How do they all stay in business?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4289068&forum_id=2#38432053)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4289068&forum_id=2#38432148)

with a kit, you just get home, open the box, and cook. so it's basically almost like having a maid do the shopping and prepping for you. if you don't get out of work at 5, it does save time and some effort.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4289068&forum_id=2#38432294)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4289068&forum_id=2#38432351)

what does 200% markup look like? paying $10/meal for a meal kit with $3 worth of raw ingredients where they actually do a lot of the prep for you? that's a great deal if you value your time and want to eat healthy during the week.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4289068&forum_id=2#38432373)

Prepping food isn't hard if you learn knife skills.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4289068&forum_id=2#38432466)

It just seems like part of the appeal / marketing was that this would be some kind of time saving oh here's my ingredients ready to go I just need to add them and cook according to recipe - because if that's not the case, why wouldn't i just want to save money and have more flexibility in my meal plans?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4289068&forum_id=2#38433207)

i don't get how blue apron saves anyone time.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4289068&forum_id=2#38433221)

I know someone who uses blue apron. I liked the idea of getting sauces in small containers, especially stuff you wouldn't use regularly to go through a full-size bottle.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4289068&forum_id=2#38432397)

That's why it's retarded.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4289068&forum_id=2#38432427)

we cook a ton of veggies and fresh herbs. herbs like cilantro and parsley leaves take time to de-stem, and then soak to get off the bugs and dirt. then all veggies need to be chopped. and then you have a bunch of mixing bowls, measuring cups, measuring spoons, etc. that are dirty.

if you got a little baggie of each veggie / herb washed and chopped, that would save people a lot of time.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4289068&forum_id=2#38433389)

I am not that audience in that I buy and cook my food myself. But I see the benefit to others who are not so inclined.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4289068&forum_id=2#38433375)

is it popular? what do people think of it?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4289068&forum_id=2#38433667)

All food was organic before the 1960s. You're a guinea pig in an massive industrial experiment.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4289068&forum_id=2#38437744)

it's like if 145+ IQ people were for some cultural reason really into healing crystals or something, and then saying healing crystals raise IQ

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4289068&forum_id=2#38438414)

Try reading the very brief article I linked to before citing all of the most obvious objections that the study's authors anticipated in the first five minutes of designing it.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4289068&forum_id=2#38447446)

Problems With That Organic Food and Cancer Study

Steven Novella

One of the frustrating aspects of how science is reported in the mainstream media is when a complex study with very unclear results is presented with a misleading bottom line. Most people read only the headline, or perhaps the first paragraph, in order to glean the essence of a scientific study. They don’t read deep into the reporting to find the important details, or go to the study itself.

This is especially problematic when the study is of a preliminary design, or when the author’s conclusions are biased or misleading.

The most recent example of these issues is a study looking at the consumption of organic food and the risk of cancer. CNN reported the study as showing: “You can cut your cancer risk by eating organic, a new study says.” No – that is not what the study shows.

The study itself is not bad, for what it is, but it is highly limited in the conclusions that can be drawn from it, and it has some serious limitations. The researchers looked at a French database of good consumption, NutriNet-Santé Prospective Cohort Study. They had volunteers fill out food diaries for three days, report their organic food consumption, gathered demographic and other lifestyle data, and then followed them for over four years, using various methods to track the incidence of cancer.

They found a negative association between organic food consumption and cancer risk only for the highest organic food consumption group, and only for those with an overall low to medium quality diet, and only for two types of cancer (postmenopausal breast cancer and non-Hodkin lymphoma). These are hardly consistent or compelling results. While they tried to account for confounding variables, the complexity of this study essentially makes that impossible. The results are therefore impossible to interpret with any confidence.

To clarify – this is an observational study only. This means we cannot make any firm cause and effect conclusions, only look for correlations. Further, the correlations are extremely complicated. Here are the problems which I think make the results uninterpretable.

Here is the strangest outcome:

>Combining both a high-quality diet and a high frequency of organic food consumption did not seem to be associated with a reduced risk of overall cancer compared with a low-quality diet and a low frequency of organic food consumption. Negative associations were found between the risk of cancer and combining both a low- to medium-quality diet and a high frequency of organic food consumption (eTable 6 in the Supplement).

It is hard to know what this means. At face value it seems that if you have a good diet, switching to organic adds nothing. If you have a low to medium quality diet, only then was eating organic food associated with some lower cancer risk. But the potential confounders here are massive.

Further, the population in this study was not random – they were volunteers. They were 3/4 women, who are more likely to eat organic in the first place. They report:

>Higher organic food scores were positively associated with female sex, high occupational status or monthly income per household unit, postsecondary graduate educational level, physical activity, and former smoking status (Table 1).

They tried to account for these variables, but that is really not possible in this kind of study. Clearly the people in this study, who were volunteers and not randomly selected, behave differently than the general population. You might capture some of their behaviors, but not all.

