Our study in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (here, here, and here) shows that the majority of the Victorian urban poor consumed diets which were limited, but contained extremely high nutrient density. Bread could be expensive but onions, watercress, cabbage, and fruit like apples and cherries were all cheap and did not need to be carefully budgeted for.
Show me a grocery store where fresh watercress and cherries are cheaper than some artificial crap loaded with added sugar, sodium, and preservatives, and people will start to eat healthier.
> The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea, and potatoes — an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t.
Orwell wasn't describing a mid-Victorian diet at all. He wrote that nearly a century after the mid-Victorian period, when sugar and processed foods had already become much cheaper than they were.
In mid-Victorian times, eating margarine, bread, sugared tea, and corned beef regularly simply wasn't an option for the poor, regardless of any lack of self-discipline -- those things were all far too expensive to be anything other than a rare treat.
I think parent is making the point that Orwell's insight applies to today's consumer choices - and that it was an understood phenomenon even ~80 years ago.
Nothing in life is a choice. Free will is a social construct, or more precisely a moral one.
Poor people exist because of bad luck, whether in managing their money or the genetic lottery.
I'm all for abolishing both of these things. A society of genetically related clones would work great. A nation as a family. You'd meet a stranger and you'd know what they're like, even though you wouldn't know exactly who they are.
Having worked with many, I have to believe it's more a mix of things. There were certainly cases of hard luck, but it's also not hard to see that spending your paycheck on beer every week when you have no money is never going to improve things. In reality, it's more a mix of things, some bad luck and some bad choices.
Now it's true that some people can absorb a whole lot more bad luck than others because of their family, but I remember one guy in particular who was rather determined to send his life into a ditch in spite of having parents who were willing and able to do a lot of things to help him. He managed to do things like going to prison for beating his girlfriend and robbing her sister and endangering (and injuring) himself on the job.
So it's not all black & white like you're making it out to be.
EDIT: I do feel I should put in a counter-point, in that I also knew a guy who made about one bad choice and the rest was hard luck, so there's that too. Most people were more a mix and for whatever it's worth, I tried to help where I could. The guy who loved to drink had his cruddy old bike stolen one Christmas, so I gave him a brand new one. That was pretty important to him, as it was how he got to work. I put a headlight on it too, as he had to ride a lot at night.
No one can deny we 'make' choices based on the way we think, feel and the environment we are in. And the way we think and feel is determined partly by environment, but mostly by genetics. You can look this up. 2 pairs of Colombian identical twins got mixed up. One set grew up in practically medieval lifestyle in a rural province, the other was raised in the capital. Despite completely different environment, their personalities were remarkably similar. From adoption studies, we know that something similar is the case for intelligence.
The thing about that is that we experience free will. By that I mean that most people perceive ourselves as being in control of ourselves, rather than being controlled by whatever else.
If you want to say that's an illusion or whatever, then you undermine empiricism and science with it. How many of our other perceptions about the world are unreliable and why can't this one be trusted?
Watercress and cherries are relatively expensive but I think you'll find that onions, cabbage, and apples are all priced quite competitively with a lot of processed food.
A single apple runs in the $0.30-$0.50 range where I'm at. It has 52 calories and 0.3 grams of protein. A mcdouble is $1 and it contains 390 calories and 22 grams of protein.
Eating fresh fruit is cheap, but it's still not as cost effective as some fast food, let alone processed food in the grocery store.
According to this study http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/healthy-vs-u... healthier diet patterns--fresh meat, vegetables, etc.--cost about $1.50 more per day. So, yes, there is some difference and meal prep etc. certainly takes longer. However, the processed food is so much cheaper argument can also be overstated.
So for a family of 4 you are talking about $6/day, which is $2,190/year. For a working class family with an income of $20,000-$40,000/year it represents roughly 5-10% of their total income for the year to eat healthy.
That's not a small chunk of change for families like that. Sure they'll almost certainly earn that back in lower medical costs in the long run, but in the short term it's a serious burden.
>" a working class family with an income of $20,000-$40,000/year"
A "working class" family doesn't have an income of $20,000. That would put a family in the bottom 12% by income. Median family income was $67,000/year in 2014.
At least where I am from "Working Class" implies skilled labor like Electrician or Carpenter, and some white-collar jobs like realty agents, nurses and teachers. People who make $35k-$60k.
People making $20k, like landscapers, janitors, forklift operators, and loaders, are generally called "Unskilled Laborers", not working class.
