When I tell people about food like Soylent, they often ask "but isn't it boring to eat the same thing every day"? From my perspective, that is actually a good thing. I don't want my food to be too exciting, because then I will eat too much of it. (Actually, I want, but I don't want to want.)
I would be happy to have a grocery store nearby that doesn't sell any superstimuli. Something that would have shelves full of vegetables and other boring stuff, but no sweets etc. I would be happy to always buy there, to avoid the temptation. But I realize that for the owner, there would be constant temptation to increase their profits by slightly expanding the selection. (Which by the way is something that already happened with Soylent-like products. The first ones, they tried to copy the nutrition recommendations. The next ones, they... tried to join the wave by offering a product very similar but slightly sweeter than their competitors. Keep going this way for a few decades and see where it gets you.)
I wonder how difficult it would be to have the kind of grocery store I imagine by simply buying online, and using some mechanism to filter the healthy foods. The simplest implementation could simply be a blacklist -- if I ever regret buying something, or if I predict that I would, there should be a "hide" button that forever removes the product from my screen without a trace. (Could this be implemented as a GreaseMoney script?) I suspect that if many people started using it, the shops would start fighting back, but it would work for some time.
Honestly, I lament the fact that things like soylent are not supposed to be eaten frequently. There should be some sort of balance though, as you run the risk of being instantly and permanently compromised by the first dorito you eat (as I've seen happen to children of crunchy people).
Now that's a thought, I would say that there are a good number of "health food" stores that try and fall into that category, updating their branding to be all browns and greens to really give that natural feeling. But as you have correctly pointed at, they are generally compromised by economic concerns. Part of the problem is that people are bad at going to a place like that and only buying the healthy stuff because we are generally already compromised...
The arms race between grocery stores/deliveroo/doordash/etc. and people trying to eat healthy would be funny just in that it would mirror current attempts to avoid the media equivalent (ads). The buying experience has grown increasingly unfriendly to consumers, despite the promise of targeted ads, so I would be surprised if there isn't a significant market for something as simple as "DoorDash, but we only show things within a defined nutritional profile".
I'd say the closest equivlent are meal planning companies that ship out fully made meals every day for quite a fee, but they can be carefully tuned for health and ensuring the brain isn't wrecked by temptations.
Part of the problem is that people are bad at going to a place like that and only buying the healthy stuff because we are generally already compromised...
Also, we are all compromised in different ways, so we probably couldn't agree on what is okay and what is not. Some people want to avoid sugar, some want to avoid food additives, some want to avoid meat, some want to avoid alcohol, etc., and that would require you to have N different shops, or perhaps 2^N different shops.
Which is why I am thinking about the online solution, which might allow you to create your personal blacklist, and maybe also use blacklists provided by others... for example, it is not necessary to every vegetarian to maintain their own blacklist, you could have someone maintain a public vegetarian blacklist and everyone else could choose to use it.
I'd say the closest equivalent are meal planning companies that ship out fully made meals every day for quite a fee, but they can be carefully tuned for health and ensuring the brain isn't wrecked by temptations.
Yeah, I tried those, but (at least in my area) they are quite expensive. Also, there is little choice there, often only one option or maybe two (vegetarian and omnivore); but there are some meals that I hate, and I would feel really stupid paying lots of money to have that food delivered to me.
But if they had e.g. 4 options every day that you could conveniently choose on a smartphone, and if the delivery was less expensive, it could be a great solution.
Another great service I could imagine is buying vegetables that are already washed and cut. There is so much junk food out there; I wish there was a place where I could bring my own food box and buy some lettuce and tomatoes that are already washed and cut, so I would just add some dressing at home and eat it. If that existed, I would probably eat much more vegetables than now. The unhealthy food is often ready to eat, but the healthy food often requires lots of work, and sometimes I am just tired or busy.
Yeah an online solution is probably the only real way, although I would be surprised if you couldn't hit a big chunk of what people need from 2-3 types of shop simply because they overlap or the things some people are avoiding are repellent (allergy) instead of addictive (sugary treats).
In Poland supposedly meal delivery has become the norm and has replaced many "Standard" meals due to the low cost. It's wild how expensive it is in the US though.
Precut veggies low key saved me during grad school, I'd always been resistant due to cost and the fact that "I can cut stuff". But then I heard it recast as the adhd tax, and got called out hard for the fact that if the transition energy between me and a cooked meal is too high I just won't eat anything. Cold salad bars are also technically like this as well, although those are often quite sad.
But then I heard it recast as the adhd tax
I suspect I have some ADHD or something similar too, and I observed that difficult things stop being difficult when I develop a habit around them. Basically, "doing it for the first time" and "doing it after I haven't been doing it for months" are super hard. But "doing the same thing I did yesterday" is easy.
In context of cooking, it means it is easier for me to cook the same two or three meals over and over again. Choices are bad, mindless repetition is good. I mean, I should think about the things that I want to do, but at a different time than when I am actually supposed to do them -- at that moment, thinking just leads to procrastination.
