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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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The obvious difference between food and other addictions is that you cannot go cold turkey on all food. At least not without dying. The common recommendation for recovered addicts to never engage with the thing they got addicted to again, even in moderation, cannot apply to food.

The obvious difference between food and other addictions is that you cannot go cold turkey on all food.

It is actually theoretically possible to quit by going cold turkey. At least if you start morbidly obese. To be clear I am not recommending it, but the canonical case was Angus Barbieri. He supposedly lost 276 lbs, and kept most of it off, at least at the five year follow up.

There is some clinical research on protein-sparing modified fasts, which seems to be more sound from a physiological point of view. In early research there was a realitvely high incidence of death, possibly from mismanagement of the amino-acid profile or (preexisting?) heart disease. It seems like it would probably be hard to get an institutional review board to go along with a large scale study now, hard to fund a high quality study, and you would have perpetual problems with compliance.

From the applied side, this is something like what competitive bodybuilders have been doing in the last weeks of contest prep for some time. That is a world known for disordered eating, so I only point this out to say that it works physiologically, not that it's necessarily a good idea.

It can’t apply to food if you’re talking about all food, but I think it can sort of apply to the kind of highly processed foods and high glycemic index foods that seem to be the worst. Maybe you can’t cut all carbs. Okay cool. But you can do something like Paleo or Keto or something similar. Like instead of a McDonald’s double cheeseburger, make the same thing at home using as close to natural ingredients as possible. Use lean beef, good quality cheese, a whole grain bun, etc. and really, I think that burger would probably taste better anyway. Substitute fries for baked potatoes. And on it would go.

Like instead of a McDonald’s double cheeseburger

Which is ~450 calories. You could eat a McDonald's double cheeseburger as your 3 meals a day and lose weight. And since I remember what I used to make it, the last burger I prepared at home (albeit not with your ingredient list suggestion, the beef was pre-packaged refrigerated patty, not from mince, though nutritionally it would be near-identical) was instead 480 calories.

Short of directly eating blocks of lard, there is no specific food item that can be responsible for the 600lb outcomes that OP describes. It instead requires an inordinate quantity of food. That it's more likely to be McDonalds instead of homemade burgers has more to do with the general dysfunction that you require to hit 600lb, rather than because McDonalds is better than the equivalent amount of homemade burgers at making you 600lb.

I mean part of the issue is that people can eat that and a large fries in a single meal. I think if you did the whole food version you’d feel full much faster. Which would definitely help to keep your weight reasonable.

Well, also french fries and a large coke are likely more calories than what you would eat and drink with it at home. I'm guessing potato chips and a single can of soda.

God. It would probably be delicious, but it would take forever, and probably cost more. I’d be a lot healthier if I developed better habits around cooking and meal prep.

I mean I'm too tired to cook sometimes too, but when I am (and don't want to order pizza or something) a cheeseburger is exactly what I make:

  1. Slap 1/3-1/4 lb of beef in hot pan or on grill; squish with flipper
  2. Cut bun; spread some mustard/mayo/butter/whatever on there
  3. Slice cheese and onion
  4. Turn beef; squish a little more and put cheese on it
  5. Wait 2 mins
  6. Put onion slice on bottom of bun
  7. Put beef on onion
  8. Put some lettuce on beef
  9. Put top of bun on lettuce

This seems like way less work than going to McDonalds, and takes less than ten minutes? If you want fries with that you need to think ahead and plug the deep frier in ~15 minutes before starting the above and add "0. Throw fries in deep frier" to your steps. Cutting up a potato first is fast enough for me (and much healthier), but those frozen fries work fine if you want to optimize for speed.

(EDIT: I see downthread you are vegan (but still think cheeseburgers are delicious), so substitute one of those frozen patties for the beef stuff and don't use butter -- even easier, and the black-bean ones are pretty good (although almost but not quite entirely unlike a burger))

You can make the case with the burger but the deep frier part is not plausible. Cleaning up a deep frier and the fine mist of oil it will deposit all over your kitchen are a lot of work, there are substantial efficiencies of scale for deep frying.

Also keep in mind that getting in a comfy car and driving to McDonald's and back doesn't register as work to most people in the same way that cooking and especially cleaning dishes do.

You can make the case with the burger but the deep frier part is not plausible. Cleaning up a deep frier and the fine mist of oil it will deposit all over your kitchen are a lot of work, there are substantial efficiencies of scale for deep frying.

Wat? It lives in the pantry and I bring it out if I want fries; if you're mostly doing potatoes the oil only needs changing from time to time. I deep clean it maybe annually.

The thing has a lid; there's no 'mist', fine or otherwise. Are you thinking of an industrial unit? You are correct that this would be a bad idea -- the $50 Walmart ones work fine for domestic quantities.

I hadn't considered leaving the oil in the pantry in the fryer between uses, if you use it often enough I guess that's workable.

I had also forgotten that deep fryers have lids which will trap most of the oily steam. So consider me convinced on that point.

