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Vaniver comments on Should I play World of Warcraft? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Er, isn't that the choice most people face, and don't most people choose tasty food? Even people with ascetic diets- like myself- seem to do it primarily out of the joy they find in asceticism rather than to free up productive power than others.
I don't think so. That might be true in some limited contexts, but if you live in the First World you're not meaningfully contributing to conditions of food scarcity where it matters by choosing to eat well. Scarcity of resources on a global scale isn't what causes people to starve; more than enough productive capacity exists, at least for now. The problem is more that local economics and logistical systems sometimes don't provide sufficient incentive to get that food where it needs to go, and the West spontaneously choosing to adopt an ascetic diet wouldn't help that: it'd push the demand side down and make agribusiness less lucrative, but it couldn't empower your average lower-class family in the Horn of Africa, for example, to buy expensive imports to replace the crops failing due to the current drought.
There are some sustainability arguments you could make, but that's political enough that I'd rather not touch it for mind-killer reasons.
Tasty food is, as a whole, more expensive. We could present the choice as:
"""
You are given the explicit choice between:
1) spending $N to eat delicious food for the next 5 years
2) spending $M to eat average food for the next five years and donate $(N-M) to prevent children starving
"""
I believe $(N-M) is more than enough to keep one child from starving.
Note: I do think we have a (large) duty to help other people, I don't think food donation is the best way to do it.
Somebody needs to tell this to the junk food industry.
It's probably true that expensive food is, as a whole, more tasty, but I'm not so sure that the reverse holds.
I agree that the choices are different in the first world between poor people and people middle class and up. It's the second group of people that I'm claiming are making (or choosing not to think about) this choice.
One can eat equally healthy food for less money, but it is less tasty. I enjoy eating meat, but vegetable protein (beans+rice, etc) is much cheaper. People have the choice to spend less on their own food, and provide more food for other people.
(More caveats: I doubt cutting your food budget is the best place to save money. I favor the giving what we can approach of pledging to give 10% of income and cut wherever you prefer.)
Fill up a grocery cart with a month's worth of potato chips. Fill up another grocery cart with a month's worth of wheat, rice, and beans (preferably bought in bags of no less than 10 pounds). Compare costs.
Factoring in the costs of buying a car to get to a place where they sell those things? Interesting question.
Edit: That came out wrong. I think the question isn't really that simple (opportunity costs, etc etc), but I acknowledge the disparity in price you are pointing out.
It probably wasn't the best example. But I did say "explicit" choice - i.e. some agent offered them this choice directly for whatever reason. It may be true that we are disturbingly amoral when the effects of our actions are several steps removed, the victim is at a distance etc. And it may be true that we don't tend to shut up and multiply in moral matters. But given my clarification, the point still stands that there is nothing unusual about prioritising other values above our own enjoyment of something.