomers feel safe.
Just like arguments to “think of the children” are almost never made by children themselves.
From what I remember it was the boomers who were the loudest voices against “shelter in place” during the pandemic. Young people were the ones happily following what ever order the authorities demanded.
Success was quite the moving target back then and to be cranky that two weeks lead to two years drastically underestimates the difficulty of the problem. Paxlovid, Boosters, knowledge on how to treat AND THE FACT that the ones that were susceptible are DEAD... (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...)
Your take on it is tone deaf and lacking in empathy.
There’s emergent behavior that came out of well known scientific behavior in trying to contain a global phenomenon that we didn’t fully understand when it hit.
The US government realized they needed people to staff munitions factories more than they needed fresh recruits.
So the US government abolished voluntary enlistment, drafted new recruits, and told everyone else to get a job.
It did not go over well. People don’t like being told there is a crisis, but they should “stay home and do nothing.” Even if “do nothing” is building tanks.
So the government wisely fudged. The Coast Guard and Merchant Marine began recruiting. Paramilitary agencies were created. Proganda began pushing the importance of the “common man.”
People in the 1940s didn’t like being told to stay home and “mask up” any more than we do.
(Are our boomer parents in rural areas in the least grateful that we collectively saved them from dying at the same rates experienced in most of the world? No.
Did it have a serious effect on our psyche? See last paragraph…).
For example, the "US death rate" is somewhat meaningless because it encompasses multiple communities which adopted multiple strategies, with multiple levels of diligence, and covers both large concentrated populations and small distributed populations.
US deaths were not evenly spread, so there was certainly some variety of outcome with variety of mitigation.
Overall, the US death rate though is high, which suggests that it's very high in some areas. The correlation between strategy, compliance and outcome will feed researchers for a long time.
So to conclude the complete opposite of what the current data shows, dirty or not, is wrong. To then be upset at it is misguided.
I'd be curious to see rates by country by BMI and infection date. There were definitely lessons learned from Italy's early surge that helped other countries in the early days.
Nobody is going to be grateful for something that didn't happen, why would people be grateful for dying less as a population, if they in fact did not die less? Also there were lockdowns all over the world, not just in the US.
Besides that? I live in an extremely low-density area, it was pretty much business as usual. Restaurants were takeout only, when parks weren't mostly deserted, people spaced themselves out. I remember meeting a couple of my wife's friends in a park and we all just sat in a giant circle. Lockdown was more a minor irritation than anything.
> Did it have a serious effect on our psyche? See last paragraph…).
That's a huge caveat you just snuck in there. I'm totally with you on the first part about largely having gotten through lockdowns, though it wasn't without some damage and suicide and crime rates did go up for example.
We simply don't have data about how many boomer parents in rural areas were saved from dying. For one thing the virus mortality rate was much less than it could have been. For another we never actually ran randomized control studies testing efficacy against death.
Given that you singled out boomers in rural areas, I also assuming that they either didn't get vaccinated or were somehow saved by those younger people in cities that did choose to get the shots. How do you assume that? The vaccines didn't prove out to be very good at preventing transmission, and preventing transmission between populated cities and rural areas is pretty well handled by geography.
I think a lot about victory gardens since I moved to rural Virginia. Commercial agriculture is big here and some I've spoken with assume that because so much of the land is farmed, that individuals have gardens or know how to grow fruit and vegetables. But this is just not true. There is a huge difference between commercial agriculture and home gardens.
I haven't looked into it enough to determine if people don't know how to garden, rent so can't create a garden, or what. But I'll keep taking about it and maybe someone will do something about it.
Why not two clubs with 1 permanent member each, with one person swinging between them? Why not one club with 2 or 3 people? Why not 3 "clubs"?
Why must it be as you describe?
Fundamentally a Victory garden is small scale soil managment at its very best. Thanks Gabe.
We're the weirdos around here with a small herd of dairy cows, pigs, and chickens along with a small-ish garden for ourselves.
The series itself is a spinoff of the weirdly charming The Victorian Kitchen Garden which reenacted a year of growing in a victorian walled kitchen garden for a great house with a master gardener who learned his trade before WWII. It’s rather soothing, as the New Yorker noted at the start of the pandemic: https://archive.is/iAGgr
(Findable on Dailymotion)
What would you like to happen?