By percentage of household spending, the US spends less on food than anyone else. There are several articles about this. This was the first search result for me:
That's fair. It's worth pointing out though that that particular comparison was between healthy and unhealthy food. There are various other studies out there that look at the cost of fast food vs. home-cooked healthy meals and things of that sort and found that the healthier meals were often cheaper. Of course, as others have pointed out there are other costs and other types of costs associated with food prep.
It's not only meal prep (which I think you are understating the cost of), it's also having access to a kitchen and cooking supplies (knives, pans, bowls etc.) that allow you to easily cook, which is not cheap.
I actually agree that there are a lot of understandable reasons that people (perhaps especially Americans) eat crappy food rather than cooking something more nutritious--time, knowledge, living environment. I'm just arguing that, while the relative cost plays some role, it's not the overriding factor that it's sometimes made out to be.
At a sit-down restaurant, yeah, a burger will often take longer than most other items. That's because it's being prepared fresh. A real "fast food" place doesn't prepare its food fresh like that. An actual fast food burger can be prepared and put into your hands in less than a minute if people aren't busy (and it's not held up by the rest of your order).
if you want cooking hardware cheap its fairly easy in the u.s. Thrift stores' more reliable items to find are always cooking hardware, all manner of containers, utensils. things like a large crockpot can be had for under $30 new. Also people state that fresh veggies are expensive, but frozen vegetables can be found for cheap. The practice now has been flash freezing for a lot of these I think so nutrients are preserved.
I've seen large gallon+ sized bags of fiji apples at Safeway for $1.99 (containing maybe 15 apples). At my local grocer, I've seen 'bruised' bags that contain about 10 apples for 99c (with only one or two actually really bruised).
The problem is that people assume that good food has to look good, and that fear of bruised/uncharismatic food is what drives prices of healthy base-ingredient foods up.
On a related note, tomatoes are a tragic victim of appearances. The "nice" looking tomatoes you can get in any grocery store here are really quite awful. They sacrificed taste and texture at the altar of appearances. In contrast, if you buy heirloom tomatoes, they look pretty bad, but they taste amazing.
Supplement the fresh produce with lentils, beans, and other nutritionally dense items that store well and you'll be far more competitive. Beans are insanely cheap, $0.44 for a 200g serving with 650 calories and 39g of protein. So $0.25 matches the calories/protein of a MD and leaves you $0.75 for fresh produce.
I can live very cheaply on frozen mixed veggies, black beans and rice. Occasionally with some meat. Sometimes I use Mexican-style spicing. Sometimes Indian-style. Sometimes Chinese-style. I make huge batches, and freeze single servings. Plus spinach etc, and fruit and chocolate for desert.
Eating tasteless frozen vegetables and starchy beans and rice, again and again day after day, sounds like hell to me. Eating is so effortful compared to soylent -- it's revolting to me how much chewing I would have to do to eat something like that.
You can just buy flavorings for soylent, or blend in some fruit, and it'll have a pleasant taste, and you won't spend time on it. Seems so much better than frozen anything.
Frozen mixed veggies (carrots, peas, corn, green beans and lima beans) are far from tasteless. Also, they're frozen soon after picking, so nutritional content is higher than most market produce. And the combination of corn, beans and rice supplies complete protein. Plus there's plenty of fiber.
Here's my "Indian" spicing, with largest quantities first: cumin, granulated garlic, black pepper, coriander, cinnamon, turmeric. First I start microwaving the veggies in a large Pyrex bowl. Then I fry the spices lightly in ghee, add canned black beans. If I'm using meat, I add that first and brown. Then I mix it all in a large pot, and simmer for a while. Finally I adjust spicing, and let cool.
I freeze in single-portion containers. It takes me an hour or two to prepare ~20 servings. When I'm hungry, it takes about 10 minutes from freezer to microwaving to eating.
I totally don't get the thing about chewing. I like chewing. I enjoy the process as flavors from each component blend with each other and the spicing. I can't imagine feeling satisfied after just drinking a meal.
I have never found frozen vegetables to have any taste other than the faint suggestion of their natural taste in a sea of mushy blandness.
When I was on a DIY blend and mixed batches of powder weekly, it took 20-30 minutes (depending how much I concentrated on it) to prepare a week's worth of meals. It took ~2 minutes to pour the powder into a pitcher at the beginning of the day, so 40 seconds/meal prep time.
Not to mention the time saved shopping, planning for shopping, driving to the store, etc., Which almost certainly takes at least 90 minutes/trip, which let's say you make biweekly. comes to 105-155 minutes of weekly overhead plus 10 minutes a meal for 315-365 minutes of total time wasted by consuming solid food a week. In comparison, DIY soylent is 62-72 minutes a week. If you're buying powder, that drops to just the time required to mix a day's batch, dropping the total time cost to 42 minutes a week! If you buy Soylent 2.0, you spend ZERO minutes on food preparation and can ALWAYS consume nutrients concurrently with any other task.
