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The problem I have with this is that foods in the U.S. seem no more superpalatable in 2024 than in 1990. Yet obesity has risen quite a bit. I also think words like superpalatable and hyperprocessed tend to become pretty mushy when we start to examine them.
I hope you don't put me in that bucket. It's true I think these problems are extremely difficult to solve. But rather than advocating surrender (as I feel Scott did on his homelessness article), I advocate stronger action. That said, it's important that we not merely just double down on solutions that we know don't work. For example, if we want to solve housing affordability (another of those intractable issues) we can't do it by using failed solutions like rent control. And if you want to solve obesity, then telling people to simply diet and exercise won't work. We tried it for 50 years. It failed miserably.
Above all, we should adopt epistemic humility and try a variety of solutions, ideally letting natural experiments play out at state and municipal levels.
This seems wrong, the difference between the average restaurant in Plano Texas from then to now is staggering, and not just in terms of quality, but variety of cuisine as well. This might be controversial, but I think the expected quality you would get from a high-end restaurant in 1990 is what you can expect from basically any restaurant today(controlling for location). Cooking knowledge seems to have really been spread through the information age, and a base line expectation of quality ingredients also spread through the country during this time window. Do you remember when people used to advertise that they used arabica coffee beans, before it just became the standard? Dominos pizza is a particular stark example, and that change happened in 2010, in part because they had fallen behind, because all the other pizza places had been upping their game for years. I think the idea that, because on the surface you could go to a Wendy's and get a burger and fries in 1990 and in 2024, the 'superpalatability' of the food has not changed, is wrong (Wendy's is another place that seriously improved and is constantly tweaking and improving, a few years ago they drastically improved their fries).
I will agree that it is not super cleanly defined, but in general I think the availability of good food has improved pretty significantly since the 90s.
Can you expand on that? I haven't been following trends in American style pizza, but the idea of "upping the game" on pizza seems absurd. The thing has been perfected decades ago. It's yeast dough, tomatoes, meat and cheese.
What could you even change to make it more calorie dense? More cheese? That's called pizza quattro formaggi and has been a classic since basically forever.
The idea behind 'superpalatable' is not necessarily that it is more unhealthy (calorie dense), but that it is more delicious, so you over eat more, or are more likely to want to eat it instead of something else(something healthier). 'Upping the game' here, means tastier sauces, better crust recipes, perfecting baking time/and delivery/heat retention, quality of cheese, cheese blends, herbs, spices. Making more palatable food does not require making it more calorie dense. Can you imagine a world where room-temperature school-cafeteria pizza is the best possible delivery pizza, and how that would effect the frequency with which you order pizza?
Although, you can almost always add calories, one of the headline changes of their 2010 recipe was an herb and garlic butter glaze on the crust.
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There's also entirely new categories of commonly consumed foods. How many people in 1995 started their day with a coffee-like milkshake? Even those that don't, energy drinks have more calories than a cup of coffee, even with milk and sugar(and portion sizes were smaller back then, too).
On the other hand, every gas station has sugar-free energy drinks for sale as well. The white Monster is at least iconic enough that Boomerjak is always depicted with one.
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There's also limitless and ubiquitous digital entertainment. Reddit, X, TikTok, YouTube, PornHub, streaming services, video games, if you get tired of one thing you can switch to another. And just like that, your whole day is gone, and you've been mindlessly snacking on junk food the whole time. Yes, there were people that watched the TV the whole day in the 90's. And these people were morbidly obese, shaped like their armchairs.
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