Call me selfish and, uh, chicken...but I don't welcome it. I'd assert that the americanization of food - applying industrial chemical technology to food preparation since the 1950s - while good at preserving it, is often a step backwards in taste and safety. Remember how bad butter was, and that margarine was so much healthier? Yeah, that lasted about 20 years before people realized margarine ain't so good. I do believe that high fructose corn syrup is worse for you than an equivalent dose of cane/beet sugar. How sure are we that artificial sweeteners ain't messing with your body 30 years down the line after a lemon-flavor diet coke a day? Not to mention that organic and natural foods taste better. Yeah, that Jose Cuerva margarita mix is convenient, but when you squeeze your own limes, well, it tastes amazingly better. So put me in the european camp that is skeptical of factory foods, and willing to pay a bit extra for a neighborhood butcher or farmer's greenmarket.
Did anyone else just have the hunting scene from The Distinguished Gentleman flash through their heads?
My uneasiness at viewing the sickly look of just about every vegan I've seen keeps my freezer full of porterhouse cuts.
Which kinda is the problem, isn't it? Factory Food is cheaper, lasts longer, etc. That's why it's touted as being better to solve world hunger, but it also means big business companies can use factory food to undersell local producers/processors. I've been impressed by how europe has stubbornly clung to neighborhood shops instead of supersized walmarts and pathmarks.
There already exists an effective and cheap machine that takes worthless material and turns it into meat. The machines even have the ability to create new machines. They are called cows. There is no way that growing meat in a lab will ever be as efficient as the end result of millions of years of evolution combined with a couple thousand years of human tweeking.
Yes, stubborn clinging is something Europe knows how to do really, really well. Did you know the French are still a colonial power? No, really!
Er...no. And I'm not impressed by many things about them. but I do not see the correlation between Walmarts, lower unemployment rates, and a better country. Unless you're saying a bunch of teenagers who couldn't care less about their jobs is much better than a few proud shopowners who take pride in their work and reputation and deliver higher quality products. Hey - supersize stores have their place. But would you want all the little farms that produce some damn tasty tomatos to be replaced with factories that only make more economically profitable doritos and twinkies? Hey, I love spicy foods. I do not want the thousands of little guys making custom hot sauces to be put out of business by the McIlhenny Company, leaving us lousy cayenne pepper sauce - do you?
hey - I'm impressed with how Joisey stubbornly keeps loads of 24hr diners around instead of turning them into Wendy's/McDonalds. Is that a bad thing?
Except in this case the McIlhenny Company came first. You could probably find a better example to illustrate your point.
Not necessarily.Mc Donalds started small,too. It speaks more to the point that as companies making any food product become more popular and national,they have sacrificed quality to ecoonomies of scale.The need for uniformity of a nationally distributed product (same Big Mac in Albany as Albuquerque) takes away much of what made the original product distinctive.