• @[email protected]
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    15111 days ago

    Chocolate, cinnamon, vanilla, pepper, tea, bananas, and a fuckload of other things that are completely integrated into our regular diets are almost exclusively imported.

    • @[email protected]
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      5611 days ago

      Sugar too. That ain’t healthy and is kinda fancy but… Can you see them losing their shit over sugar prices? I do.

      Tomatoes imports were 2.5B in 2023.

      Apparently the us imports 15% of it’s food supply.

      • @[email protected]
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        5711 days ago

        That can’t be right. Corn can’t be only 85% of our food.

        But seriously, there’s so much goddamn corn. Our meat is fed corn. Our processed foods and drinks are pumped full of corn. Even our fucking cars eat corn. We’re up to our fucking ears in ears of corn.

        • @[email protected]
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          311 days ago

          I understand your perspective but I want to ask a question, not to you, but for you to think about it. What motivation causes the imports?

          If corn syrup is a replacement for whatever they are doing, why are they importing raw sugar? If raw sugar is cheaper than you would expect them to already use sugar for everything and not corn syrup, and switching to corn syrup would be an increase in cost . If raw sugar costs the same, import is additional paperwork, why import? Raw sugar is more expensive, why would they pay more?

          Raw sugar can’t be replaced easily in their use case? Now that makes sense.

          • Flying SquidM
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            811 days ago

            Sugar tastes better than HFCS. Ask anyone who drinks Mexican Coke. “Tastes better” doesn’t matter when there’s no other option.

          • @[email protected]
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            311 days ago

            Fact is, HFCS is cheaper. I haven’t checked the entirety of it’s supply chain to figure out why, but it is cheaper.

            If sugar was the same cost, they wouldn’t have switched to HFCS in the first place (why mess with your successful product for no gain?). Fact of the matter is that HFCS is saving them money. It might be pennies per bottle, but when you’re moving 10M bottles of soda, those pennies turn into dividends, literally.

      • @[email protected]
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        511 days ago

        Sugar is fancy now? Man my grandpa would be thrilled were he alive. There’s a colloquial term for the farm-houses of sugar beat farmers in Northern Germany, “beat castles”, as they quickly made a lot of money growing the beats in the late 19th century. When sugar became more accessible due to the processing of the beats to refined sugar. The wealth is long gone now, similarly to how salt used to be a luxury good.

        • @[email protected]
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          11 days ago

          No. That is the point.

          Sugar is “fancy” as in “you don’t need sugar for your diet”.

          • @[email protected]
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            111 days ago

            Technically, we don’t need raw sugar for our diet at all. So technically correct?

            We also don’t need any sugar substitutes, like HFCS, but you can find that or sugar, in the ingredients list of pretty much all processed foods.

            Yay capitalism!

        • @[email protected]
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          111 days ago

          Yeah, we do high fructose corn syrup over here. It’s even more addictive, even less healthy, and it tastes bad. So obviously, we put it in everything, even premade salads

    • @[email protected]
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      411 days ago

      A lot of fruit/veg is grown in places they can get away with slave wages and then shipped here because that’s how little labor costs. Less than our already super low paid fruit/veg pickers that are primarily the people who escaped the countries and situations that put them in those even lower slave wage places.