A study in contrasting systems based on differing priorities, conditions, capabilities, and choices

An interesting thread.  All the usual caveats associated with quality of social media information.

So...my cautious thoughts Shanghai/COVID-Zero-in-China. Yes, I am self-censoring on this one, so this is one of those threads where those of you who need explicit statements and can't read implied meaning and nuance are going to have a tough time.
🧵

— Naomi Wu 机械妖姬 (@RealSexyCyborg) April 9, 2022

The thread is interesting but this particular item caught my eye.   

The fact that many Westerners have a relatively unhealthy diet of processed, pre-prepared foods with an extremely long shelf-life actually serves them well here and makes the time-sensitive and precarious nature of the Chinese food supply situation a little counterintuitive.

— Naomi Wu 机械妖姬 (@RealSexyCyborg) April 9, 2022

American homes are much larger than anywhere else in the world.  They therefore also have much more storage space.  Having grown up overseas, the size of American houses was one of the things that impressed me most when I returned to the US in the early-1980s.  The size of American stores and the volume and breadth of what was offered in those stores and malls compared to overseas was one manifestation of American prosperity and the size of American homes into which those purchases were going was the other.

Without even being preppers, American's are almost inherently better prepared for disruptions and unexpected emergencies.  Supply chain disruptions, government lockdowns, states of emergency are easier taken in stride than those living in places with significantly more constrained space limits.  Such as Shanghai.

Add to that, the cultural orientations towards energy dense foods, and you have a second order survivability factor.  

It is easy to think of the American diet as one where our prosperity and our evolution are out of kilter.  We are biologically programmed to seek high energy sweetness and indulge fulfilling calories.  That makes sense when we evolved in an environment of real food scarcity.  There simply was never enough food and severe constraints due to drought or climate or season or war or whatnot made the little food available even harder to get.

Our current economic prosperity are out of kilter with our evolutionarily evolved needs.  Needs which no longer predominate.  

Biologically we are impelled towards food energy.  Our historical evolution has also played a role.  In agricultural-era Europe, it has always been healthier to drink beer than drink water.  Water, on this riverine continent, is available but filtered through a relatively dense human, animal and agricultural environmental filter, picking up hazards and diseases in the process.  Better to drink high calorie but pasteurized beer than calorie-free but disease laden water.  

Our cultural evolution has also driven us towards energy dense foods, the best example being cheeses which pack a lot of energy into long lived hard cheeses.  The old admonition to eat everything on your plate is another cultural holdover.  

Our technology and economy also drives us towards food accumulation and storage.  When we lived in England in the mid-1960s, few homes had refrigerators.  Everyone shopped two or four times a week.  Now, you can shop once a week, or even every two weeks and lay food in store in a refrigerator/freezer.  

If I am in Shanghai where I live in apartment with 400 square feet, get all my food from lower energy density dishes heavy in vegetables and receive it real time each day via restaurants, I am in a far different food dependency condition than an American living in an 850 square feet apartment, get half my food from eating out but have a pantry stuffed with long-shelf life high energy density food ranging from bags of rice and boxes of pasta to twinkies, high sugar sodas, and refrigerated cheeses.  

All the things which people are critical of America for, large homes, sprawl, over-consumption of food, over reliance on processed foods, etc. are well-founded criticisms.  

But like Chesterton's fence, there is always a back story or counter version.

It is the age-old issue that everything has a trade-off.  Every gain entails a loss.  Both have to be taken into account.  

In this case large homes, urban sprawl, broader range of food preparation (from fresh to processed), broader range of acquisition custom (eating out, ordering out, preparing in), and prosperity induced obesity create some issues.  They also make citizens far more resilient of disruptions.  

What the right balance is between a just-in-time food chain versus a high energy, hight storage capacity food chain is a matter of both capability as well as relative weighting of goals.  If you want high resiliency, you choose the American system.  If you want high dependency but higher quality food (in terms of freshness), you choose the Shanghai system.  

In America, the answer is arrived at via a political system which functions as an emergent order.  No one decides because everyone decides.  In Shanghai the decision is made.  And if the system is not resilient, it usually doesn't matter.  But when it matters, it matters a lot.