Honestly it turns fries into one of the easiest things you can make -- with homecut potatoes and appropriate oil choice they are reasonably healthy IMO -- I've got some pork fat in the freezer and will try with lard once I render it!

It's mostly start-up costs. Admittedly, the start-up costs are high; we got 'lucky' in that wife wasn't allowed to work for a while during the immigration process, so she bore a lot of those costs while unemployed. We kept a spreadsheet of recipes; I usually did the calorie counts. But once you have the recipe and have done the calorie count once, it's done forever. (You also don't have to do this right away if it's not an important goal; you can always just go do it later, since you have all the information just sitting there anyway.)

Actual cooking time can really vary. We have a mix, with some recipes that are pretty quick and easy to make; honestly, many of these take less time than I would have taken to go out of my way, fight through traffic that always seems to get worse, stop by a drive-thru, wait through what always seemed to be a longer and longer line, and then still have to wait for it to be prepped. Just a burger and fries? Easy peasy, honestly takes almost no time. Maybe 15-20min of cook time for the fries, and you do the burger while they cook. Even faster if you're just microwaving a baked potato. There's a ton of really simple meals, like throwing together a salad or making some spaghetti (purchased frozen meatballs are an easy starter), and legit, I'm probably saving time over running to a drive thru.

Up to this point, you don't even need much "meal prep"; you just need meal planning, so that you can pick up all your groceries for the week in one stop rather than having to constantly run out to the store to get that one thing you're missing.

Getting more into meal prep, with a little time and effort, you can start freezing things to have some 'ready made' stuff that just needs reheating for days when you have no time. We'll have more extravagant recipes that we'll make on some weekend that we're going to be home anyway (winter is fantastic, especially because the cooking keeps the house warm), and we'll just make a double/triple/whatever batch (depending on calorie counts and how many portions we're wanting), bag it up, freeze it, and bam, we've got ten meals that we can just pull out and reheat over the next few months. Family size matters for what is plausible. If you're not a big family, you can bang out twenty days worth (or more) of lunches/dinners in a long afternoon. A freezer helps, so you don't have to eat the same thing every day for a week, which is what a lot of meal preppers do. But we'll also sometimes do, say, a casserole or roast or chicken that we'll just eat for three days in a row or whatever. That maybe takes more time than if you're stopping by Chipotle and buying enough food once to have it sit in your fridge and eat on for three days... but probably less than stopping by Chiptole every day and buying individual meals each day.

Now, once a week, one of us goes through the recipes and picks some for the following week. Can take into account if we know we have some work thing or whatever and put something super easy on those days. Then, since the actual recipes are right there, make a grocery list. That whole process maybe takes 20min now, tops. We often do it between sets while we're at the gym, so it doesn't even take up what would otherwise be productive time. I spend wayyyy more time writing stupid comments on TheMotte than I do on almost any of this.

Costs are a big question mark; it really depends on what you want. We've definitely culled some recipes that were good and tasty, but not so good and tasty that they justified the cost. If you want everything artisanal and fancy, sure, you can rack up the dollar signs. But when you're making it yourself, you really can tailor it to what you want, and for an equivalent quality, you're almost always saving (or for equivalent cost, you're almost always getting better quality). I will absolutely put a cheap American cheese slice on my homemade double cheesey until the day they ban it; nothing else melts quite like it; fight me.

It definitely changes your relationship with restaurants, though. So many times, when we do end up in a restaurant, there's like half the menu that would just pain me to order, thinking, "MFer, I can put Alfredo sauce on some pasta for like a buck o' five; why would I pay you fifteen for it?!" Restaurants now are mostly for being social, when traveling, for an experience, for some international dishes that are kind of a pain to get/keep the ingredients, or for some dishes that genuinely do have a significantly higher home prep cost/difficulty (I may or may not be finally close to cracking sushi well enough; this was always one of our few 'always worth just picking some up' meals).

Since I feel like I need a closer, I will just remind you that the start-up costs are absolutely high, and you will probably feel very very frustrated for a while. But like with most things in life (exercising, taking up a new sport/hobby, buying a house for the first time, hell, being married, etc.), it does get easier. You can try to ease into it, too; don't feel like you need a brand new recipe and make every meal yourself every day for three months; just plan to substitute some number of meals a week to start and hopefully be fine with repeating some things as you're building a repertoire. One last thing that also helped my wife is that I always assured her that if something went horribly wrong with a new recipe, we can always just go pick something up/order something in/pull out a frozen pizza or something; it's not the end of the world. Thankfully, we only had to do that a handful of times.

As an aside, any chance of posting some of those recipes in the Wednesday thread? I'm beginning to get heavy into meal prep, and could use the inspiration.

Batch cooking is an honest revelation, especially with automation like ovens, crock pots, rice cookers, or sous vide rigs. When I'm doing well I can meal prep for 3 days with about 3 hours end to end, of which maybe 30 minutes is actual touch time and the rest is watching a movie waiting for food to cook. That gets me very whole foods that are honestly pretty boring, but there's a whole universe of price points for effort vs outcome. You could do a week's worth of giant 1000-calorie burritos in 90 minutes end to end, I bet.