That is HOURS a week you are literally stealing from yourself. You could use that to scale your startup that much quicker, or if you're a freelancer you could just convert it directly to billable hours! (If you're a wage slave, why are you on HN?)
By design Soylent has a complete nutritional profile, so you're getting everything you need, complete proteins, fiber, whatever, and far better than your vegetables, which have variance that can't be measured or controlled. This also means you're always satisfied while on Soylent ("drinking a meal" is possible, but quixotic... Soylent allows you to liberate yourself from the concept of meals, and just consume calories as you need to throughout the day, which has the added advantage of eliminating food coma and keeping energy release steady).
I usually drink my soylent unflavored, because I've long since stopped caring about things like taste. The ROI just isn't there. Taste sensations are a fleeting experience that rarely generates a lasting memory (how did your lunch taste yesterday? The day before? The month before?), whereas the tangible benefits you can attain from saving that time tend to be persistent long into the future and generally compound. But, if you want to add ~30 seconds to prep time, you could mix in cinnamon, MSG, blend in some fruit, whatever, and you'll have a taste experience that is almost certainly on the same tier as reheated frozen vegetables.
> it's revolting to me how much chewing I would have to do
I have heard that argument several times when Soylent is mentioned. Don't dentists ever bring up the importance of chewing for gum and teeth health? I thought it's common knowledge.
Why do you think chewing is healthy at all? It allows organic matter to get into your teeth and physically wears them down. This is a hard question to google, because you get chewing tobacco and gum chewing results, but can you provide any evidence that chewing on its own is somehow healthy? What mechanism do you think it hits?
Yes, exactly right. There are many foods that can give you inexpensive calories and protein. E.g. black beans and rice. Bags of rice and beans and potatoes and similar are so cheap that they are practically free.
It's the fresh fruit and produce that's expensive, relatively speaking. You have to keep an eye out for whats on sale or in season.
Where people often go wrong is in buying expensive junk food. Potato chips cost $3 a bag around here. Same with a package of Oreos. Ridiculous.
You could eat three eggs ~150g for ~20g protein, ~200 cals and it would cost you about a dollar if you buy by the dozen. Going by UK prices, we pay <£3 for a dozen large eggs so 75 pence for 3.
If you fried them up as an omelette, you get a healthy breakfast with very few carbs. Chuck in a tablespoon of olive oil (again, we assume bought by the litre) and you've got another 100 calories.
Fruit is expensive because, per your locale, it's almost always out of season. Supermarket apples in particular are massively marked up; we pay £2 a bag here. Any orchard will sell you apples (seasonally) for much much less.
True, that's probably on the high side, I had a look on mySupermarket and it's around £2.00-2.50 depending whether you want factory/free range. Since all the supermarkets price match these days, they've settled on £2.25. Oraganic will set you back over £3.50. It seem the eggs I buy now from Morrisons are "Very Large" which have a slight premium for the size. If you shop at Waitrose then you're looking at £3-4.50.
When I can, I buy from farms which sell by the roadside and you can normally get a half-dozen for £1.30 or so.
Well if it's pure calories/macros, take the 40 cent apple, add some 30 cent protein powder and then 10-20 cents of oats and you've got similar calories and better macros for the same or cheaper if you go for a banana or find some deals on apples. Throw in half a bag of frozen veggies and you're a lot better off for a quarter more than the McDouble.
Easy and fast? No, there's opportunity cost there of course but that's just an example off the top of my head. Heck and apple and a can of tuna would come close in price.
I've found, in my temperate industrialized urban area, an astonishing amount of 'wild' food, all free for the taking: apple, pear, cherry, plum, berries, rose hips, hazelnut, walnut...
One fall I picked so many kilograms of apples that I still had a few wrinkled (but edible) left-overs by the following spring - all stored carefully, unrefrigerated, in a cellar. Other fruits are preserved as jellies, or in jars, or simply frozen.
It angered me last year to see a fully laden plum tree in a parking lot, with plums squished on the ground, and a row of terraced houses nearby, with kids playing outside... Their stupid parents had ignored the bounty literally on their doorstep.
And yet Detroit has pretty much the perfect weather for growing apples. I'd imagine there have to be old trees all throughout the city from back when there was money, given that they can easily produce fruit for 100+ years and can go decades with little to no maintenance.
Absolutely right (to whoever downvoted you) - go explore! I've trekked with my bicycle to forgotten orchards and overgrown corners of parks and riverbanks, and found plenty.
Even roadsides are laden with wild produce. Some less-trafficked verges are quite OK for foraging.
