[qaruxj]

Sorry, but I don't trust anyone who uses the phrase "Big ______". Your argument isn't even coherent. You're just making a fallacious appeal by putting the scary capital-B "Big" in front of a random noun and acting like that's supposed to mean something. Who makes up "Big Food"? Who controls "Big Food"? Why does "Big Food" necessarily make less healthy products than "independents"? I agree that a lot of mass produced food is unhealthy and probably excessively seasoned and sweetened to improve market appeal, but that isn't really an argument for why Soylent is better or worse than Ensure.

[gruseom]

He's not allowed to say "Big", but you can say "mass produced"? Those are pretty close.

Why does "Big Food" necessarily make less healthy products than "independents"? I agree that a lot of mass produced food is unhealthy and probably excessively seasoned and sweetened to improve market appeal

Take out that hedgey "necessarily" and you've answered your own question.

that isn't really an argument

To say that Ensure is excessively sweetened to make people buy more, while Soylent isn't, sounds like an argument to me.

[javert]

> He's not allowed to say "Big", but you can say "mass produced"? Those are pretty close.

No, because "Big _____" is a Progressive catchphrase that is normally used to villify whatever their target is and rationalize taking away some freedom from the marketplace, wheras "mass produced" just means "mass produced."

Of course, some people might use "Big _____" in a useful way, but it's definitely like a code smell but for English.

[gruseom]

"Big _____" is a Progressive catchphrase [...] used to villify [...] taking away some freedom from the marketplace

This all sounds much more ideological to me than the comment to which you are objecting.

[JohnHaugeland]

My interpretation of what he meant was "when the original post under discussion used the phrase Big Foo, the intent was to villianize the topic under discussion by the use of a recognized catch phrase for abusive and villainous scheming, and that moving the phrasing to the more neutral mass produced helped establish an honest baseline for discussion."

[javert]

Actually, it wasn't particularly. It was intentionally written in very plain, common English, in a way that refers to concrete things, not big ideological abstractions.

[makomk]

"Freedom" and "the marketplace" are concrete things, not big ideological abstractions?

[javert]

I was anticipating this objection, and no, they are not big ideological abstractions. They are not quite concretes, but very, very close.

[thejsjunky]

Properly "Big X" refers to the biggest players in the X industry, particularly with regard to trade groups and lobbying. It's useful because often this section of the industry will have unique qualities compared to the industry as a whole or other industries (such as how much they spend on lobbying, how much innovation they are responsible for, etc)

It is true that people will often use it as a lazy and fallacious way of vilifying but please note this is not exclusively a progressive phenomenon. Many of these groups lobby for things like govt subsidies, laws which restrict personal freedoms in ways that help their industry, etc...many conservatives aren't thrilled with such behavior.

In a brief non scientific survey of a few subreddits (r/libertarian, r/socialism, etc) phrases like "big oil" appear roughly comparably.

People on both ends of the political spectrum are (perhaps rightly) displeased with some of the actions of such groups and vilify them - they just disagree about what the root cause is and how to prevent such behavior.

The fallacy comes in when people use some particular actions of some players in an industry to invalidate everything that comes out of it. (such as implying that anything produced by a startup is ipso facto healthier than something produced by a large pharmaceutical company)

[qaruxj]

> He's not allowed to say "Big", but you can say "mass produced"? Those are pretty close.

"Big Food" is a meaningless scare phrase. It literally means nothing in the context of the comment I was replying to. On the other hand, "mass produced" has a very clear and well-established general meaning that I'm pretty sure most HN readers understand (and one that can easily be found online or in a dictionary; when I try Googling "Big Food", I just get a lot of random sites that use it as a buzzword without ever bothering to define clearly what they're fighting against).

> Take out that hedgey "necessarily" and you've answered your own question.

The question was rhetorical, and the point was to illustrate how absurd the phrase "Big Food" is. My statement about mass produced food was intended to show that I'm not defending major corporations that produce unhealthy food, but pointing out a rhetorical and logical flaw in tlb's post.

> To say that Ensure is excessively sweetened to make people buy more, while Soylent isn't, sounds like an argument to me.

tlb didn't include any sourced information about Soylent (other than "it's not sweet", which means nothing about its sugar content), so that's irrelevant. My point, again, was that calling anything "Big Food" is a meaningless, bullshit scare tactic and I was calling it as a saw it.