Where I live there are multiple allotments within walking distance from me. These are basically enclosed gardens where people can rent small plots to grow vegetables on. It is a nice hobby. You are outside a lot, have a nice comunal feel to it, you get produce you can feel proud of. But it is not really going to replace grocery stores for anyone. (Nor is it meant to.)
I can imagine scenairos where skills obtained from it would help resiliency and survival. But i can also imagine lot of other scenairos where other hobbies would do the same. Why is it growing small scale vegetable gardens is the skill to concentrate on?
Reminder that a significant portion of the American public opposed participation in WW2 until the US Navy got attacked by Japan and Germany subsequently declared war as well.
(And before anybody says it, refusing to sell oil to Japan so their armies could take over Asia wasn't America declaring war on Japan, nor did it give Japan a legitimate or rational cause to attack America. Japan caused war for themselves by their own imperialist ambitions.)
I did write this!
Also you have no idea if there will be no shortage of gunpowder. Rationing gets applied where the shortages are, and the shortages are many times difficult to anticipate or predict. I get your point and agree it's more likely to be new items, but that's just a gut feeling. In reality shortages can happen on basic products that are easy to manufacture but which a country doesn't manufacture anymore, for example if it's not very profitable.
Nitrate is NO3. It is produced 100% from the air, by a process which is exothermic. So it’s (almost) free, at the margin, or would be if not for the need of pure input gasses.
A Haber-Bosch plant is a factory the size of a city that produces all the fertilizer or explosives you’d ever want, using nothing but air, water, and electricity as input.
We can confidently say that this particular shortage won’t be an issue anymore.
The development of synthetic gunpowder via the Haber-Bosch process, which fueled Germany through two world wars, but only became available to the allies after WW2, means this particular form of rationing is a thing of the past.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/04/reluctant...
Nitroglycerin was used as a component of smokeless powder -- propellant for bullets, mortar shells, and artillery.
The Haber-Bosch process was used by all belligerents in World War II. Germany was the only operator of the process during World War I, but it rapidly spread throughout the world between the wars.
For the USA at least. The UK was a different issue, as they were actively being bombed and therefore experienced direct shortages.
The US and other countries also used synthetic Haber process ammonia to make nitric acid and explosives from it during World War II.
Here's a 1946 report about American chemical plants and facilities built to support the war effort:
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001108531
From pages 2 and 3 of the report:
The Government has invested more than $200 million in 10 synthetic ammonia plants, having a combined design capacity of about 800,000 tons of fixed nitrogen per year. These include eight ordnance plants, of which six have been declared surplus, one Defense Plant Corporation plant and one belonging to the Tennessee Valley Authority. Four plants have facilities for producing ammonium nitrate solutions. The nitric acid facilities located in the explosives plants of (2), and the ammonium nitrate graining facilities found in the ammunition loading plants of of (1) have a definite relationship to the ammonia plants.
Resources like aluminum, copper, rubber, pharmaceuticals, chips and rare earth elements.
[0] https://m.youtube.com/@TastingHistory [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ED7kGq4Ieak [2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i8ROieDwLBw
Is there no point that's too far!? Unbelievable!
https://vsmk.ch/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/60_006_d.pdf-Koch...
(and speaking of trail food: couscous with as much squeeze margarine as it can absorb makes for a quick high calorie life sustaining glop; I was wondering more about the entire cookbook than this particular recipe)
EDIT: in non-trail food, I find it tough to beat rice & corn/hominy & beans for cheap and cheerful.
That said, while it looked rather unappetizing in its canned loaf shape, it's mostly pork shoulder, and after I cubed it and pan-fried it for a bit, it tasted like a crunchier ham steak. It was quite delightful when mixed into fried rice.
Counterexample: spam fritters. Those and badly cooked ox liver were the two worst school dinners I ever had to force down (Brit, 1970s)
And no, Miss, the jam splotch on top only makes it worse.
And the spam fritters - that is a nightmare I had totally suppressed until it was just mentioned up above.
Sorry! Perhaps I can defuse the situation a little bit by mentioning the hard brown tiles (of shortbread?) with the pink 'custard'. These weren't nauseating, just merely inedible.
Me, the occasional fried spam sandwich is a delicious indulgence.
I assumed it indicated some customer-base with a significant level of nostalgia for the product.