Watercress is about $2.49 to $2.99 for a bag with four servings in it. That's not prohibitive. A real problem is it's hard to find watercress, and anecdotally I see it more in upscale stores than in regular supermarkets in poor areas.
Show me a grocery store where fresh watercress and cherries are cheaper than some artificial crap loaded with added sugar, sodium, and preservatives, and people will start to eat healthier.
Here in urban China people still shop at fresh food markets, where there is only fresh food. Typical prices might be...
Tomatoes 4-8元 (yuan=CNY=<USD$2) per 斤 (jin=500g=1/2kg).
Spinach 4元 (<USD$1) per large bunch
Bananas 10元 (<USD$2) per large bunch (like 15-20 bananas)
Onion 1-2元 (<USD$0.50) per large purple onion (brown is rarely found)
Artificial crap can be had elsewhere for cheap, but it's not available in the markets, which also provide fresh soy milk, tofu, rice and wheat noodles, nuts, fish, etc.
Yes, it probably is. China is not cheap anymore. Beers in the bar I was at last night were 45元/pint (that's about 6.6EUR or 7USD). Travel in Europe feels positively affordable compared to major Chinese cities. That said, many Italians love it here because they can actually find a job and make money. I know Italian film directors, restauranteurs, import-export people, and English teachers. They all tell me it's virtually impossible to find a job in Italy, let alone live in your own large modern apartment or save for a house.
My local grocery store (Berkeley Bowl) is very expensive, on par with Whole Foods -- however their produce department is shockingly cheap. They even have bags of bruised food that go for 99c and contain a gallon-sized bag of random fruits or veggies -- and this is at the super expensive local grocer.
Cheap, good food is easy to find. The problem isn't in the pricing of watercress and cherries, it's that people don't see those as complete meals and don't want to go through the effort to cook for themselves. Eating poorly isn't done because it's cheaper, it's done because it's easier.
I think the Bay Area is a bit of an outlier in that its close to the Central Valley where a lot of America's produce originates. I used to shop at a place called India Cash and Carry when I lived near Mt. View--also unusually good/cheap produce compared with other states. If you've been in California for a long time, you might not realize that your experience is better than a lot of other places.
Not just labor -- expertise. Also, do you have access to fully furnished kitchen? Living out of a car or in a marginal housing situation where a kitchen isn't available (or you've got a microwave/hotplate and fridge) changes some of the cooking.
These considerations aren't conclusive, and I'm sure there are people who find a way to overcome them, and possibly we could use resources that help others to do so.
But on HN of all places people should understand the power of marginal gains. And marginal obstacles.
I'm guessing that the produce referred to was cheap when in season and possibly unobtainable out of season unless preserved. Apples Sept/Oct, cabbage pretty long season.
Yes, I was thinking that too but the Victorian poorer people ('respectable working class') would not have had much spare space over their living needs (c.f. endless official reports on over crowding and various 'model' residential developments like Port Sunlight and Bournville). So unless the grocer had a cellar or a wholesaler somewhere...
...sounds like a research project over the holiday.
Yeah, but I'm pretty sure the grocer or the producer would have cellars both for apples and roots. All sorts of things like onions don't actually grow all year round, but need to be conserved away from heat and light. The same goes for wine, beer, fruit preserves, pickled vegetables…
I'd never heard of this, but it makes sense: satisfying fruits and vegetables (artichokes, onions, beets, apples, cherries), some bread (whole-grain, I'd guess), a little meat. Doubtless tea, too, and a little chocolate, but minimal sugar. This is definitely a diet to keep in mind!
The article's point on life expectancies, also, is timeless. In almost any era, if you make it to 5 years old, you'll make it to 70. (This was as true in the Middle Ages as in the mid-Victorian period.) When we see life expectancies of 30 or 40 years, it's a sign that most people didn't make it to 5...
Correction: a lot of meat. The diet was basically animal protein and vegetables. In their linked studies, the authors make it clear that offal in particular was consumed far more heavily than today. I guess it was cheaper than skeletal muscle meat.
"A return to mid-Victorian eating habits is not feasible, given their high calorie intake and our low-energy lifestyles. This would exacerbate our already alarming rates of overweight and obesity, problems which were uncommon and mostly confined to the urban upper middle classes in the mid-Victorian period but which have become major public health concerns today. Instead, we recommend that the modern diet be re-engineered, integrating the micro- and phytonutritional elements of the mid-Victorian 3500–4000 calorie/day diet into the modern 2200 calorie/day diet. [...] The realities of a need to promote an intake of nutrients at a level not naturally available in today's 2200 calorie/day diet does require the vexed issue of food fortification and supplements to be included in strategic public health policy formation. Inevitably, this also means that it will have to be reflected in the regulatory sphere."[1]
Possible translation: If you're going to follow a Victorian diet, you need to get lower- and middle-class Victorian amounts of exercise: enough to support a 3500-4000 calorie/day diet.
