Calm the fuck down.
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On one side we have the Paleo Diet crowd, and the Locavory enthusiasts who want everyone to live near a farmers’ market, and the Unprocessed Food crowd, and the people with huge kitchens full of pink Himalayan salt and Thermomix processors and similar Veblen goods for pecuniary display… and on the other side we have Rhinehart trolling them, with his idea that foodstuffs are best grown out of sight so they have no environmental footprint, then processed into hydrolyzed starch so that the destroyed nutrients can be scientifically replaced.
I’m rooting for injuries.
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But it doesn’t require 0 energy.
That’s not a universal truth.
Grocery stores – like stores in general – are designed to be pleasurable experiences, to encourage people to enter and buy more than they intended to buy. Of course, that doesn’t work on everyone, and a few people find repellent what most feel is attractive.
These are the core problems with what Rhinehart says: he does calculations with numbers he’s guessing about, and he repeatedly assumes that when he can’t find an exact number, that it must be 0; and, he treats his personal preferences as universal. His supplier says that they reuse water, so when he calculates his water usage, he assumes that Soylent requires no water to produce. He can’t stand grocery stores, so he assumes that no one would want to go to one. Any externality he doesn’t happen to think of, must not matter.
It’s a mass of irrationalities, posed as rationalities.
And the scary bit, as with that article I linked earlier about laundry services, is that many entrepreneurs – including people who are currently the richest people on Earth – think similarly, and have the power to reshape the world according to their flawed reasoning.
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You never did budgeting? If some other department pays for it, it is free for you.
Then why do they fail so miserably? Ever heard anybody say “let’s go to the grocery store, just because it is pretty there”?
Apparently it works. He knows how to step on the toes in just the right way to piss off the easy-to-piss-off people, to get the pageviews and citations. He is doing a perfect job. I have to applaud.
Compare with other foods and you may find that the amount of water used can be compared to a rounding error. Meat especially is quite thirsty. (Which doesn’t make bacon taste any less good, though.)
I’d have to run the numbers to see if the actual number is close enough to zero to round down, but such things happen. Especially in comparisons that give the necessary perspectives.
Besides, for the purposes of semantic driving trollies, the Earth can be considered a closed system where all the water used gets recycled.
Check out the number of “grocery stores suck” hits on google. Some of the suckage is inherent in the mode of operation, so you cannot just engineer it away with brighter lights (bleh) and more colorful packagings (bleh) and more annoying music (that’s what a mp3 player with headphones is for).
Do you like grocery stores? Do you voluntarily spend more than just the barest necessary time there, do you visit them just for the fun of the experience? Or do you consider them a necessary evil?
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Budgeting rules cannot apply when talking about environmental impact. “Someone else’s budget” doesn’t exist when we’re talking about the globe.
And personally I love grocery stores. Especially when travelling. I cab literally spend hours in there. Not only do I like food I find it highly informative of the local population. Also people watching. It’s all good. And I get tasty food on top!
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actually i love to go to the central market on lovers lane in dallas. as an enthusiastic omnivore with a highly trained palate i find the selection and display of the produce and meats, not to mention the bins and bins of bulk spices, grains, and nuts amazingly appealing. even my local h.e.b. carries a handsome and well-displayed assortment of produce and meat. i realize that not everyone regards shopping as a highlight of the week and cooking as a highlight of the day but i am not the only person i know who feels that way. certainly, i would find a diet of sameness, same taste, same color, same texture a nightmare.
i haven’t commented previously because i don’t really feel like i have a dog in this hunt. other peoples’ food choices are really none of my business unless i observe a student who may either be suffering from an eating disorder or from neglect, or from extreme poverty. still, your rhetorical question provoked me because i like grocery stores, grocery shopping, and cooking. when i am in dallas i often go to the central market for the sheer fun of it.
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The grocery store hate is bizarre to me too, it seems like you’d have to be some kind of shut-in to hate grocery stores. I like to wander in the big Central Market on Lamar in Austin sometimes just to see what’s there and check out the bulk bins, those bulk bins are really pretty wonderful. It’s nice to find new foods to try out and cook or find odd candies for the kids to try. I like wandering in produce sections just because there are lovely things to see and smell there, and occasionally interesting new fruits or vegetables to try. My local H.E.B. has a fantastic cheese section I visit even when I don’t need cheese just because it’s lovely to see and the person who runs that section likes feedback on what to get. It’s nice. I go to Trader Joes sometimes even though I never need to go there since I like the place and the lovely things they carry as well.
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*waves*
A couple of minutes of dealing with other people in a supermarket and I’m ready to start stabbing.
The shops themselves are fine, although I don’t in any way enjoy being in them.
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Damn you, autocorrect.
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Also… I’m stealing that shit. Hope you don’t mind.
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“feeeeemales!”
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“hu-man feeeeemales”!
God help me, quarks is awesome.
[ETA] Oh god, do you think there is Odo/quark slashfic?
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As a guy who harvests his own salt from the sea, uses exotic enzymes on meat, has an inferno pit in his back yard along with a sous vide setup, a decent sized garden and all my grandparents ball/Kerr jars…
This thread gives me the giggles.
I am totes gonna buy some soylent. Stash it in the back of my car next to the distilled water.
Want to eat food basically as a pill? Go nuts. But did he actually question having a kitchen in his apartment? Sure, cap pipes and wires off if you want… But still run them to code before you cap.
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I prefer a square foot garden and some chickens.
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Me too. Trimming suckers, training vines caring for life is about as meditative as it gets.
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Add a little green dye for added effect, perhaps?
If you don’t want it, don’t install it. At worst it impairs the facility resale value but that’s it.
I am so bad with my suckers and I always plant way too many tomatoes for my tiny 6x9 plot so they turn into 10 feet tall monsters straining to reach the sun. But oh man, nothing makes me feel better than wading into that jungle after a day at the office with a ball of twine and clippers. So good.
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http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/08/04/techbros-are-hilarious/ makes for a nice teardown.
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One thing I forgot: I’ve donated clothes, and sold clothes and purchased them from second hand stores, and in both sorts of places there was always an explicit requirement posted that incoming clothes had to be clean. So I’m guessing the places to which he donated his used clothes probably didn’t have any facilities to clean them, and just threw them out.
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