mikiShoe factories make much better shoes than an average person ever could. Car factories make much better cars than an average person ever could. Chair factories make much better chairs than an average person ever could. Why don’t food factories make much better food than an average person? This is a serious question. It feels like food production should have been outsourced to specialists long ago, and cooking at home should be, at most, a hobby. Why has this happened to shoes and chairs, but not food?
modulux@miki One could argue food factories (restaurants) make much better food than an average person, but they don't scale very well. Still an interesting question why not.
@modulux Why are restaurants so expensive, compared to homemade meals, then? I don’t think that buying a chair from Ikea is much less economical than making one from scratch, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was cheaper. This is not the case with restaurants. I know why it happens, and taxes and overregulation are a much bigger part of the answer than evil, profit-seeking capitalists, especially in that industry, but why does this apply to restaurants specifically, but not furniture?
@miki Right, that was what I was thinking when I said they don't scale very well. Restaurants have low margins in general, and they're hyper-competitive. Maybe because the barrier of entry is so low. So perhaps, they didn't manage to scale up in a way that cuts costs by much. Closest we have to that is fast food, I guess. Also chairs don't generally poison you if you mess things up. But those are just guesses on my part. Do you have some yourself?
@modulux I guess biases might also play a role. Chairs do kill people, furniture-caused deaths are definitely a thing, and they’re less rare than deaths by terrorism actually, but that usually doesn’t happen right after you buy the chair, so, if accidents happen, blame gets placed on the old chair, not the people who made the chair, who were forgotten about long ago. That means fewer lawsuits, fewer headlines in high-profile newspapers and fewer chair-safety laws. I guess the probabilities of dying by furniture accident versus dying by food poisoning also play a role.
@modulux One interesting difference is that furniture, clothes and phones can be made mostly by machines and/or cheap labor abroad, while restaurants, by necessity, have to hire expensive, fussy employees in the city where they’re located, which causes them to price relatively to local prices, not global ones. Restaurants in San Francisco *need* to set higher prices than restaurants in a small town in Russia, because rent in California is more expensive than rent in Russia, and so Californians demand higher wages than Russians. The price, relative to your salary, will be roughly the same wherever you go, but the absolute price will be much different, just as your salary is much different depending on where you live. Phones and clothes don't have that problem, they can be manufactured exclusively where manufacturing is cheapest, and then sold at similar absolute, not salary-relative prices across the world.
@miki Mmm, that's true, and probably will remain true while food is perishable, so probably forever... We do have food prepared by machines but it has to last a lot, so that limits the quality.
@modulux That still begs the question, why is food made by humans, not machines? What unique ability do humans have that an assembly line doesn’t, and why is that important to food but not shoes? Maybe it’s the fact that machines are expensive to set up, and food tastes better when made fresh than when processed to allow transporting across great distances? If your machines can make shoes for basically everybody in Europe, it makes sense to use them instead of humans. When all you have is a single district in a single city, that stops being economical, even though humans are ridiculously expensive?
Diego Ramírez@miki Because neither shoes, nor cars, nor chairs have an expiration date measured in days after production finishes. Also food requires proper refrigeration and storage to even last more than a day.
Besides that, economies of scale don't really work well-enough for the big corporations to bother with trying.
Supermarkets are the only ones with the logistics and infrastructure to do it, and they've mostly tried and failed.
Crappy shoes, tin cars, and flimsy chairs are easier to swallow (pun intended) than crappy food for most people.
And one could argue that the frozen, instant, or otherwise precooked foods sold in the shops are exactly what you're asking for. Though as I said, most people don't like those, nevermind the local regulations on preservatives and such.
deadalnix@BlindMoon38 @miki electricity does have a much shorter lifespan than this, and yet...
@deadalnix @miki Economic reasons, mainly. A private enterprise can charge whatever they want for electricity, and people don't really have a choice but to pay. You can't really monopolise food.
That's why civilised countries have electricity nationalised.