(and why conservatives hate public schools, ofc)
Schools still assign Upton Sinclair? I can tell you for certain that mine did not, likely because they were busy suppressing any mentions of socialism.
Hey why do they call it an “ecomomics” class anyway, shouldn’t they just call it capitalism if that’s the only thing they teach?
at my high school they made us read fucking ayn rand
Jesus
Talking to a Libertarian is like talking to a child.
Every self-proclaimed libertarian I ever met gave me a different reason why they’re a “libertarian”, bashed fake libertarians, say they’re the only TRUE libertarian, then voted Republican.
Yeah, they’re Republicans with even more brain damage and not a single one understands how societies work.
Libertarian: I can’t hear you with so much money I have!
Libertarians are only in tiny minority of US population, and most of them are earning roughly $100,000 a year. Of course they will support absolute laissez faire society.
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Adulterating consumable foods has been a thing for a really long time. From tea having poisonous weeds mixed in the 1600s to milk having chalk or other toxic stuff in it. Commercial interests put profit first and “cut” the product to extend profitability.
Good thing they’re cutting oversight like the FDA in the US. That’ll work out great.
This reminds me of a story my dad told me. His school went on a field trip to an ice cream factory and he was, of course, expecting this to be the best day of his life. What he discovered, though, left him mortified. They were taking poor-selling flavours and running them back through the machine to change them to something better. If you buy some store brand chocolate and it has undertones of mocha, now you know why. I think of this now whenever I see a product that “may contain peanuts”. Like they’re not sure.
I don’t know how that’s possible with shelf life considerations, but I guess it could happen? Usually the rules are it has to be thrown out.
They aren’t taking them back from the retail stores.
They are taking them out from a production run, from storage facilities.
ah, no idea what workarounds are available to that situation. Guess if it’s only been packaged and never shipped it might be ok? Not desirable, but not unsafe.
Rules are only for when you’re caught and have to pay for ‘operating’ costs.
I’ve seen a youtube video about that, and from what I remember it’s was detectable as soon as it went over 10% or so. Although a corporation could easily get it over 10% without issue if they used the right particle size, mixing technique and treatement of the sawdust.
It honestly wouldn’t surprise me if some cheap seasoning is partially sawdust or similar.
e.g., cellulose, added to kraft parmesan as an “anti-caking agent.”
It’s crazy to me that they try to sell that shit as anti-caking because any time I’ve ever tried to use that garbage it’s always caked anyway.
I love how they insist it’s not sawdust - since they don’t literally use the byproduct of lumber milling, like the shit they sweep up from the floor. But it’s still wood turned into a powder, which the term “sawdust” is perfectly valid for.
There’s a bag of “bacon flavored bits” at Walmart that’s just sawdust seasoned to taste like bacon.
Now to be fair, freeze dried bacon bits in general tastes worse than animal feed. So if you ground it up and covered it in the anti-clumping agents, it is basically sawdust without containing any wood.
Check out what cheap pepper is made of some time.
Is it vegan?
10% is massive too
Corporations would sell you a bag of dirt and gravel from the lot outside and call it granola if they could get away with it.
We literally had to outlaw slavery. That should tell you everything you need to know about supposed self-regulation.
Well, we didn’t really outlaw it. We made it only legal under certain conditions.
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” - emphasis mine
Your point still stands though
Elon Musk’s original pitch for the underground hyperloop system / boring company included the claim that the dug out dirt would be repurposed as super building bricks, and that this would keep the projects at or under budget.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/almost-7-years-ago-elon-145526694.html?guccounter=1
He literally did this, sold reformed, shitty dirt and called it a miraculous building material.
It’s fine, just list it as “cellulose” on the ingredients list.
(It’s not technically sawdust anymore after processing, but it’s still gross even though it’s food-safe.)
It’s free fiber!
I mean, it’s not free, but yes, edible sawdust would be good for the health of most people in the western world. Though they tend to get cellulose from cheaper sources like straw or chaff.
Well they sure aren’t eating vegetables so might as well shove some sawdust replacement down their throats.
William Osman did this experiment a few years ago. (YouTube link)
He shows this exact picture in the video as his inspiration
Most entertaining 12 minutes of my life i will never get back.
This video will forever be a certified classic in my mind.
I think I remember someone on reddit actually doing this and the result was waaaaaaaay more than you think.
Libertarian sub reddits don’t self regulate
I thought it was pretty obvious after like 10%?
10% sawdust before people notice sounds pretty fucking high to me :/
The video someone posted earlier shows that 15% is still not entirely noticeable. 33% people could tell something was off but they weren’t bad enough to stop eating.
So it’s somewhere between 15-33% and it seemed to be leaning closer to 33
Not waaaaay more than you’d think though, is my point
Way more than I’D think.
