helping educate the population of the United States with the assistance of Chinese Australian missionaries on how to navigate the "food" supply chain and minimize the consumption of adulterated/compromised food while still achieving a well-rounded nutritional diet
there has to be a way for us as a society to introduce a level of accountability into our so called "food" supply chain without the burden of regulation... perhaps it's as simple as spending more educating our kids about agriculture
amendment: seems to be an unpopular take... my point being regulation is a workaround for a population that is worst than uneducated, miseducated, especially in regards to agriculture and "food" supply chain... if kids were provided with an actual education and not miseducated on the subject then the demand for on-demand food testing would go up, and prices for said testing would eventually go down after supply rises to meet demand increasing competition thus encouraging technological innovations to come in and lower prices
amendment ii: in a competitive market where all participants are thoroughly educated and the consumer is armed with the ability to test their food frequently then a market would likely emerge where consumers buy directly from farmers who out of market forces publish test alongside their crop
I imagine that in a competitive market where the participants are educated that the farmers would publish tests alongside their crop and the educated consumer would understand that they should be buying direct from farmers and be processing the turmeric themselves
it's not about education, but rather attention.
how much of your finite attention do you want to spend on extra things? most people already operate under extreme attention-scarcity.
This is why governments exist and what you're proposing is absurd. Do you want to compile a list of every possible threat you are exposed to daily and amend your comment? Sounds like you need to educate yourself on the role of government before you parrot more "competitive market" nonsense.
Yes, that is correct. At least in the west, governments are actually filled with quite earnest, diligent people, not cheating. It's possible to find narrow cases where industry manages to bias government, but it's not like "ignore the lead in this turmeric".
If a business is going to get away with cheating, it seems better that they also need a corrupt government in bed with them rather than just another corrupt business.
> to introduce a level of accountability... without the burden of regulation
Why? What's wrong with regulation?
The whole point of regulation is safety and accountability and fairness.
Yes things can be over-regulated, but then the solution is to regulate properly, not over-regulate. The reason we don't have libertarian or anarchist societies is because they fundamentally can't solve the problems around safety, accountability, and fairness.
my point is that regulation is a burden, not that it isn't the next step... from my point of view regulation is a workaround for our nightmare of an education system where giving kids a proper schooling is considered dangerous and a threat to national security
What sort of proper schooling allows one to detect lead in ground turmeric?
I guess proper schooling would help one understand the analysis techniques, but the machines are pretty expensive and most people don't have one at home.
Regulations that require food products to be regularly surveyed for heavy metals or other contaminants seem more effective than requiring every household to own and operate analysis machines.
Regulations that require foods to be tracked with origin and batch information makes it a lot easier to find out where contaminants entered the system, rather than requiring kids to go around playing Carmen Sandiego. It also helps save money with recalls when there's specific evidence to include only specific batches.
if the population was thoroughly educated then I imagine most food would be bought direct from farmers with test published alongside the crop because the population understands the importance of unadulterated food and are armed with the ability to test their food cheaply... once relationships are established with farmers and food providers then the need to test becomes less frequent
I don't have any farmers within a fifty miles of me, I don't think. I live in a major city surrounded by suburbs.
And how exactly am I going to know the farmer's published tests are correct?
And there aren't cheap tests for everyone to test all their food for thousands of different possible contaminants. That's wishful thinking.
And why do you think testing would need to become less frequent when relationships are established? It's a tried-and-true business technique to gain a reputation of high quality, then rake in the big bucks by switching selling low-quality stuff that people are fooled by.
You can understand why it's about 100,000x more efficient for everyone to say, hey, why don't we hire actual experts and give them the expensive equipment people can't afford on their own to do all these tests for us, and levy huge fines when farmers and corporations adulterate their food or otherwise make it unsafe? And we can call the rules farmers and corporations have to follow "regulations".
I genuinely don't understand why you think it should be legal for farmers to add lead to turmeric and try to sell it, and then put the responsibility on the consumer to test. I mean, do you think it should be legal for people to murder each other, and put the responsibility on others to avoid getting murdered? And if not, then why do you think poisoning people with lead is any different?
Exactly, we need a label, maybe call it "Nutrition Facts" or something like that which lists all ingredients.
We'd need a way to enforce it though. Maybe make the farmers pinky-swear not to lie on the label because it is cheaper to lie than tell the truth? Do you think that would be enough?
If only there was some kind of group ... or administration even ... specifically tasked with making sure foods are unadulterated. Of course we can't have that though, because that would be regulation and businesses are perfect special little angels and would never ever lie. God forbid we place an evil burden like regulation on a business poisoning all of south-asia with lead.
By definition. Like a laws against murder are a burden to murderers.
The key to stopping murders isn't "get rid of the murder laws", but fix what made these people people violent (like lead poisoning?). Or in the context of this kind of regulation, the solution isn't to get rid of regulation, but make business account for the costs of their externalities from the beginning (rather than being forced to be moral by the government).
I support oversight with subscriptions to Consumer Reports and Consumer Labs. I do think government must play a role-- rather than regulate, just regularly test everything and publish the results and ban/recall unsafe products.
my brain read "before the age of 10" as "before the age of 100" haha and wondered if llms are leading us to the point where we look back and realize dying before 100 is truly young??
my intuition on all this, and what both you seem to be getting at is that is wildly difficult to understand the problems of others at least to the degree that you understand your own problems, which even then understanding one's own problems is hard... which leads to the perspective of focusing on what they understand (their own problems), and then as a side-effect of addressing their own problem helping others by documenting their problem and attempted solutions... documenting and broadcasting adds a little bit of overhead but it seems like an environmentally-friendly approach to participating in society in a healthy way
i encourage everyone to reconsider consuming oils outside of their source material and granulated spices including salt... my experience has been much smoother from a health perspective since doing so, and i imagine there are a few others out there who would benefit as well...
Spices like oregano, ginger and many others disrupt the biofilm in the gut. Too much disruption would be deleterious for most people, but spices are mild in their disruptive effect, which is generally beneficial and preferable for most people to never eating any biofilm disruptors. Spices keep the biofilm to manageable levels.
I have to be careful with ginger and oregano: if I haven't taken any in many days, then I take more than a quarter teaspoon of dried oregano leaves, then too many microbes in my biofilm die, which makes me feel bad (because the dying microbes release toxins).
Point is, maybe you just need to introduce spices gradually.
i didn't know that so thanks for sharing... I would love to have access to quality ginger or oregano which I could process myself and not over-granulate it... it's just so damn hard to buy food that I'm confident isn't even slightly toxic
Granulated ginger frequently has heavy metals in it, which complicates things, but I've found Frontier Herbs's dried granulated ginger root to be safe, and I seem to be unusually sensitive to heavy metals in my food.
one level deeper... better farm (soil, water, .etc), better food... also you can easily ruin food in a top-of-the-line kitchen by over-processing, adding tainted spices, excessive heat, .etc