The one methodological quibble I have is that there is no mention of controlling for multiple variables and comparisons. When you look at multiple outcomes and multiple potential associations, having one or two be significant is not surprising.

Here is the fatal flaw, which they acknowledge:

>“Some limitations of our study should be noted. First, our analyses were based on volunteers who were likely particularly health-conscious individuals, thus limiting the generalizability of our findings. NutriNet-Santé participants are more often female, are well educated, and exhibit healthier behaviors compared with the French general population. These factors may may have led to a lower cancer incidence herein than the national estimates, as well as higher levels of organic food consumption in our sample.”

They also acknowledge that their results are not consistent with the far larger Million Women Study, which included 623,080 UK women and concluded:

>In this large prospective study there was little or no decrease in the incidence of cancer associated with consumption of organic food, except possibly for non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

This larger study was not mentioned in CNN’s reporting.

This study also represents the main problem I have with organic farming – it is a false dichotomy based on the appeal to nature fallacy. The authors conclude that their study suggests promoting consumption of organic food may be a way to reduce cancer. Their study is not capable of showing this, but even if there is some real signal in this messy data, that is the wrong approach.

Promoting organic food is not sustainable. We simply don’t have the land, or the manure, to feed any significant portion of the world with organic food. Further, the organic lobby takes many unscientific stands, such as opposing food preservation through irradiation and all genetic modification. It is a package deal, with lots of nonsense and pseudoscience.

What we need is to take an objective evidence-based look at each individual variable. It is certainly possible that some pesticide is causing adverse health effects at the currently used levels (although there is no current evidence for this). If so, we need to find out which one, and either eliminate it or reduce the safety threshold. This is in fact what the various regulatory agencies do – monitor the scientific data and adjust safety thresholds accordingly, with a generous buffer.

There are also a host of negative unintended consequences possible with promoting organic farming. Organic produce is usually significantly more expensive, and may reduce overall fruit and vegetable consumption if people are avoiding more affordable produce out of unwarranted fears.

Let’s also keep in mind that many pesticides are allowed in organic farming, they just have to be “natural”.

The very concept of organic farming is a pseudoscientific nuisance. This study is just one example of the confusion it creates.

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(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4289068&forum_id=2#38452386)

But when it comes to diet, basically all we have are observational studies, so it's retarded quibbling to point that out. They made efforts to control for all of the obvious variables, and showed a significant reduction in risk. There will always be unobserved variables that you can't control for in an observational study. That doesn't completely discredit them, it's just the nature of the best. This is the best you can hope for with a modern nutrition study.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4289068&forum_id=2#38460483)

you're paying blue apron to give you a teaspoon of the chinese five spice at the cost of the bottle.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4289068&forum_id=2#38433258)

So all this did was send you ingredients you could've easily bought yourself / most home cooks would have on hand anyways, then commit you to specific meals days in advance with practically no flexibility.

You're paying for shipping costs for small amounts of cheap vegetables, you're bound to specific recipes, and they're not even prepped for you in any way.

It makes no sense for people who have the slightest experience in home cooking to do this - maybe this is a stepping stone to that who knows - but their recipes weren't any good you'd do way better walking / driving / ordering curbside etc. at your local grocery, then looking on seriouseats or somewhere for a recipe you want to make.

That was my main gripe - that if you were going to pay all that money for the delivery and "time saving" etc. - you still had to do all the work so why the fuck would i pay for vegetables I can walk and get and better recipes i can find online?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4289068&forum_id=2#38433192)

Attract the roaches with their quick and easy snacks.

Get enough roaches signed up / hooked on the soy.

Sell to another competitor with more roaches or the holy grail sell to Amazon before going bankrupt.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4289068&forum_id=2#38432289)

it’s like an archeologists dig

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4289068&forum_id=2#38433284)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDE8R51FqJw

ISIS take the fucking wheel

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4289068&forum_id=2#38432502)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CG0oN6UlgyY

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4289068&forum_id=2#38433266)

yay tech!

edit: wait thought this thread was about seamless and it’s many clones, i guess not

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4289068&forum_id=2#38432708)

The problem is they spend so much money on shipping/packaging/customer acquisition that it ends up being $10+ a meal - and you dont even get leftovers and are usually hungry at the end. We did Freshly for a while which is pre-made and you just microwave - that was far better because you don't have to spend an hour actually cooking the shit - but it is still pretty expensive. Plus you end up with a ton of cardboard and dry ice so the whole thing seems extremely wasteful.

It seems like the obvious long term play is for grocery stores to take over these businesses - so when you head to the Safeway there would just be end caps selling the same shit for $5 per meal, next to microwaveable versions similar to Freshly. That seems much more efficient than the current models taht I don't think anyone does for more than a couple of months.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4289068&forum_id=2#38433390)