This is the conclusion of the paper [1] that this article is based upon: "We suggest that any real declines are generally most easily explained by changes in cultivated varieties between 1950 and 1999, in which there may be trade-offs between yield and nutrient content."
What National Geographic says scientists say, "Scientists say that the root of the problem lies in modern agricultural processes that increase crop yields but disturb soil health. These include irrigation, fertilization, and harvesting methods that also disrupt essential interactions between plants and soil fungi, which reduces absorption of nutrients from the soil. These issues are occurring against the backdrop of climate change and rising levels of carbon dioxide, which are also lowering the nutrient contents of fruits, vegetables, and grains."
My anecdote from my garden is that my smaller cucumbers have way more taste, my smaller red bellpebbers are way more pebbery, potatoes have a richer taste, if this is just freshnes i dont know, but there for sure is a huge difference.
It was always the case that smaller vegetables are stronger in taste. I'm guessing that the larger ones took up more water, which diluted the taste, but without a difference of total nutrients.
I don't think that's you. When I come home and eat stuff from my parents garden, the differences in some cases are massive. Carrots for example taste 10x more intense, even one that was taken from soil weeks ago.
And I am comparing to bio carrots we buy in Switzerland, so can't go much higher than that when shopping (apart from farmers markets maybe but that depends what kind of farm).
Maybe its about transport and premature harvest, like bananas - if you ever taste some in exotic locations where they harvest them in the morning, its hard to ever enjoy bleak taste of those available in western world.
Commercial mass-produced tomatoes, bananas and other climacteric fruit are picked heavily unripe, shipped in this more durable state, and in the destination country are rapidly artificially ripened in ethylene gas chambers. The same commercial mass-produced fruits and vegetables also have been cultivated for decades for resistance against disease, size, and shelf life. Taste is often only secondary to those.
On one hand it allows year-round affordable fruit and vegetables to lie in our stores. On the other hand it means we are now stuck buying tasteless bags of water.
It is an erosion of the 'middle class' of products that economies of scale across all products seem to cause. There are only two kinds of product left: the small-scale artisanal extremely pricy product (e.g. farmer's market), and the mass-produced MBA-optimized to death commercial product. Any product that becomes 'too successful' and reaches economies of scale falls victim to this and is subsequently repeatedly penny-pinched until nothing of value is left.
> Commercial mass-produced tomatoes, bananas and other climacteric fruit are picked heavily unripe […]
I've heard it said that frozen vegetables are often "fresher" than non-frozen: they're picked when they're actually ripe, and flash frozen a short distance from the farm. They can then be moved about and stored with much less fuss as long as they're kept cold.
Some trade-offs:
> Certain nutrients are also lost during the blanching process. In fact, the greatest loss of nutrients occurs at this time.
> Blanching takes place prior to freezing, and involves placing the produce in boiling water for a short time — usually a few minutes.
> This kills any harmful bacteria and prevents the loss of flavor, color and texture. Yet it also results in the loss of water-soluble nutrients, such as B-vitamins and vitamin C.
> There are only two kinds of product left: the small-scale artisanal extremely pricy product (e.g. farmer's market), and the mass-produced MBA-optimized to death commercial product.
I discovered this phenomenon myself over the past decade, seeing the race to the bottom in automation, while at the same watching artisinal cottage industries sprout in East Austin in response.
Whether it was nitrogenated cold-brew coffee in kegs, handmade denim jeans, handmade cheeses and charcuterie, there was definitely a drive to produce high-quality, handmade items locally, seemingly in response to tasteless, soulless products begat by automation. I figured that is what the future held, two classes of product, one rather expensive and high quality, made by hand, and the other symbolized by a soulless $5 Garden Center plastic chair.
The reason why a market exists for those artisinal handmade products, I reckon, is because people at some level still crave the authenticity evidenced by something made by skilled craftspeople.
I have a local CSA organic veggie box dropped at my door picked from local farms. It is delicious and no pesticides, highly recommended anyone who can afford it to try.