Precise plans are easier to do. "Cut some vegetables" is too abstract. "Cut 1/3 of iceberg lettuce, 1/3 of Chinese cabbage, a few cherry tomatoes, and put some dressing on top of that, maybe add some meat" is a plan I can do reliably.
Agreed with everything in this post, but I would add that (n=4 people, fwiw) there is also a stable state on the other side of Healthy Food. It's still more expensive (though becoming less so, especially if you cook) to buy actually healthy food. But, if you are willing to spend a few months experimenting and exploring, while completely eliminating the hyperpalatable stuff, you can end up in a place where the healthiest foods taste better, and the hyperpalatable stuff makes you feel awful even in the short term. You won't automatically reach a desired weight, but you very likely will eat less, and feel full after a more reasonable amount of food, and have a higher thermic effect of food, and have higher nutrient density food, and have more and more stable energy and mood.
Examples:
Your writeup makes me think you may be interested in Erik Hoel's essay Enter the Supersensorium.
That's a lovely essay, I just read through it and it's given me a lot to think about. Dreaming is something that has influenced my thinking quite a bit having spent a bit too much time in my own head growing up.
The distincition between entertainment and art here is particularly salient, although I would imagine the pressure on both would still be present. For entertainment it would be pure engagement farming, how much attention can be captured. Meanwhile art would be about the commodization of expanding the mind, pithy insights made for people to easily consume and "expand" their mind in a safe manner with minimal effort. Vacuous for an entirely different reason than entertainment, and I'd say perhaps more dangerous as a result.
"The only cure for bad fiction is good fiction"; but I might say that entertainment is neutral fiction, bad fiction can lead people's minds down terrible paths.
For the majority of human history we lived in a production market for food. We searched for that which tasted well but there was never enough to fill the void. Only the truly elite could afford to import enough food to reach the point of excess.
Humanity ~300.000 years. Agriculture ~12.000 years. We have been hunters and gathers for the vast majority of human history.
I'm unsure what your point here is, my goal is to gesture at how we have relatively recently saturated food production and are now making hyperpalatable food.
That in mind, there is still a lot to be said about the difference between hunting and gathering food and agriculture. I just didn't feel like it was in scope of this essay, did anything leap out to you as being particularly salient?
Hello, this is my first post here. I was told by a friend that I should post here. This is from a series of works that I wrote with strict structural requirements. I have performed minor edits to make the essay more palatable for human consumption.
This work is an empirical essay on a cycle of hunger to satiatiation to hyperpalatability that I have seen manifested in multiple domains ranging from food to human connection. My hope is that you will gain some measure of appreciation for how we have shifted from a society geared towards sufficent production to one based on significant curation.
For the majority of human history we lived in a production market for food. We searched for that which tasted well but there was never enough to fill the void. Only the truly elite could afford to import enough food to reach the point of excess. This has changed drastically, to the point where gastronomical indulgence, once a marker of a well-to-do family, has become a symbol of American poverty. Only those with "discerning palettes" who consume nutritious and exotic meals are considered exempt.
The effect on our physicalities is striking, at first we were merely well fed but through the wonders of technology we suddenly could feed orders of magnitude more! One can easily trace the history of meeting our dietary needs using height as a marker; by the 1800s we began our take off and finally levelled off globally around the 1980s. Interestingly this can then be compared to rates of obesity which spiked in the 1990s, right after we had finished meeting our needs. Thus the invisible hand of the market spoon feeds consumers by engineering hyperpalatable foods and making them more accessible.
Companies need to make money, and historically food is a notoriously low margin industry meaning that scale is the best way to make money. After the 1980's they needed to get consumers to eat more, enter hyperpalatable food which is capable of hacking the brains reward system to make humans hungrier. Thus we gained a perverse incentive where things that kept people full, like fiber, were selected against; the North American microbiome rose to the challenge, selecting for *Bacteroides* that quickly colonize any immigrants replacing the fiber digesting strains. The result is that humanities hormonal systems are damaged and hunger is a norm, it's not just in your head it is harder to stay healthy than it used to be.
Now our diets are stuck in individual extinction vortices, our bodies hunger, our mind craves, and our society takes advantage of both for a bit more profit. However, there has been a push in the inverse, the discomfort of the body has begun to outweigh the engineered cravings of the body. Thus the invisible hand of the market returned, this time bringing GLP-1 agonists (AKA Ozempic); a veritable cornucopia of effects are listed, but most powerfully it simply makes you less hungry in a way that doesn't destroy your body. Now people are getting healthier, using a drug that makes you less hungry to counteract the effect of an over-effective food and beverage industry, a fully self-inflicted wound on the level of a society.
For the majority of human history we lived in a production market for stimulation. We searched for that which interested us but there was never enough to fill the void. Only the truly elite could afford to import art, plays, and information to reach the point of excess. This has changed drastically, to the point where extensive knowledge of a subject, once a sure sign of culture, has become a symbol of intellectual poverty. Only those with "discerning taste" who consume unique and important information are exempt.