But not “way more than you would think” where “you” includes readers such as /u/agmemnonymous and myself.
IMO you should be able to guess >5% just from the OP image. The OP implies that corporations actually used sawdust as a substitute, which implies it was a profitable substitution, which implies it was worth it to set up an entire supply chain for bagging sawdust in sawmills, outbidding other parties interested in industrial quantities of sawdust (such as paper mills), shipping it to cereal factories, mixing sawdust into the mix, and trying out ways to make it homogeneous, not to mention the risk of customers noticing and switching to alternatives with less sawdust.
That said, nobody uses sawdust anymore because it’s too expensive. Hay, straw, and chaff are much more common sources of cellulose, also known as dietary fiber. Most people in the western world would be healthier if they ate more sawdust (assuming it has been produced in a way that didn’t introduce toxic pollutants).
Apparently a lot of artificial flavors are used to mask the taste of industrial metals and chemicals. So, yeah…
I sort of picture this when I see bread or tortillas marketed as high fibre even when they contain no whole grains.
Tortillas made from 100% recyclable, free-range, gluten-free, non-GMO, hand-raised sawdust that complies with the Geneva Conventions.
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Back in my day, we just discussed what wrote in The Jungle. They didn’t have us read it.
Probably because of all the socialism.
I didn’t learn until well into adulthood that food safety wasn’t actually the message Upton Sinclair was trying to get across.
Nor I. I learned about it in school but I didn’t read it until my honeymoon. I loved it, of course.
I’m losing my mind picturing someone bringing the worst beach read I can imagine to couple’s massages and reading it before bed.
This was early 2000s.
so the Cold War was over, is what you’re saying
Yes, that is how the free market works. If people don’t notice or are entirely focused on price, then they’ll accept the lower-quality product. There will be a place in the market for luxury goods, but cheap alternatives need to exist as well for the price-conscious.
Corporations sell inferior product, it kills hundreds of people. They claim no responsibility and move on without any government intervention. Maybe a few lower level employees lose their jobs, despite the choice to release the deadly product coming from above.
People are dead. People are unemployed. Wealth shifts upward. No accountability. “ThAt’S HoW the FrEe MaRkEt WoRkS!”
Yes, and that’s why, even in brutal hypercapitalist America, we fucking regulate the free market.
And why we should abolish the free market in the long run, for that matter.
Because having the “freedom” to buy poisonous adulterated foodstuffs, if you’re too poor to buy real good food, is like having the “freedom” to accept sub-minimum wages if you’re desperate enough for money. Not freedom, but exploitation.
I wish we were hyper-capitalist, what we really have is privatized profits and socialized losses.
If we were hyper-capitalist, we would have let banks and businesses fail in 2008.
The problem is we have a system that is protects businesses, and antagonizes individuals.
And why we should abolish the free market in the long run, for that matter.
Abolish free market?
You want the government to control all the means of production and the distribution of wealth, and be able to dictate the prices of goods and services and wages?
Like it sounds nice, just like communism in theory.
Could it work out? Sure. Would it? I don’t think so
You want the government to control all the means of production and the distribution of wealth, and be able to dictate the prices of goods and services and wages?
I don’t know about that. The current administration are definitely trying to nuke out every regulation they can, starting by shutting down the regulating agencies. A law that isn’t enforced is a polite joke - every one of the people in charge have seen that, so they’re ending enforcement.
I think one important point is that we have nutrition labels mandated by regulation so that consumers can see how much sawdust is in the rice crispie they’re buying.
The logical extreme would be no regulation at all and expecting consumers to scientifically test every rice crispie they buy to determine the amount of calories in it.
See, that’s why the current admin wants to abolish the FDA. The food manufacturers consider that accurate labeling law onerous, and want it gone. Caveat emptor, etc.
But I thought the blessed capitalist optimization was all about providing the best possible product at the lowest possible price, so why do we pay the full price for the shittiest product possible for which the customers are still willing to pay?
Best possible, yes; but you’re defining it wrong. The best possible product is always the thing that makes the thing that makes the most profit. The ideal is to generate massive profit for zero cost. And if the company has the sense to corner the market and create an irreplaceable product, the will of the consumer ceases to matter.
You really do love your magnificent corporations, praising them for their infinite wits selling you lowest quality bullshit for the benefit of not you at all.
It will always bring joy to my heart seeing a common men awe for their corporate overlords for the most altruistic reasons, because how else should I call it? You don’t get nothing from their greed, and yet you clearly enjoy seeing how they operate.
