[cm2012]

These two categories are massively different. Tobacco, you could make the case that you're just hurting people.

Industrial food conglomerates are necessary to feed the world. People would die without them. They also make plenty of nutritious food. When people eat non-nutritious food it's not because the conglomerates are pushing it on them. It's because they choose it.

[Hnrobert42]

I agree in part. By definition, the conglomerates have many parts. Some of those are not objectively bad.

I also agree that people have choices.

I disagree that it is simply people choice it. When large corporations perform research to find hyperpalatable foods, spend billions on marketing, and capture regulatory apparatus to lock in their dominant position, it absolutely is that they are pushing it on people.

[cm2012]

Those things you said sound evil but they're really not. Finding hyper-palatable food is just another word for finding stuff people want to eat if you're making food, something that's tasty.

Spending billions on marketing? Marketing is how you connect to what customers want. I'm a professional marketer, right and it's really really hard. If I was trying to sell food, I'd try different positioning statements, different ways to see what actually appeals to people. Marketing is not magic; it's market discovery.

And yeah it's bad whenever any company captures regulatory power. That's bad and I agree.

[moritzwarhier]

Optimizing for food that costs the least in ingredients, at the same time is provenly unhealthy, and has addictive properties, is a totally valid strategy for a free market but it's far from "feeding the world".

And better accessibility of unhealthy food in comparison to healthy food is a reality for many people, especially when they cannot outsource the act of buying and preparing food to others, including family, or spend arbitrary amounts of money on luxury "health food".

I'm not saying it's impossible to buy healthy food, or the responsibility of regulation to dictate what people eat.

But what you say about marketing seems besides the point to me.

Optimizing marketing of food for profit is not equal to "feeding the world".

[cm2012]

Every kind of food is currently being made: healthy fresh food, processed foods of various types at all different price ranges. People have options to buy what they want and that's a good thing.

[moritzwarhier]

Of course!

But the availability of these options when you're say, doing lunch break in a particular city, is not unlimited.

I explicitly said that I'm not for a government dictate on what food should be made.

I did not add any suggestion on how to deal with the problem, but my statement said that maximizing profits on food can be exploitative.

[bondarchuk]

By and large most people don't see any problem with marketing, they will actually get a little bit mad at the suggestion it should be abolished, evidently it fulfills some kind of need for them.

All these kinds of questions you're asking come from a specific way of looking at things that is just not how most normal people look at the world. I'm not saying this out of misanthropy or some kind of wake-up-sheeple attitude, I'm also not saying you're wrong, but when you get knee-deep into critiqueing every aspect of how the world works at some point your worldview divorces from the worldview of most people to the point that "how do they all sleep at night" becomes kind of a moot question.

[cm2012]

My Theory: Advertising is a lot like capitalism itself. Both ads and capitalism are messy and have some externalized harms, but are better than the alternatives.

In the "advertising led" model of customer discovery, businesses advertise to essentially tell the market that they exist and provide a service. They do so by paying for advertising space across various mediums. This includes everything from their store signage to Craigslist ads, to TV and sophisticated digital advertising.

Most modern advertising is an auction where businesses compete to serve their message to customers the algorithms think are most likely to be interested.

This function - of matching users that might be interested in products to businesses providing products - is at this point hugely scaled.

People who want to ban ads will usually give the alternative of a reviewed directory of products and services for each category. That, they say, would be the ideal method of product discovery, along with word of mouth.

However, that runs immediately into the same problem that communism has historically. Who actually controls these directories, which would be a huge source of power for society? I posit that that it is impossible to centralize this effectively, and that the most likely most effective method for idea and product dispersal is something close to modern marketing and advertising.

[bondarchuk]

>People who want to ban ads will usually give the alternative of a reviewed directory of products and services for each category.

I don't know about this. The idea that it should be centrally reviewed and managed is somewhat of a strawman as far as I'm concerned. Once you outlaw third-party advertising you would naturally expect such directories to spring up (much like specialized business publications that are actually full of high-value ads that genuinely serve a purpose for people in the business) but they could operate just like normal businesses with in the capitalist system and would have to compete for quality and customers.

[cm2012]

How will the directories get their names out and compete if they're not allowed to promote themselves?

If you remove approved commercial options for promoting yourself, like advertisements, then most of the other options left for promotion are essentially spam.

If your answer is word of mouth, that's naïve. I've worked with over 100 startups at very various stages of marketing in the last 15 years. Word of mouth is fire in a pan. It is very industry dependent, context dependent, and company dependent.

[bondarchuk]

I don't know man. I just think somehow we'll manage. For example if a group of friends all feel a desperate need to find out about new products they could start a non-profit organization that will search out the new products and directories detective style. And public business directories exist in most places because they are required by law.

The deeper point is that pro-advertising people always frame it like advertising is something people want and that benefits them, but this is just a fig-leaf for the underlying ideology that businesses have the fundamental right to buy peoples' attention for money. The directories idea is mostly just a way to call this bluff, essentially saying "if people wanted to be advertised to they'd go out of their way to get it". Then the underlying ideology comes out.

[actionfromafar]

Yes, but why do they choose it?

[mystraline]

> When people eat non-nutritious food it's not because the conglomerates are pushing it on them. It's because they choose it.

Ah yes, the capitalist trick of blaming the consumer for structural failings.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-access-research-... - food desert map.

Especially in food deserts, sometimes the only places to buy food are from gas stations. Guess what they serve? Toxic shit that somehow identifies as food.

Opening state-run groceries is essential in fixing that many food deserts, but so many would howl of socialism.

Even Adam Smith warned that companies and capitalists would not help with infrastructure. Food access is one such area.

[vel0city]

I'm not against state-run groceries, one of the best grocers in this country is operated by the federal government. Food deserts are a problem, and we already have tools to solve them.

But you're putting far too much weight on food deserts on "why do Americans eat so much junk food". 6% of Americans live in food deserts. I imagine way more than 6% of Americans regularly eat junk food.

[SauntSolaire]

Food deserts are a methodologically fraught concept. The inclusion criteria are basically arbitrary; vary the distance or income thresholds by modest amounts, and the maps change drastically. It also buckets everyone living in a census tract to the geometric center of that tract, so that people living five minutes walk from a grocery store still count as living in a food desert. On top of that, they don't account for public (or private) transportation, using straight line distance as a proxy for time traveled.

The store-classification criteria also tends to only count supermarkets and large grocery chains, artificially classifying neighborhoods with local, well-stocked stores as food deserts.

Supposing those methodological problems were resolved, proximity to a grocery store still only accounts for 10% of the variance in nutritious food consumption between groups. The other 90% is driven by buyer demand, as is shown in the cases where different demographics shop at the same store[1].

For the small group for which access is truly limited (further reduced to the 10% of those for which their purchasing decisions would actually change), other solutions — such as reducing grocery store "shrinkage" through better policing, therefore increasing grocery store availability in areas where elevated crime otherwise renders them economically unviable — are noticeably under-discussed in favor of the heavy handed solutions of the type you raised here.

All of which exemplifies the typical failure mode inherent to many "socialist" policies: 1. Misidentify a problem, or solution. 2. Increase government control/regulation. 3. Repeat — indefinitely, as the problem hasn't been fixed — forever tightening the ratchet of government control.

[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w24094