For some definition of "fine", at any rate. Outside of groups like the Inuit who eat a lot of organ meat to compensate, we don't have a great idea of what sort of long-term nutrient deficiencies you may accrue by eschewing all fibre and carbohydrate-based foods.
This was, however, the start of a radical change in food culture in the US. WWII introduced refrigerated food transport, improvements in canning, and developing frozen and shelf-stable meals. The result was 2-3 decades of Americans eating TV dinners and canned foods, as well as the rapid expansion of fast food restaurants. The growth of supermarkets and year-round produce then shrank the available variety of foods, and intensive ag practices reduced the nutritional quality of those foods.
Thank God for Julia Child. She single-handedly turned the tide away from an ocean of bland crap and back towards delicious home-cooked meals (for a small portion of Americans, anyway). It did not stem the tide against the rise in obesity, which began in the 70s, largely due to the explosive growth of cheap fast food and junk food, lobbying, and a lack of education around food and health.
There was a series of science-mistakes that cascaded into the obesity epidemic. Ancel Keys kicked off the chain by slandering saturated fat.
I think there was a protective factor in the food supply that was reduced in the latter half of the 1970’s. Around 1990 McDonald’s was tricked into replacing their saturated frying oil with polyunsaturated oil...
the most prominent example of this is Heinz ketchup, where Heinz lobbied for the FDA and essentially got most of its competitors out of the market as a result; Heinz was the only major ketchup producer not using preservatives. https://archive.ph/1y8f5
---
IIRC the major problem in food science is that most of the people willing to pay for food studies are food makers.
But they junked that in 2011 and replaced it with a trivial pursuit-looking thing called MyPlate. More details at choosemyplate.gov.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/09/19/addiction...
I strongly suggest you don't take the information from a documentary, which is focused on engaging story telling in order to make money, with a balanced and complete view of the situation.
There was no effort to dissuade further research yourself or to not engage with other mediums. I also don't believe they were supposing your only source of information should come from their casual suggestion. "I strongly suggest" you go ahead and link the research papers you've personally vetted like the poster above you trying to contribute to the discussion did that covers these topics indepth if you feel passionate about the lacking information.
Documentaries tell stories. They often leave out facts that run counter, rarely try and provide a balanced view and their intent is to make money.
> vegetarians or people who don’t eat beef were mad.
I think you’re referring to the vegetarian who sued Buffalo Wild Wings for still using beef tallow in their fryers, even after the restaurant industry had mostly switched to industrial seed oils.
https://www.drovers.com/news/vegetarians-lawsuit-over-beef-t...
Part of the reputational risk at McDonald’s was that at the time they were heavily communicating that the standard items were standardized everywhere, so the revelation that US McDonalds used beef in fries did not go down particularly well in South Asia.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Sokolof
I said McDonald's was 'tricked' in ~1990 into switching to vegetable oil. This was trickery both because the fries became less healthy (Omega-6 oils are inflammatory, etc), and less tasty. Malcolm Gladwell's podcast McDonald's Broke My Heart is about how the fryer oil switch made McDonald's fries soggy: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/mcdonald...
The 2002 article you linked to is about how vegetarians believed the switch to using seed oils as the fryer oil made McDonald's french fries compatible with their dietary philosophy. Those lawsuits were in the late 1990's or early 2000's, which was well after the 1990/1992 fryer oil switch.
Thanks for bringing up the early 2000's lawsuit against McDonald's by vegetarians - I was not aware of that. My point was that Ancel Keys' holy war against saturated Fat was an important part of the cascade of science-mistakes that resulted in the obesity epidemic which took off around 1980 (weight started inching up in the "post WWII" period, but didn't take off until ~1980).
While there's no real answer yet, most science is beginning to point to overeating as the real culprit. Processed foods simply make food more delicious, making you eat more of it. Munch on some raw broccoli and well you'll get tired of it real fast. Fry the broccoli up in some olive oil and it'll taste a lot better, so you'll eat a lot more of it. Since WWII we've increased the availability of salts (counting MSG here), fats, sweeteners, and spices. Fast food thrives off very cheap manufactured products designed to make caloric dense foods taste delicious.
Compare American portion sizes to portion sizes anywhere else in the world when eating out. They're enormous. While the science isn't definitive, it's beginning to look a lot more like controlling how much you eat is the answer. The problem is in our current world it's trivial to eat delicious food and eat much more than you need to survive.
