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Modern day first world peasants eat so much better than ye old day kings, but at what cost? A discussion filled with food, alcohol, baseball, fat shaming, Pontiac disgust, and frog legs!

SHOW NOTES:

Diet of the Kings 

Rarity (100 dollar bottle of wine) study 

Rarity makes everything better 

Kobe Steak is delicious 

Poverty, Minnesota, Nutrition, and Food Deserts: 

Honey Crisp is the best apple ever

Life expectancy of the ye old times

Typhoid Mary

We are getting fatter faster. 

Paleo Diet 

Calories In and Calories Out 

Sugar Tax, cause why not?

Variety is the spice of life

Cricket Burger needs to take a page from the Potato Marketing Campaign 

Minnesota frogs have 5 or more legs

Unfermented cheese, why is it illegal in the US? 

K Sera’s Afterthoughts:

• Rarity or arbitrary value MIGHT make things “better” in a subjective way. I’m willing to admit that perception of a thing can be considered to be an attribute of a thing. Like the placebo effect… kinda.

• Still love burgers

• Spices are the spice of life.

• I have since learned that Japan had cattle brought over from China around the second century AD, but were largely used as draft animals up until around the Meiji Restoration (1868). There was actually a ban on eating certain kinds of meat in Japan and until the Emperor, Musuhito decided to lift the ban in 1872 - likely because beef is delicious.

• As bad as some of the things are in the world, how unfair and depressing… I can still say that there isn’t another time period before now that I would prefer over the present. I really enjoy the variety and general affordability of foods and spices - and let’s be honest, alcohol - that we have access to. 

• Speaking of access to alcohol - I died a little on the inside when I said “They don’t lack [dedication and discipline] they just don’t have enough of it…” - Let’s blame that statement on my beverage consumption that evening. (Oh addictions, how you ruin us.) I guess what I meant to say there is that losing weight requires discipline along with the mental and physical resources to care about “holding the line,” so to speak. It is incredibly difficult to combat your desire for easy, efficient energy over a desire to maintain a healthy weight when, say, other factors in your life are taking away your energy to achieve long term goals.

As Micah was implying, poverty is a huge stress factor in a person’s life. The stress of living paycheck to paycheck and not knowing if you’ll make enough to pay rent influences your choices and takes from your resources - like time. If you are working a minimum wage service job (or 2 or even 3), and you want to live in an ok apartment, you're probably working more than 40 hours a week just to make ends meet. Your time is way more limited. Are you going to spend your limited hours cooking a nutritious meal? Probably not. Probably, you are going to take five to ten minutes on your way home to pick up fast food because the cost of resources (time, money, effort) are low and the immediate rewards are high (tasty, high calorie, filling). When you are poor, your vision of the future can shrink. You live more day-to-day and aren’t always able to put your energy into a longer view.

So, maybe what I’m saying is, it’s a little too simple to say an overweight person lacks discipline. If other factors in your life are drawing on that finite energy reserve that you put towards goal setting and basic needs, it isn’t necessarily solely that persons ‘fault’ for not having ‘enough’ willpower and dedication to losing weight.

And there’s probably some genetic factors that influence your weight and some upbringing factors as well. It may boil down to discipline in the end, but life and situational factors can make this issue more complicated.

Yeah.

• Church of the Obviei (Obvi-eye?) - we could make this a thing, right? Then we could call ourselves a non-profit and have rituals where we all consume illicit cricket burgers every Wednesday.

Phillip's Afterthoughts:

• I didn't even discuss Fried Chicken!