> There was some pain in that realization. So many of my utopian dreams—what if we could live in a society where everyone can get the food, the housing, the healthcare, the opportunities for growth that they deserve—come from a place of wishing that we could live in a world where people are cared for.
I'd like to offer some comfort to the author on this score. Food, housing, healthcare broadly... while these are all aspects of being "cared for" by society, they aren't all care in the individual sense you describe. The food system is different from homecooked meals; the housing economy is different from the handsome breakfast nook your family DIYed into their home. We can build systems which scale and make it possible and economical for individual care to happen.
> The food system is different from homecooked meals
This is a good point, and everything I've heard from parents says that it's parents, not children, who identify home-cooked meals with care. Children notoriously prefer prepackaged industrially processed food over whole foods prepared with care and love. In order to feel cared for, all children need is to trust that the person caring for them will make sure they get enough food when they need it. Food quality has nutritional consequences down the line, and at some point a child that is fed pancakes every day will gain the ability to look back and regret how they were raised, but it doesn't prevent a child from feeling cared for in the moment.
During fine dining, a meal may consist of small portions that even when added up together total less calories than a large bag of theater popcorn which many people are quite capable of going through.
No one will argue that the popcorn taste "better".
Simply put the popcorn is less satiating but more addictive to eat.
Meanwhile the fine dining meal, if done well, will be incredibly satiating and not leave one wanting for more.
Hyper-palitability is a thing. There are foods that are hard to stop eating (e.g. potato chips), and that do not fill people up no matter the caloric content.
Starbucks frappes are another example. They can easily have over 1000 calories, barely be satiating, and yet people desire them again and again.
I hope no one claims frappes or potato chips are the best tasting foods in the world. But they are both addictive as hell to consume.
That’s something I hate about other people. They just type out comments. I prefer to trigger the control centers of my brain to cause movement of my peripheral actuators to depress buttons on a purpose built device to compose textual information for transfer across the Internet.
if you'll forgive my prior snark, some people successfully involve the children in the cooking. When this is done, the children seem to prefer the home-cooked because they are part of the cooking and they are part of the feeding/providing to others.
Don't underestimate the human desire to provide value to the tribe, it runs deep in the evolutionary make-up.
Speaking as someone who successfully involves their toddler in the kitchen: regardless of her great joy in being alllowed to participate and contribute (which you are completely right about), my daughter would still much rather prepare spaghetti for dinner than veggies.
Also, in some kind of weird benign parentification[0] twist, she now loves to feed me food, even if (or more like especially if) she doesn't like it.
So having fun with cooking food seems quite decoupled from her desire to eat it.
Pretty sure no amount of participation in cooking can make children start liking food with specific tastes, like eggplants or celery. If they like it - great! I they don't like it, but parents do - well, _that_ kind of home-cooked food will never be liked.
(Unless you process them so much, and add so many spices, that they no longer have any original taste.. but by that point they are at "pre-packaged" level of cooking)
> Children notoriously prefer prepackaged industrially processed food over whole foods prepared with care and love.
In most cases, this is probably due to the care givers training their children to prefer that kind of food because they don't make many home cooked meals.
I don't even know if it's true, though. When I was a kid, the best food in the world were the home made meals my grandmother made, especially on the holidays. Remember as a teenager telling my Grandma her meals were better than any restaurant I had ever eaten at, and meaning it in all sincerity.
Something to keep in mind is that industrial food usually has a lot of sugar and other additivies added to make it taste as good as possible. . Companies literally spend billions of dollars figuring this stuff out, of course the home made meal can't compete.
Could you please stop posting flamewar- and ideological-battle-style comments to HN? Your account has been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately, and it's not what HN is for.
Children notoriously prefer consistent meals over diverse ones, home cooked or not. The issue with serving blueberries for example is that each blueberry is different. My mother home-cooked for me a boiled egg and rice porridge every morning, and it was that consistency that associated me with care.
Yes. And child psychologists will tell you that babies and children crave consistency, variety is not their thing. In fact, one of the reasons we as parents (adults) expose them to variety is so they develop an understanding of how to cope with inconsistencies. And it's always a careful balance, small amount of variety but mostly consistency.
And I can tell you most little kids love hard boiled eggs which I suspect is because they are incredibly consistent in texture and taste, unspoiled by some cook seasoning them or cooking them differently.
Often, it's the act of preparing the meal by hand rather than pressing a button on their hypothetical Food-o-matic that makes the biggest impact. We can certainly scale the provision of needs otherwise. I agree with the author on their assertions about what it means to care and actually connect with people.