If you cook, the cool thing is you can use the same tricks fast food uses to make healthy food much more delicious. You can incorporate fiber heavy vegetables, season them with some salt and MSG and make them delicious while filling you up. Eat heavy on proteins which make you stay full for longer (this doesn't mean meat, there's plenty of vegetarian protein dense options like tempeh, tofu, and seitan out there.) But applying these tricks at a population level continues to be a huge, unsolved public health problem.
[1]: https://world.openfoodfacts.org/product/3266980891411/filet-...
[2]: https://world.openfoodfacts.org/product/8410789140118/tofu-f...
This kind of processing has been done industrially for thousands of years, e.g. with the production of meal or flour from seeds or the extraction of oil from oily fruits or oily seeds.
As long as care is taken to prevent changes in the parts of the food that are separated (e.g. by using cold pressing or sCO2 extraction instead of hot pressing for oil extraction), such processing methods cannot have any detrimental effects on food, but they can greatly reduce the costs needed for the storage and for the transport of food.
The second class of food processing methods mix various food ingredients and/or transform the food in various ways, by using heating, whipping etc.
When food processing methods of the second class are used industrially, as opposed to being performed at home by the end consumer, they almost always result in unhealthy food, because the interest of the food vendor of obtaining a maximum profit conflicts with the requirements that have to be observed in order to make a healthy food.
Terms like "highly-processed food" or "ultra-processed food" make sense only when applied to food processed with methods of the second class.
Chicken breast separated from bones and skin is not more processed than an apple separated from its tree.
It is extracted, yes, but the actual thing that you eat has its original consistency, therefore is unprocessed.
Is it a perfect categorisation method? No, such does not exist. Is it immensely more useful than the other categorisation methods that we have, and does it correlate with negative health effects ? For sure.
The idea about ultra processed food cause overconsumption just because of their hyperpalatability is questionable and questioned, as ultra processed food contains a myriad of novel molecules that our digestive system has never encountered. A leading theory is that these molecules circumvent our satiation detection mechanisms, along with their hyperpalatability.
"Ultra-Processed" and "causes obesity" are two massively different claims. If the claim is that said tofu is ultra-processed, obesity rates in countries where it is eaten are completely unrelated and do not work as argument.
Also, it is perfectly fine to define "non processed" group in a way that wont put every single meat into it. If you say that everything that requires killing or cleaning is ultra processed, then the whole term is meaningless.
why would it. home-cooked meals are not uncommonly calorie dense, full of fats and oils.
Cigarettes.
You know what really started getting phased out in the 80’s?
I find it quite strange that people think home-cooked meals have to be calorie-dense. It's food. Where you cook it doesn't matter. And if you have to keep your food from being delicious to control your portions... the problem isn't the food.
[1]: https://health.clevelandclinic.org/how-many-calories-a-day-s...
Assuming you have 3 meals a day, and assuming you have 600 kcals per meal, and assuming your nutritionist has prescribed a diet with a 50/20/30 carb/fat/protein ratio, and assuming one of those meals (dinner?) has 100 kcals from fat, that means 16% of the meal was fat. If you eat a lean protein (with a tiny amount of incidental fat) and carbs with that meal, that's actually the perfect amount of fat.
You can also mix up your meals so that, say, breakfast has very little fat, and dinner has more fat, or vice versa. It's all about balance.
Yeah, but only anorectic are able to keep eating this long term. Until they get to hospital with all kinds of body damage.
Nuts, sugar, cheese, eggs, actually also fruits ...
In the UK, today, people specifically desire beans produced by a factory, from a tin, with sugary orange-colored tomato sauce. Even at high end restaurants, people desire and expect tinned beans.
Whereas places outside the UK that share some elements of British culture like Australia, Boston and Ireland expect home made means - crushed tomatoes, borlotti beans, local additions (like feta and mint in Australia).
My best-guess understanding is the British taste for sweet canned beans comes from WW2 rationing.
I do recall my shock at visiting the staff canteen of a large UK corporation and finding out that the most popular menu item by far for lunch was chips (fries) and beans.
I don't think you'd ever see beans on a breakfast menu in the US unless it was aimed at working-class Mexican/Central American/Caribbean immigrants. Reminds me of my time in rural Costa Rica and the roadside stands that served a hearty breakfast to the farm workers. And I don't think you'd ever get something to taste that good without cooking it from scratch.