Comment by spiderfarmer
13 hours ago
“industrialisation of agriculture led to ultraprocessed junk food“
The mass production of unprocessed food is not what led to the production of hyper processed food. That would be a strange market dynamic.
Shareholder pressure, aggressive marketing and engineering for super-palatable foods are what led to hyper processed foods.
Shelf life is one of the major factors allowing treatment more similar to nonperishable commodities.
I think some people do instinctively feel like all different kinds of software have different shelf lives or useful lifetimes for different reasons.
But there's always so much noise it's not very easy to get the expiration date correct.
Mass production is pretty much a given when it comes to commodities, and things like long shelf life are icing on the cake.
The inversion comes when mass production makes the highly processed feed more affordable than the unprocessed. After both have scaled maximally, market forces mean more than the amount of labor that was put in.
Strange indeed.