I'm not talking about food preparation, but food systems. E.g. look up the concept of a food desert. Preparing a meal by hand is one thing; having access to quality affordable ingredients is another. A food desert is what you get when the system that would enable care is deficient.
And even in a "food oasis" with adequate quality, yes, if you yourself cannot prepare a meal, or have nobody to do that for you, that's a failure of a different kind.
I tend to consider food deserts just cheap/fast transportation or personal mobility deserts seeing as they tend to "lack" a whole bunch of other things in addition to food. They lack these things not because people can't get them, but because the cost in time or money of going whatever distance one needs to go to get them makes it not worth it. Food doesn't ship well or keep well in individual use volumes so it is particularly impacted.
Although it’s theoretically possible and theoretically economical for individual care ‘to happen’, it doesn’t in practice for the housing economy. If anything it’s decreasing year by year on average.
Especially when you look at construction quality, the average quality of say new built condos in any major city has gone way way down since the 90s.
Of course on average condo designs have on average gotten fancier with quirkier architecture, and building codes have gotten more complex, so maybe it’s not due to builders caring way less, but the end result is shoddy work either way.
Edit: And the average home buyer has no method of separating out all these confounding factors, so it boils down to a single congealed mess.
About housing: I have a few ideas as to why, weirdly none of which overlap with yours.
1) I think part of it is due to our ability to fine-tune the limits. Before, if a company wanted to pass an inspection, they had to be really confident. There were going to be some expenses that in theory they could have avoided if they were better capable of measuring where the line between 'safe' and 'unsafe' was. The end result was buildings that were more safe than strictly required. But now we can get closer to the line, and so buildings are engineered at the edge of safety.
2) Of course, survival bias plays a role here. Who remembers all the crappy buildings that just vanished? It's the same reason we look at old toasters or mixers or what-have-you and say things were so much better-made in the past - all the crappy cheap toasters, mixers, and houses are gone now.
3) Also, as extreme weather has happened more frequently, areas all over are seeing weather different than what they were designed for. Given that the average temperature in Oregon in July (the hottest month of the year) was typically around 65 degrees Fahrenheit[1]. For the past few years it has generally hovered in the upper 60s. The hottest temperature ever recorded in Oregon before 2021 was 107 degrees Fahrenheit[2], and typically there were one or two days a year that crossed one hundred degrees -- occasionally five, more often none. In 2021, it hit 116 degrees. Since 2021, there has not yet been a year without 4 or more days over a hundred. And, of course, this pattern is repeated all over the world. Houses are being built for one set of extremes and averages and getting another.
1 is in large part a reflection of idiot proofing everything. Every party's judgement gets reduced down to some some quantitative stuff like wire gauges, stud spacing, etc, that even idiots with poor judgement can reliably assess. Instead of failures because people do shoddy work we instead get failures where people are dumbly building things they know won't last because it's easier to just let things be crappy than to try to get permission to deviate from the plan. Basically decision making authority is being abstracted away from the people who have actual context. This limits the screw-ups from people doing work below the minimum at the expense of preventing anyone from who would have done something better than the minimum from doing so.
Heh, I know somebody that was really annoyed their builder wouldn't install conduit since it wasn't in the code or something and their gripe was "but its better than code".
Maybe it doesn't in America. Nor here in Australia. Some European cities are showing that better is in fact possible by strongly supporting co-operative housing sectors which are better for residents. But that would break the American taboo against government intervening usefully in private markets for human rights (in this case, shelter).
Anyway, my advice to the author was that systems can enable care at scale. Not to say that our current systems do.
Edit: to be more explicit, I'm suggesting that some approaches to the housing sector in some parts of Europe amount to care that scales; society and governments have decided that housing is a right, and have enacted policies to approach that situation. Conversely, a "we don't care" approach also scales very well with the opposite outcome.
‘Society and governments’ can also ‘decide’ that the Sun is revolving around the Earth… so decisions and policies on paper cannot be fully credible by themselves…
What is the actual tangible evidence that the aforementioned issues are avoided?
Yes I did take a slightly different tangent than your build quality argument. I don't actually know whether there's been studies done about that. You've inspired me to go find out.
I'd like to offer some comfort to the author on this score. Food, housing, healthcare broadly... while these are all aspects of being "cared for" by society, they aren't all care in the individual sense you describe. The food system is different from homecooked meals; the housing economy is different from the handsome breakfast nook your family DIYed into their home. We can build systems which scale and make it possible and economical for individual care to happen.