I feel you are making a good point, in a free market people will choose, it is literally in their best interest to choose, and if someone produces a sub par or even poisonous product, the people will choose not to use the product and basically self regulate. Our country had this sudden boom of Shein clothing, they were cheaper so of course they dominated. The government tried exercising control by confiscating the clothes or adding extra tariffs on the clothes and it really was ineffective, our ports are basically so corrupt anything gets through. But now two to three years later even the newspapers are picking up on the growing textile industry thanks to everyone buying locally made clothes that are higher quality that lasts more than 5 washes. Yes there was a market disruption but the market is regulating itself, and cheap clothes from China or Pakistan will have there place, they will only have enough space the market decides for itself.
Here is an opinion piece regarding the recent shifts, https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2025-07-07-after-the-bell-shopping-sucks-but-sa-is-stitching-a-comeback/
Ah yes, the blessed “self-regulating market”. So when will we finally reach it? It’s been some time after all, like hundreds of years now. We went through slavery, robber barons, gilded age, we’re going through deregulation, enshittification, rise of fascism, rush for recession. Oh man, we’re getting there, the bubble is about to burst and we’re about to witness the American dream for everyone!
They also ignore that companies will cheerfully skimp on safety to save a buck and then spend far more than they saved fighting legal battles against the government to prevent or delay relevant regulations, against their own customers (or their next of kin) who have been harmed by their products, and against any kind of criminal prosecution. They’ll also spend millions on marketing to minimize awareness or the severity of the problem and to actively increase sales of the dangerous product. It’s not exactly an environment designed for fair and informed decision making.
Speaking of unfair, the history of monopolies, market collusion, and the race to the bottom have given us plenty of examples of companies removing that choice of product quality from the board entirely. If the people making the unsafe or unethical thing buy out all the competition and eliminate or cheapen the former competition’s products until the have the same problems, there’s no choice. If the competition look at the market and realize they can also take unsafe shortcuts and remain competitive, there’s no choice.
There’s a long history of rich people framing exploitation as the freedom to choose to accept a dangerous product or job or place to live. After all, if people are poor and desperate and propagandized enough there’ll always be someone to make that choice. And the lower they drive the quality of life, the more people will have to choose the same. But it’s not about saving you money. They’re not doing you a favor. It’s about saving money for themselves and framing things so you thank them for it.
save a buck and then spend far more than they saved fighting legal battles
I wish that were true, but man, it sure seems like the assholes doing this never seem to come away with less profits.
Ok I hear you, the free market is not perfect, in fact it is free for exploration due to its open-ness. I give you that. There have been many abuses and will be. But I just listed a way the free market can regulate itself passively eventually without external influence, it is in individuals best interests to choose a better product and let the inferior fail (if there is no external influence). In a controlled market where the decision is made that the food can be adulterated by let’s say 10% saw dust, this was chosen because the people on top realised that it won’t have detrimental effects and will provide 10% extra rations. What passive correcting method which individuals can exercise is there?
It’s to peoples’ best interest to choose a better product if they:
- even know there’s a problem in the first place. Corporations have a long history of covering up faults in their products, sometimes for decades, before independent tests or reporting reveal them (during which time they’re outcompeting more legitimate competition on price).
- competing products exist. Monopolies are a natural outgrowth of unregulated markets. It’s always more profitable not to have to compete so endless mergers are a threat which have to be regulated but frequently arent. It’s also much easier for an entrenched institution to crush or buy out new startups before they can become a problem. Add in collusion where companies that compete on paper secretly agree not to undercut each others prices and you end up with a market where there is no real competition and no need for costly innovation. And though regulatory capture may not exist in a truly unregulated free market, we certainly see it in real life, where superior foreign products can be outright banned from a market, the entrenched industry’s products made artificially cheap through subsidies, and new safety laws kept off the books to protect the corporate bottom line.
- the competing product is actually superior. We frequently see a race to the bottom effect where most people consistently choose the cheapest product available (often because wages have been stagnant for generations and they’re poor enough that they legitimately can’t afford better) and better, safer, more ethical products are simply priced out of the market, whereupon the companies making them either start cutting corners themselves or go out of business. And we can refer back to point one where just because one product has been revealed to be unsafe doesn’t guarantee that the competitor hasn’t managed to hide an unknown hazard in theirs.
Asking regular people, many of whom are perpetually overworked and exhausted, to extensively research every product that’s made it to market (and to overcome marketing, illegal concealment of hazards, and collusion) strikes me as a kind of Just World Falicy thing, where the ‘opportunity’ to simply buy a better product becomes a chance to blame people for the bad things that happen to them. They should simply have bought a test kit and figured out that there was lead contamination in their baby formula. They should have studied auto accident statistics from the last five years to notice that that particular model routinely explodes in a fireball with the doors jammed. What did they expect buying something without doing their own research?
I still feel you attacked the open market idea, instead of answering the question I asked where a controlled market decides to give a sub par product, what individualistic avenue is there then to correct the 10% saw dust in my food?