The effect on our cognition has been striking, with the ability to spread media and information at the speed of light fundamentally altering how we think. Information used to be constrained by physical limitations, with the rare individual bringing back an interesting pigment or art that sparks a revolution. As humanity has modernised creation and distribution of content became exponentially cheaper and easier. As a result culture has begun to "flatten" and incentivise attention gathering over any other metric of quality.
Companies need to make money, and stimulation has become the primary currency to promote products and create markets. A memetic arms race has emerged, with companies attempting to "go viral", while various groups attempt to socially engineer populations for power. Techniques like the distractotron and eye tracking software human attention can be fed into models with perversive incentives, resulting in targeted ads to perpetuate depression in teenagers for engagement. The result is our attention systems are being damaged, as rates of neurological disorders skyrocket
Now our systems are feeding off of each other, with wellness apps that sell information to the very companies that are able to profit off your mental distress. With meme cycles moving faster and faster humans tend to seek information that conforms to existing biases to reduce stress. With the advent of AI that are more human than humans and write indistinguishable poetry that is "more relatable" than humans, how long is it until we have the torment nexus from David Foster Wallace's famous book "Infinite Jest"? There is no media GLP-1, the constant refrain is to touch grass, to reduce screentime, to just focus on "better" stimulation; a series of statements reminiscent of anti-obesity campaigns rendered ineffective by research on doritos.
For the majority of human history we lived in a production market for relationships. We searched for that which connected us but there was never enough to fill the void. Only the truly elite could afford to import partners, parties, and prostitutes to reach the point of excess. This has changed drastically, to the point where a wealth of followers, once a sure sign of interpersonal quality, has become a symbol of shallowness. Only those with "discerning connections" who maintain deep and meaningful relationships are considered exempt.
The effect on our society has been overwhelming, we can now find a forum for any interest that may be conjured from making metal flowers to the most unholy ship dynamic conceived! We used to only have a limited number of possible connections, constrained as we were by interaction methods and survival. Now there are myriad methods to form connections from anonymous imageboards to full on business personas. Unfortunately this also appears to have made our connections shallower and [people are lonelier than ever.
Companies need to make money, by selling relationships apps like Tinder make money, but their incentive isn't for people to find a long-lasting romantic relationship. This has created a game where finding the best way to make someone feel attended to will draw them back, with cultural concepts of relationships and what we deserve pushing us deeper down that rabbit hole. Now we have things such as Character.ai which creates AIs that will always attend, always want to talk, always be the type of person you imagined them to be, taking away the risk inherent in relationship building with humans. That is a hyperpalatable connection, where all the scary and new edges have been sanded down because it draws people inwards to be able to have that level of control.
Now our relationships are increasingly compromised by memes pushed by the media and structured by our social platforms, losing grip on normal human interactions. COVID showed us this danger, but it will only grow more potent as we continue developing alongside these platforms. AI is now poised to create the "perfect" companions, and much of the population fundamentally lack defenses against this, look at how you respond to this, are you exhibiting a hyperpalatable self so that people like you? Again humans are told to put down the phones, to go outside and meet people slowly, and indeed that is the cure, but the question is how can we create a system to incentivise this behaviour without suffering through communal obesity.
For the majority of human history we lived in a production market. We now live in a curation market, excess has been reached and we must carefully select what to take. Only the truly elite can afford to pay the premium of quality to ensure they are not trapped, even then it may not be enough. Now it is not enough that there is enough, it is that we must be cautious and tasteful when selecting our life. Curation is the key, and any new artist of food, media, or connection should be aware that only through this paring down of choice can quality be maintained.
The effect of curation vs. production is manifold, while before humanities primary concern was to have enough of a thing, now we need to ensure that what we have won't cause significant harm. Such efforts are seen in the dual incentives of making something better for a process and better for humanity. Frequently there are consequences that only appear once satiety is reached and the market attempts to recapture it's initial momentum via innovation. The children of this philosophy are rarely grounded in what is actually good for the consumer, as the consumer has already met their needs.
Companies need to make money, and the methods by which they do so are driven by what consumers will give them money for. Usually this means integrating their product into some form of reward circuit so that purchasing, via money or attention, comes not from need but desire. The consumers brain is hijacked by this mechanism and as a result their life shifts to accommodate this new norm. Worse still the choices of suppliers and other people directly dictate the consumers access as products that are purchased frequently are subsequently more accessible.
Now our systems are self-reinforcing and survive via addiction on physical, psychological, and social levels. What is new is that people are slowly recognising these dangers as the distortion of a persons life is becoming more uncomfortable than the pleasure given by the addiction. Unfortunately, as of yet, the push back on this is relatively slow and difficult due to the requirement for either a fundamental technological breakthrough or the shifting of institutions that live and die on these feedback loops. Even the cures can have a hint of poison added, because it will only be a matter of time before the original system adapts and attempts to integrate the prior solution as another step in its chain.