> The Delphic oracle and the ethylene-intoxication hypothesis
Thanks, interesting read. The paper seems rather against the hypothesis, to say the least - it's a demolition.
"this hypothesis is implausible since it is based on problematic scientific and textual evidence, as well as a fallacious argument. ...the evidence did not support the conclusion. ... if it was not the positivist bent of the argument that made it so widely attractive, then how did such an implausible argument get such wide press?"
I don't want to give long quotes, but it says "developing the explanatory hypothesis required the combined efforts of an archeologist, a geologist, a chemist, and a toxicologist", but they offered a pathetically flimsy argument, which only seemed convincing due to the appearance of its scientific trappings, appeals to the glamour of the "interdisciplinary" and of explaining ancient mysteries with Science. It mostly looks at why it convinced anyone, and became widely known, although extremely low quality work.
Welcome have some types of produce that is stored for long periods of time and lose nutrients during storage. For example, apples that you buy in the store tend to me more than a year old.
I.e. apart from the general trade-off problem between maximum yield and maximum taste, things are also exacerbated by the big supermarket chains demanding varieties that are delivering a "consistent taste year-round". As even the best tomatoes are only mediocre-tasting during winter, that apparently means standardising on mediocre-tasting tomatoes all year round, instead of mediocre tomatoes during winter and tasty tomatoes in the summer.
Oh yah supermarket tomatoes are crap - literally all of them. They shouldn't be called tomatoes as they are more like soulless, tasteless, poor textured trash.
I've noticed this too with tomatoes. My parents grow tomatoes in their backyard during the summer. The amount of "meat" in the backyard grown tomatoes is noticeably a lot more than store-bought tomatoes. Stock-bought tomatoes are a lot more watery. and have less "meat" in them.
Similarly, I've started buying a lot more organic fruits and vegetables. The organic strawberries have way more taste than non-organic strawberries.
Same goes for zucchini and eggplant. People often bring their excess zucchini’s into the office as a trophy, and potentially prize to some lucky staff member, but they’re tasteless.
All kidding aside: please people read the full article, there's enough in there to at least partially support the claim quoted by the OP. Just not in that first paper.
I'm sure you'd agree that what they claim scientists say gives absolutely no mention to the conclusion of the first paper they chose to reference. How do you interpret this? Let's check out the 2nd paper [1]. It seems in many ways even worse than the first.
It not only also offers significant weighting to breeds, but ultimately even rejects the idea of a temporal decline in nutritional value! "Based on the available limited data, and due to variations in sampling, analytical techniques and likely differences in growing location and season, no definitive temporal trends could be established."
Basically the observed differences could be easily explained by other simple factors than a mysterious decline, including breed selection. Grow less nutritious crops, get less nutritious food.
Well. I too am occasionally guilty of doing this. As a geek who knows how search is supposed to work, it's hard for me to drop the assumption that the highest hit is the most relevant. Even though I know it's not.
Because this article isn’t a review of a single paper?
They’ve used a single paper to write a broader article. You can find other papers that justify the other claims that the article makes.
Being a popular article as opposed to an article in a scientific journal means references are not also necessary, although I suspect if you reached out to the author they would provide you with a list of references they used.
Also, the idea that the media used to be better is even more laughable. In fact, popular science media, with all its flaws, is better than its ever been. The reality is popular science is just hard to do.
So there's like 4 or 5 different studies cited in that article. The one you're talking about, unless you found the rest of the article and it says something completely different, doesn't reach any conclusions about the cause. It just says that the researchers think the easiest explanation is different cultivars.
That probably has something to do with it. However, plants don't make nutrients out of thin air. They cited samples that found the nutrient content in the soil at "regenerative" farms was much higher than other organic farms. It seems crazy to me to think that soil quality wouldn't be one of the main causes, on top of all the practices to get higher yield out of a smaller area. Which was discussed in the article.
To be fair, NG doesn't claim that the paper calls it changes in cultivated varieties, it says "Scientists say..."