Me, I'm personally wondering if the true bottom-line here is that you could skip the whole diet thing and get the health benefits purely from a high-exercise lifestyle? (A very high-exercise lifestyle.)
If you'd like to know what the daily life of mid-Victorian poor people was like in excruciating detail, check out "London Labour and the London Poor" by Henry Mayhew:
A major point of interest is that the oceans had not yet been overfished, so fresh fish was an abundant and extremely cheap source of protein that formed a major constituent of most poor people's diet at the time.
yes. and i suspect that one must pay more today for meat from animals that are comparable to those in Victorian times.
our cows, pigs and chickens are fed differently than they were back then. and it's not just a matter of feed quality. it's a matter of new ingredients (e.g. some chickens are fed small amounts of arsenic to change their flesh color and as an antibiotic for certain diseases. and who knows what the hell goes into farmed fresh water fish - it's literally animal sewage and garbage on some farms in certain parts of the world.)
>"In the 1870s Victorian health was challenged by cheap sugar and the first generation of mass-processed high-salt and high-sugar foods. This dragged urban health and life expectancy to a nadir around 1900 — a date that consequently provides a highly misleading baseline. (The trend was even reflected in people’s height. The minimum height for infantry was lowered from 5ft 6in to 5ft 3in, then later to 5ft, in just two decades.)"
High salt and high sugar led to a shrinking height. Could this be applied to how the average height is rising in the US?
The comments on the article are quire interesting, at least to me, as they show a community that is very confident (even when they disagree with each other) about broad food "right-ness".
The English show "The Supersizer" did a great take on the Victorian diet. Too bad that it is not on their youtube channel because it is on many other youtube channels.
Bread could be expensive but onions, watercress, cabbage, and fruit like apples and cherries were all cheap and did not need to be carefully budgeted for. Beetroot was eaten all year round; Jerusalem artichokes were often home-grown. Fish such as herrings and meat in some form (scraps, chops and even joints) were common too.
So, a diet with little to no bread that's focused on vegetables and meat (including fish)—sounds pretty paleo to me.
Call me cynically suspicious, but reading the related articles makes me think this is intended to indirectly support the supplement industry.
"[To provide remedies for the appalling state of our health,] Look, instead, to the food and beverage industries, and to a lesser extent the supplement companies, who may well step up to the plate with better designed foods and nutritional programmes once the currently profoundly counter-productive regulatory system has been re-drafted."[1]
Key parts of the argument seem to be that the Victorian diet was better, not necessarily because of the types of foods, but because of the large amounts of micro- and phytonutritional elements ingested. It's not possible to make use of the massive caloric intake today, so...pills.
In my opinion, the interesting thing about the article is not the diet, it is the claim that if you remove death during and shortly after childbirth, mid-Victorian era life expectancy was about the same as ours now. If true, that's a startling counterpoint to the prevailing narrative of modern medicine's triumph.
Why is everyone on this thread so obsessed with protein? If there's anything most western diets have a surplus of compared to traditional Asian or African diets, it's protein. Unless you're a vegan who likes junk food over whole foods, it shouldn't be a problem.
Agreed. The key point in the article is that mid-Victorians had a similar life-expectancy to our own. From there it just assumes that dietary changes are what caused life expectancy to decline, starting in the late-Victorian era. That's an awful lot of assuming.
The interesting thing to me was not the dietary claims, but the claims about life expectancy. If those are correct, then it does rather strongly suggest that the mid-Victorians were doing something right that we have now got wrong. Or perhaps just that modern medicine has not done as much to advance life expectancy as is generally thought.
I'd want to check references on the life expectancy. Quick web searching shows that it was about 40 years, but I don't know whether that's life expectancy from birth or not. (Very bad child mortality will artificially lower the average life expectancy.)
I have found some mentions that adult life expectancy from age 5 was as good as it is now... all of which appear to be by the article authors.
Given that a lot of Victorian children over the age of 5 were working, and frequently at dangerous jobs, I'd be very hesitant about accepting that figure.
The actual diet, or at least some examples of dishes, something I think is very interesting for a broad audience, and the reason I clicked the link, is only mentioned in the comments.
And those examples would not had made the article something for PubMed.
Show me a grocery store where fresh watercress and cherries are cheaper than some artificial crap loaded with added sugar, sodium, and preservatives, and people will start to eat healthier.