pluckytree

Better how? Certainly not more nutritious but having some new feature that adds convenience or uniformity. Processing always has side effects, usually discovered decades later. Trans fats, artificial sweeteners, refined grains, the list goes on.

With a -8 vote, I’m not going to comment on eating real food ever again here. :)

If you genuinely care and aren’t just baiting me, thinking you’ve entrapped me in an illogical box, here goes. I don’t have a problem fortifying cereal or flour, but they are both moderately to highly processed, so it’s generally better to eat less processed food. Salt is minimally processed and is an essential mineral, as is iodine. If you eat a good diet, you don’t need extra iodine, but I don’t think it’s harmful to add it. You can choose uniodised salt if you feel you don’t want extra iodine. Adding these things doesn’t make them more processed, it just makes them the same but with additives. :) Processing means you are taking a real food and removing nutrition from it in exchange for getting something in return like better shelf life or faster cooking times or some other convenience.

Clean coal, green hydrogen, natural gas. An adjective doesn’t make something good for the environment.

From Simon Kuznets, who invented GDP as a concept:

Economic welfare cannot be adequately measured unless the personal distribution of income is known. And no income measurement undertakes to estimate the reverse side of income, that is, the intensity and unpleasantness of effort going into the earning of income. The welfare of a nation can, therefore, scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income as defined above.

If he can question it, then we certainly should instead of just accepting it because “we’ve always done it this way”.

Deflection is needed in this case. Nothing good comes from focusing on goods created while ignoring all the societal costs.

Cut down the remaining bush in NZ and selling it off would juice up the GDP, for example.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/may/24/robert-kennedy-gdp

Are the ants from somewhere else in New Zealand or imported?

If you’re a native plant or animal, it will probably feel perfect.

Will the trickle down effects also be retrospective?

I used to live in California where a neighbour had a massive feijoa tree. There were a lot of big fruit trees around, so it was common for people to put out a bag of fruit near the street and people would snatch them up.

I stumbled upon this full bag of feijoas one day in front of their house and squealed FEIJOAS! (They call them pineapple-guavas there). I took only a handful because I didn’t want to be greedy. The next day I walked by and clearly no one had taken any so I took more. A few more days and I was snatching the remainder. The homeowner came out and chatted with me. She said they’d been putting out what they’d couldn’t eat for years and hardly anyone ever takes them. I told them to let me know whenever they had any and I’d take them.

Eventually, she started leaving bags of fruit on my porch during fruiting season. And that’s how I got free feijoa delivery. One year I made chutney and jam!

As an interesting side note, the “pineapple-guava” tree is actually a very popular landscape plant in the US. But whenever I’ve stumbled upon them in fruiting season, fruit is rotting in the ground or being eaten by crows.