I think there should be an option (unless there is) for mods to turn off (or hide) voting as needed. That might be an effective way to cancel any downvote brigades. Lemmy really doesn’t have the population for mass vote manipulation now, but it will soon enough.
Hiding all votes can also help mitigate some superficial bias, but not all. I believe that if a person sees a comment with a few dozen downvotes first, they tend not to read the post objectively. After being on Reddit for such a long time (12 years or so), I found that it was super easy to manipulate voting trends if I caught a post or comment at just the right time.
Hiding only downvotes is just silly though. Some register of public opinion, positive or negative, still has its uses, IMHO.
I am an American and I agree. This issue started at the end of World War II. The technology we developed to store and preserve bulk calories in tiny packages was probably a contributing factor to outcome of that war. It was cheap, simple and it was fantastic technology at the time. It has gotten too good, unfortunately.
However, processed foods are just one of the problems. All things considered, we have a lot of extremely cheap normal food as well. The mid-west is practically dedicated to cattle farms and corn. Our calories are super cheap and for the most part, we have excellent logistics networks. A funny rumor is that we here in Colorado get fresher sea food than most coastal locations since our orders get processed first thing in the morning for transport. (That sounds silly enough that I wouldn’t be surprised if it were true.)
There are many different issues that cause higher obesity rates here, is my point.