It is absolutely wild the butterfly effect of processed terrible food this may have caused and deaths from obesity. All from trying to find something to do with ultra cheap army surplus.
Obesity exists because food is insanely abundant and cheap because people wanted to solve the problem of people starving to death
Sources to back your theorem on the cause of obesity?
That said going back to entropy to explain how a structure of dozens of trillions of cells harvest energy from foreign structures following a lifetime of heuristics is utterly misleading.
In particular it makes it sound scientific, when we have very little practical knowledge on how it works at scale and can't reliable do falsifiable experiments to prove our theories.
I mean, we're still literally burning stuff[0] as a proxy for the digestion process because we have no other way of coming up with a stable number. Which gives us aberrations like gasoline having higher nutritious value than potatoes (which totally makes sense in thermodynamics, I concur)
[0] https://www.livescience.com/62808-how-calories-are-calculate...
Much of our modern processes are to somehow extend the life of the foodstuff over long periods. This boomed the overly processed food economy we currently have, but it was first built to simply make sure we had food for the long haul. Curing meats in salt is roughly the same process.
In turns of cheese, powder has less moisture stored in the individual cheese granule but may also be reconstituted with added moisture. Powdered forms are easier to package for individual soldiers to carry for themselves rather than a large, bulkier wheel that needs its own storage and transportation methods.
Current products include MREs for the military, which are actually somewhat hard to buy commercially since Warnock got tired of dealing with preppers. They really want to sell these things by the container load. There are all kinds of knock-offs available. The real military MREs are designed for young soldiers in good condition doing heavy work, so three of them contain almost 4,000 calories. Civilian versions tend to be smaller portions.
There's also the Humanitarian Daily Ration. It's kosher, halal, vegetarian, lactose-free, and nut-free. Also air-droppable without a parachute. It's basically lentils and beans. It's intended for people on the edge of starvation. The US military used to give out MREs in crises, but that was too much concentrated energy food for someone nearly starving and could sicken them.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/03/01/147751097/why-...
It's impossible to overestimate how important this was. The U.S. military in WWII had to support an enormous force overseas, to a degree and extent that no other power had to approach. Everything that the force needed in the field had to first go on a ship to be sent overseas. With the U.S. Twelfth Army Group numbering over a million men alone in Europe, small changes to products were magnified at scale, saving tons of weight in the logistics chain.
There's a page over on combinedfleet.com (great resource and discussion) that goes into the numbers, and it's truly astonishing. U.S. output could be described as terrifying. http://www.combinedfleet.com/economic.htm
Native Americans, lacking domesticated ruminants, achieved similar results with pemmican, which is the same principle: protein + fat + dehydration = long-lasting nutritious food for survival. Not apparently very tasty, and they would certainly supplement it with anything else they could find, but it kept you from starving.
‘Not starving to death’ seems like a good reason, eh?
The sole blemish on Nestlé's otherwise impeccable record. /s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_in_...
Nestlé also participated directly:
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/31/news/new-studies-detail-s...
> Nestle and the former Brown Boveri & Co., now called ABB, earlier admitted slave labor had been used at their German sites and have paid compensation. Novartis, Nestle and Roche contributed to the $1.25 billion settlement in 1998 that banks organized to settle the Holocaust account claims.
From the NYT article, I'd say Nestlé itself has at least some dirt on their hands. OTOH, that article makes no mention whatever of Switzerland's location - landlocked and totally surrounded by the seemed-to-be-winning Axis powers for almost all of WWII. Considering how <cough/> nicely the Axis occupation forces were treating most of the countries which they'd already conquered - the Swiss might have felt that making much of a fuss (over Axis misdeeds) could result their own conquest and occupation.
> > During the war, Nestlé companies
as referring to companies that are now, or were at the time of WW2, part of Nestlé. I thought that was clear from context when I said
> See Maggi on this list which is now owned by Nestlé
which has the operative word now. (Emphasis added.)
Contrast that with how I followed up:
> Nestlé also participated directly
Emphasis added to indicate that Nestlé also was directly involved at the time, to differentiate from actions taken by a different independent company during WW2 that has since been acquired by Nestlé.
From how you have responded, you seem to believe that we disagree. I am simply clarifying that I was perhaps unclear in my phrasing, but that we are in alignment here.
As for the NYT article, I wanted to find more context but was mostly seeking to find a suitable citation for the claims made by another poster, which I think I have done.
I think that given other actions performed by Nestlé speak to the kind of corporation it has historically been in more recent times in foreign countries is no less problematic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Nestl%C3%A9_boycott
https://voxdev.org/topic/health/deadly-toll-marketing-infant...
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2019-06-...
These practices are especially problematic due to the nature of breastfeeding - by marketing directly to mothers who are about to give birth or just have given birth using bad nutritional claims not supported by science, they rob mothers of crucial nutrients as well as introducing pathogens due to poor sanitation, while actively lowering incidences of breastfeeding from 90% pre-advertising to 10% post-advertising in in Chile, for example.
By the time mothers are able to become better informed, their milk will likely have dried up, and so they are now locked into buying formula that is likely unsafe to use in many cases due to poor sanitation and lack of access to clean water.
Don't worry though, Nestlé also promotes and sells bottled water, so they can sell you a solution for the problems their own products not fit for market create.
The numbers are pretty grim.
I mean, they have a whole article just about their horrible track record:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_of_Nestl%C3%A9
I think it's probably as bad as you say, and likely worse. If they were really worried about Axis occupation, you would think they would stop selling to the Allies. That they continued to sell to both sides seems to me to be an example of how Nestlé puts profits over law and over human life itself.