Not to detract from your point that chemicals are not necessary for high food production.
But just to point out that Europe does use glyphosate, on something like 1/3 of crops.
https://doi.org/10.3390/su12145682
Antier et al. (2020) Glyphosate Use in the European Agricultural Sector and a Framework for Its Further Monitoring, Sustainability, 12(14), 5682.
Maybe true as long as you make it the same way at home as the ultra processed version from the store. But you usually can't since you don't have the machinery.
Homemade wheat bread made of just wheat/water/salt is an entirely different thing from most "whole wheat bread" in the food industry.
That's the point. Homemade white bread and store bought have the same nutritional profile. They're both hyper-palatable. The super fine milling of the flour and removal of the bran makes it super tasty and enables the body to convert it into glucose super quick.
A whole-grain bread made with stone milled flour is going to be far healthier for you than steel ground white bread even if the brown bread is technically UPF and the white bread is home made.
The true "natural" alternative would be a cracked-wheat porridge. That's about as far as you can get from hyper-palatable.
> The super fine milling of the flour and removal of the bran makes it super tasty
I disagree on this. Speaking only about homemade, white bread is tasteless and wheat bran and germ adds taste.
White bread pretty much tastes exactly like the sugar you pour into it, and wheat is the sort of mix of sour and sweet that makes an addictive taste - why Kool-Aid and soda are largely citric acid(sour) + sugar(sweet) + [random other stuff]. You can drink a larger volume of sugar in a shorter time through drinking Kool-Aid than you can eat in marshmallows.
Wheat bread as some sort of health food is a scam, though. You get a few more micronutrients, but the problem is that its a ton of carbs. Brown foods being associated with health was just some weird advertising heuristic that got hammered into us our entire lives.
Wheat bread simply tastes better. All of the seeds and gritty parts that they add to some of them are honestly just more marketing to people who think that things that are more difficult to eat are intrinsically better for you. There are plenty of other places to get your fiber than your bread.
It tastes better to you. Good for you. White bread continues to exist as a category because it's hyperpalatable; in fact, it's one of the canonical HPFs.
It is processed but not ultra-processed. You can look into this by a simple search: “is flour ultra processed” and I got a number of results explaining the difference.
There's no way 7 in 10 people were prescribed antibiotics in 2024. This looks like a simple and egregious misinterpretation of the data, which seem to be all too common. I could believe there were 700 prescriptions given in the US per 1000 people in the US population. But many of those would be repeats to the same smaller number of people. I still would say there's way too much antiobiotic use - every time doctors have wanted to give me antiobiotics it wasn't necessary.
My wife isn't with me to answer directly, so I am going off memory. She is a nurse. But I am pretty she when telling me about her day at the hospital she also mentions needing to change antibiotic for patients for various reasons. I am guessing that also counts as 1 person, multiple antibiotics. Probably considered "separate" prescriptions.
Yea that's another good point. Luckily my kids haven't had troubles with ear infections, but my sister did growing up. It like 3 or 4 times a year almost every year in elementary school and halfway through middle school that she had multiple that she needed to go antibiotics.
I've gone without a fridge for 8 years now and do something kind of like this usually - I'll cook a pot of food and then steam or boil it again after ~24 hours to reset the clock on it rotting. It's handy for things like eating a whole chicken or other large soup. I switch between being home and on the road a lot so my pot just comes with me and can be re-cooked on my car stove or my home stove. I tend to cook or re-heat once a day. Ideally I'd rather be sharing freshly prepared food with other people every meal and I do that when I can, but this works for when I'm feeding myself alone - cheaper and easier than any other approach.
Resetting it will kill bacteria, certainly. But there are a number of heat-stable toxins that once created will not be destroyed that way.
I guess you've been doing this for a while, and presumably it's been working, plus I know that historically this is how people lived. But be aware it's not risk free.
A suggestion: A pressure cooker - not for the pressure, but because they can be sealed. Heat the food, then let it cool without opening it. Kind of a less secure form of canning.
The bacteria is still there, its just dead. Along with all of its waste. Leaving soup at room temperature over night is crazy. Its usually the biggest food borne illness vector in restaurants so they usually boil then move straight to cooling.
