Comment by TeMPOraL
6 days ago
> The reason is that an industrial producer has very different incentives than those who cook for their family, for friends or relatives, or at least for some loyal customers who appreciate good food. An industrial producer cares only for the appearance and taste of the food, and for its production cost.
Now I'm not denying industrial players have a different set of incentives than people cooking for themselves, but it's not all evil either. They also care about appeasing regulators in countries where food regulations exist, and they may care a bit personally since they themselves and/or their family is eating that too, so I wouldn't necessarily paint them as completely disconnected from the rest of society.
Now, on the other hand, the industrial producers have a few more things going in their favor, such as they actually have quality control metrics, and they are in actual position to make good on caring about food. Home kitchens are not, regular people have neither knowledge nor appreciation of the complex chemistry involved, and even if they did, the equipment used in home kitchens is too crude to allow for consistent quality (not that we can hope for any with no supply chain control either).
(The slightly-fancy restaurants are arguably the worst - they combine all the bad incentives of a high-volume, low-margin commercial operation, with equipment and setup inadequate to guarantee any kind of process quality control. Contrast that with e.g. McDonald's - they may be serving mediocre food at best, but they do it with engineering precision, and you can be sure they aren't just microwaving you an old chicken breast and adding burn marks with an electric grill to make it look like you'd expect for a $50 menu item with a name written in French.)
So the irony is, the industrial producers may have misaligned incentives, but they're also the only ones in position to deliver actually healthy and quality food. Regular people have neither knowledge nor equipment for that, and all the "healthy eating" fads abusing real scientific terms and imbuing them with quasi-religious meaning is not helping. In reality, people just eat stuff and make up stories they don't even verify to feel good with their choices. Which, like with other such belief systems, is fine, until they believe their own stories so much they try to force others to believe in them too.
While you are right that industrial producers could deliver high quality healthy food, when I go to any supermarket and I look at the huge variety of food offerings, after I exclude the raw food ingredients, like fresh or frozen vegetables or fruits or meat, various kinds of seeds or flour or oil, etc., from what remains 99.99% contain various kinds of garbage that I do not want in my body.
Even when such food products are intended to resemble food that I used to eat at home, based on traditional recipes, the modern industrial recipes are very different, with all expensive ingredients substituted completely or partially with worse but cheaper alternatives, and with many extra additives that do not provide any nutritional benefit, but they just improve the texture and taste to resemble that of products made with more expensive ingredients or with ingredients that cause a shorter shelf life.
So in practice, the food producers could, but they don't.