That's still modern media in a nutshell though. Who are these "scientists" and also "experts" referenced in the next paragraph? They don't go into that but in true NG fashion they have some pretty pictures.
That said, from what I understand producers changed varieties to get veggies that are easier to grow, feed, and ship using using industrial ag processes. And those processes do require more irrigation and -- especially -- fertilization. Sorry I don't have any sources for that right now; I went to school for journalism.
Virtually all modern media exists to push a narrative, usually a Right Wing(tm) or Left Wing(tm) narrative. I'm not convinced you can get to the truth by "triangulating" since this assumes at least one party is actually saying something valid.
Blanket cynicism is really easy to manipulate: you don't have to do a good job yourself, you just have to convince the cynic that the other guy is just as bad, which is easy.
"Both Sides" cynicism feels centrist but it actually kills centrism because it turns centrism into a losing media strategy.
Listening to both sides is important to avoid selective information bias, but refusing to pick a winner or, worse, always picking the midpoint is a terrible policy that is responsible for enabling the current degradation in the public discourse.
Imagine you were tasked with deciding the greatest film of all time. And after some opaque process over which you have no meaningful influence, you were presented with your choices, the "sides:" "Generic Superhero Movie #1" or "Generic Superhero Movie #2".
Of course you are right that one may be objectively better than the other, but I'm also right in that such a choice ought be rejected on principle because neither deserves the validation of participation in such a charade.
...and then audiences stop reading your opinion, because snobbery isn't useful for picking which movie to see on Friday night, and then producers and directors stop paying attention to you because you have no audience, and now you have traded away your ability to effect change for the self-indulgent fantasy of being above the fray.
Look to the media. They sold any and all principles they once held in pursuit of "effecting change". And what happened? Everybody knows everything they say is worthless, they're further than ever from affecting, let alone effecting, anything and now they struggle, with no small degree of contempt and jealousy, to attract the viewership of a mid-tier YouTuber.
And this tale of modern media is not some new one. History and humanity endlessly repeats the same stories over and over, with little more than technological improvement offering a change in scenery. This is where the countless parables analogous to selling your soul to the devil come from: observing humanity. The moral being that it doesn't end quite like how you might have imagined.
Intensive agriculture has been focusing too much on short-term yields, and too little on long-term soil performance.
Plants need nutrients which they normally retrieve from the soil. Natural soil is rich in organic matter and minerals, a product of microorganisms consuming biomass and excrement. Note that it forms a cycle!
Nutritious soil -> Growth -> Death -> Decomposition -> Soil enhancement.
Plants are just the visible part of the cycle. The other part consists of microorganisms.
The use of pesticides, monocultures, and an absence of organic waste material and natural decomposition, effectively kills the microorganisms in the soil. This is what intensive agriculture does. Now, the soil is devoid of nutrients that plants need to grow. So farmers have to use fertilizer to substitute the required organic building blocks.
The problem with this, is that fertilizer just provides the most common organic building blocks. This is enough to grow, but not in the most healthy and fruitful way possible. It's comparable to humans living on a diet of water and rice. They'll survive, but their health will suffer from a lack of nutrients.
Now that intensive agriculture has literally killed the soil, there is no easy way back, and we are dependent on fertilizer to produce food of inferior quality.
Luckily, alternative ways of agriculture are picking up popularity. See for example, biodynamic farming: https://www.biodynamics.com/
"Intensive agriculture has been focusing too much on short-term yields, and too little on long-term soil performance."
I think a lot of this pressure is from there being too many people. I have seen the estimates of how many people earth can support, yet I have never seen numbers for how many people the earth can sustainably support, especially in our modern lifestyle of excess.
This is an ecofascist adjacent argument, and is not based on reality. Not much land is needed to feed people, most of it is being used to produce meat and dairy, which is a waste.
