Choosing a place to live
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I want access to good quality food, particularly good quality meat, dairy, and fruit. Ideally the place I live has a growing culture of eating well (for example, in Austin, many restaurants are now making it a point not to use any seed oils in their cooking.)
Avoid the US for this. Food quality is worse than third world countries. The food is no where near as organic. Unpopular opinion, but I don't think food should be industrialized.
I’ve found that if I stick to Whole Foods type places the quality of food is quite good, including some options that aren’t available in NZ.
But yes, the mainstream food options are crap, including the majority of restaurants.
The current industrialisation of food is problematic, but these are parochial problems. There is nothing about industrialised food production that is fundamentally and irredeemably flawed. Problems are soluble!
I disagree. In case of mass starvation, GMOs and the like make sense. But besides that, I am for eating food that grows without human intervention.
GMOs are great outside of mass starvation, too. If we can genetically modify foods to be better for us, why wouldn’t we?
… I am for eating food that grows without human intervention.
I don’t think that’s possible unless you go deep into a forest somewhere and eat some wild berries you find (which is dangerous anyway). You’d die trying.
GMOs are a marvel of food engineering. But ‘GMO’ as a concept isn’t coherent anyway since people have been genetically modifying foods through selective breeding for millennia. There’s virtually no food that isn’t genetically modified. That’s a good thing. For example, ‘natural’ bananas are a pain in the ass because they have seeds you need to remove before eating. Those bananas are also tiny. https://youtu.be/VRbITN4qlRs?t=121
You seem to think that whatever’s ‘natural’ is good. That’s not the case. I think you’d do well to avoid organic foods and specifically seek out GMO foods:
Organic food is a scam. Participants in double-blind experiments can’t tell what’s organic and what isn’t. Organic food hasn’t been found to be healthier than non-organic food. The ‘organic’ label was never even meant as a health endorsement. It’s just a way for stores to charge you more. Don’t be a sucker.
From what I recall, it’s a scam in Germany, too. From skimming the article, ~all of its criticisms apply there as well. For example, “Organic food has a larger impact on climate because of the greater area of land required to farm it.” I don’t see why that would be different in other countries.
Food quality [in the US] is worse than third world countries.
That seems like a wild claim to make, seeing as you can safely drink tap water in the US but not in third-word countries. That tells us something about the concern for the safety of consumables in the US. I cannot imagine that food safety in the US would be anywhere near as bad as it is in third-world countries. I mean… India? Nah.