I’d be interested in a writeup. I know it’s possible in theory, but I’m a lazy son of a bitch, and haven’t made a plan.

Also, this forum will probably skewer me for this, but I keep a vegan kitchen. So lots of the common minimal-prep sources of protein are off the table. C’est la vie.

Oof. Good on you for following your ethics, but that is harder. I can only speak for my own situation, I hope it helps as a sketch:

I'm designing food supplies for 3 days, which lines up neatly with integer bulk quantities of food I can buy. I'm targeting 1800-2000 calories a day, 150-200 grams protein, about 300 grams carbs, the balance is fats. My level of talent and energy to invest is minimal. My 3-day buy is:

  • 5 pounds of boneless skinless chicken breast, usually packaged as 6 breasts. This can flex between 4.5 and 6 pounds, which lets me easily buy from what's in the cooler.
  • 5-pound bag of russet potatoes.
  • 2-pound (? Maybe just 1) bag of rainbow carrots.
  • Enough broccoli heads to end up with about 1.5lb of florets. Allegedly you can coin the stems, I've not tried it.
  • 1 or 2 heads of cauliflower.

This assumes stocks of olive oil or EVOO and spice blend on hand. I use 2 large baking pans, because I don't have a lot of counter space.

Batch 1 is chicken:

  • Preheat the oven to 425. While that's running, prep the batch:
  • Pat the breasts dry of juice, array them on the pan
  • Lightly coat with OO, you want a thinnish layer, say just short of dripping off, but enough to adhere the spice blend and help cook
    • I have a mister that should help with this, but instead wants to squirt a stream of oil all over, not fog it. I don't have a solution for this beyond keep the stream moving and vary spacing until the result looks right.
  • Dust with spice blend
  • Set timer for 25-35 minutes, depending on weight and preference. 165F in the center is what USDA will tell you to achieve; I think this is high because that's what's needed for instant sterilization, not an accumulation of sterilization over longer times at lower temps.
  • After starting batch 1, immediately prep pan 2:

Batch 2 is broccoli and cauliflower:

  • Use a paring knife to prep the veg as you like. For me this is just cutting florets of both up, medium size.
  • In a second pan, arrange artfully. Some piling is acceptable; if you need this, oil the veg that would get covered up.
  • Apply OO, fairly heavily. I'm not going to say soak, but you want enough for all exposed veg to be wet.
  • Apply spice dust

Wait out the rest of pan 1's cooking time with a beer and entertainment. When your timer dings, cycle pan 2 in immediately, turn the heat to 450 and let it climb, set timer for 25 minutes, and give pan 1 the rest of your beer to cool. Move the chicken out into a storage platter, move the platter to the fridge to start chilling, and pour out chicken juices wherever you find acceptable, perhaps a beer can or the trash. Roughly swab out pan 1 and prep batch 3 in it:

  • Sink wash potatoes, sink wash carrots. Remove blemishes, top and trim.
  • Coarse-chop the carrots to ~1.5" long. Or maybe don't even bother if they'll fit your tupperware and you're feral enough, it doesn't seem to change much.
  • Arrange on pan 1 as you go.
  • Apply OO, you can be pretty light here if you want.
  • Apply spice dust

Wait out batch 2, cycle in batch 3, bake for 40 minutes. While it's cooking, pull the chicken out and start portioning out. For these portions, one day is enough volume to fill one 8-cup Rubbermaid container and one 4-cup Rubbermaid container, as here.

This is, you'll gather, not haut cuisine, and that's somewhat intentional, in order to encourage the food-as-fuel mindset.

Cooking doesn’t take that long if you do it enough to be good at it.

Corollary, some people think it’s work and don’t like it. These people generally don’t do it enough to get good at it, so they don’t get fast at it.

Healthy cooking is usually cheaper than fast food with intelligent meal planning, however, so I don’t think that’s a true criticism.

I’ve always been fairly neurotic about cooking whenever there’s a time pressure. I hate seeing my kitchen devolve into even more of a mess. It’s why I don’t enjoy baking.

Agreed that cheapness is not difficult on its own.

The capability to manage your kitchen and clean as you go is a skill, but it can be learned with enough practice.

Though it's important to remember step zero - make sure your work area is easy to clean.

I hate seeing my kitchen devolve into even more of a mess.

This was something that started off difficult with my wife, too. She was biting off more than she could chew, was wanting to make three complex dishes in one afternoon (some of which might even be brand new), for example, and not even thinking about any cleanup. She would get real anxiety from all the crazy. To stem the bleeding early, I would come into the kitchen just to clean up everything while she was cooking. She has gotten better at figuring out how to clean as she cooks.

If you're not going nuts and making several complex dishes simultaneously, a dishwasher helps, a lot. If it's a big family with no dishwasher, there's definitely a much bigger time penalty in comparison to just eating takeout and throwing everything away.