Ive learned leaving soup out and reboiling is fairly common in some cultures which is unfortunate. Bacteria rapidly multiplies at room temperature around the world (well, maybe not antarctica).
> Ive learned leaving soup out and reboiling is fairly common in some cultures which is unfortunate.
I know next to nothing about chemistry or biology but I do cook a lot of food, and quite often have leftovers.
After many years in Germany, I got into the habit of leaving food out, and that would mostly be fine. Very rarely would food spoil, at least from a culinary perspective (I'm not disputing the presence of bacteria or harm of its waste).
However after even a few months in Taiwan I learned that this strategy is basically impossible: food left outside spoils within hours.
Given I originally come from a country that is warmer, but much dryer than Taiwan, where food doesn't spoil if left out nearly as fast, I do believe it has to do more with humidity than with temperature.
Both humidity and temperature matter, it's a complex thing going on.
But yes I'm mostly in a dry environment doing this, I haven't tried it anywhere that was warm and humid at the same time.
It helps a lot to not seal the leftovers but let them have airflow and dry out on the surface. Sealed containers with moisture in them get nasty much faster.
If the container is sealed (airtight) while it's still above the temperatures that (most) bacteria can survive at, and then cooled while sealed, it might actually do better than open-air for a while.
You'd be amazed at just how much tolerance human guts can develop for this kind of thing. I recall reading about a hunter-gatherer tribe the discoverer ran across just going to town on horribly rotten carrion. The more rotten the better.
> Leaving soup at room temperature over night is crazy.
And yet, this was common before the electric fridge. I've lived without a fridge for years and the amount of food I ate after being left out overnight would give americans a stroke.
I left a bowl of pasta with meatballs out on the table by accident on New Years Eve a handful of years ago, and aside from a power outage the whole night, it was perfectly fine the next day; most food is.
Pork is especially fine if it is properly packaged... That is part of what 'curing meat' is all about.
Most people that brought lunch or dinner to work or school prior to maybe the 1990s thought nothing much of unrefrigerated food being eaten several hours later. Laborers still often do. So do kids.
And tuna at room temperature is surprisingly good (as long as it is not rotten, or the temperature isn't too high). I mean tuna salad, although sushi is served just barely below room temperature.
I remember in grade school taking thermoses of soup for lunch, though I would never do this as an adult (and not only because it was disgustingly lukewarm five hours later).
Can confirm, have made hundreds from playing music after four years of several hours a day. Still probably only made 25% the cost of instrument and strings though.
Out of curiosity, have there been any other advances in medicine that would make it less likely that women would die from cervical cancer before hitting 30? I don't keep up on oncology developments, but I assume that this particular shot is not the only thing that has reduced cervical cancer deaths in women under 30. If they were looking at rates of acquiring cancer, that would be more focused on this intervention.
Didn't read the article, but regarding the title, this is kind of fundamental.
NIMBYs want to protect some aspects of a particular place usually because it is their home.
Capitalism largely lives on destroying particular places to benefit people who are [mostly] somewhere else.
This is the only thing happening in capitalism but it's a big part of it. The end game of this kind of capitalism is that every place is destroyed (ecologically) and it gradually grinds to a painful halt.
Maybe there's a way to have some elements of capitalism in a society that doesn't destroy places but I don't know.
> NIMBYs want to protect some aspects of a particular place usually because it is their home.
this is the reflex, and it's a sensible one to have. but the perception of what is or isnt a threat can range from something legitimate across the board ("I dont want a giant thing taking all the power and pumping my head full out sound 100% of the time near my home") to the truly detrimental ("I should get to be the last one moving into this area. Me moving to a place is good and fine; other people moving to where I live constitutes destruction. No new housing.")
NIMBYs forget they moved to where they live from somewhere, and they are not more important than other people on a societal level.
There is. That is one of those cases that it truly is good to surface, because it provides a watermark to clear. Whatever you are doing, you should have to prove that it is worth the destruction you will cause to do it. People getting to live somewhere clears that line much of the time; excesses like golf courses and yet another datacenter become gross when put into relief.
But just to point out that Europe does use glyphosate, on something like 1/3 of crops.
https://doi.org/10.3390/su12145682 Antier et al. (2020) Glyphosate Use in the European Agricultural Sector and a Framework for Its Further Monitoring, Sustainability, 12(14), 5682.
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