"Nutritionally worthless foodlike substances"

[unixronin]

We need to stop flattering nutritionally worthless foodlike substances by calling them “junk food” — and instead make clear that such products are not in fact food of any kind.

That's one of the "money quotes" from this article talking about how to make US agriculture actually sustainable again, while improving the quality of food grown in the US and creating positive incentives for people to eat healthy diets instead of endless noshing on junkfood.

"Nutritionally worthless foodlike substances" ... or, in a more Adamsian bent, "Almost, but not quite, entirely unlike food."

Comments

Re: Money quotes

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

A lot of that is just measures to undo damage that's already been done.

Regionalize federal food procurement? That sounds to me like "Make government agencies buy [relatively] local". I see nothing socialist about that.

Federally defining what "food" can be bought with existing government benefits? Do you really want your tax dollars wasted on Fritos and Ho-Hos? Making the benefits buy twice as much at a farmer's market where they have to be spent on healthy produce ... I don't have a problem with that.



And yes, a fuck of a lot of things over the next few decades are going to require major changes in our daily lives, because the US has spent the past fifty years making the average American daily life utterly unsustainable in the long term. We can change it under our control and in some semblance of order, or we can let the change be forced on us when the whole house of cards we've built collapses.

It's not an invented problem. It's a problem that the US has ignored for the last thirty or forty years by sticking its fingers in its ears, shouting "LA LA LA LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!", and going out to gas up the Cadillac. And it's been knowingly made worse and worse and worse, because in the short term, making it worse is PROFITABLE.