This is one of the strangest thing I come across on HN. Often you see a poster in some other thread railing against all forms of ‘oppression’ but then casually suggests a future with an effective world dictatorship to regulate meat consumption…
"Fascism is a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism, characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and the economy"
Nothing is truly fascist with a dictatorship, but you were the one to start throwing around that term. That said, regimentation of one's diet and control over the agricultural industry, likely with the supression of opposition in the name of what's good for society, would reasonably fit the rest of that definition.
The linked article talks about global adoption of dietary habits, mainly refraining from meat consumption or switching to other meat types. The only reasonable assumption for that happening is that some level of force would end up being applied.
On top of all this, the article linked (and your comments) fail to address the question in my comment about sustainably supporting an increasing population. The article you linked promotes intensive alternative such as farmed poultry, fish, and shrimp. To do those sustainably, we would have to look at massive changes in the crowding, low nutrient feed, and pharmaceutical use rampant in those. It also doesn't address the potential demand for land for other uses such as industrial or residential, nor for the anticipated increase in industrial use of crops for things like plant based plastics, nor does it seem to account for land classification and suitability, such as what could be grown on specific pieces of land and the economic labor models of the crops.
It's easy to say theoretically how we can just adopt another nation's food practices (not preferences). It's another to determine the geopolitical feasibility of it. I point out preferences here because we see that many nation's have a high demand for animal products as they develop.
You are reading way too much into my comments. All I was saying that it's a common ecofascist talking point to say that the problem is the number of people, and used the link as a source to how wasteful our food production is.
Now you are trying to bend this into the most uncharitable interpretation you can think of. In addition you're also just completely making up what I think. Sorry but I'm not gonna start defending your strawmans.
It seems a little uncharitable to say that I'm bending things to be uncharitable when you look at what was said (or not said).
If you wanted to talk about how wasteful our food production is, then why not say that and actually talk about that. Talking about land use that produces animal products and then calling it wasteful is a stretch when many people use those products, including n-order products like organic fertilizers or white sugar. It's not wasteful to fulfill the wants of the people. It could be inefficient or excessive, but those aren't the same as actual waste.
That's not at all what I'm saying. It's jumping to conclusions to think that we can just solve problems by using that 80% of production for people food crops vs animal feed. The paradigms are entirely different - from the types of crops the land can produce, to the labor involved in its production, etc. I also believe that the switch to plant based plastics over the coming decades will eat up whatever minor reduction in animal feed occurs. Even with higher prices for animal products you will still have a large market. Which is why you couldn't just remove subsidies and think that 80% number would shrink much.
The vegan fascists don't want sustainable animal cultivation, they want everyone to choke on soy products produced on land that was once full of diversity but is now a monoculture wasteland.
You're right. Also, not much space is needed to house people. Everyone can just start living in coffins with breathing tubes. It's so efficient, that when you die they can just wheel you into a hole in the ground and be done with it.
Seriously? You're comparing eating a diet that consists of less dairy & meat and throwing less food away as waste, to living in a coffin? This is not productive at all.
Totally. I much prefer my oversized mobile coffin, sporting conditioned air and a banging infotainment system, ferrying me to and fro, to the stationary coffin conveniently located in a central location.
> I think a lot of this pressure is from there being too many people.
Would this still be a problem if we didn’t use most of our agricultural land to grow crops to feed to the animals we eat? It’s very inefficient to feed plants to cows and then eat the cow.
In most cases, the pastureland for cattle for meat isn't suitable for growing anything more than grasses or may be inaccessible for growing other human consumable vegetables.
Animals are part of ecosystems, and play a role in their health and sustainability. The great plains are fertile farmland in large part because of Bison.
The problem we have is that animal products are more profitable in general than vegetables, so people overproduce them. It's the same thing behind the housing crises we see everywhere - luxury apartments are more profitable than low income housing, so that's the vast majority of what gets produced even though it's not what is needed, and it just fuels speculative buying.
"Would this still be a problem if we didn’t use most of our agricultural land to grow crops to feed to the animals we eat?"
It depends on the lifestyle. If everyone agreed to go vegan and eat unprocessed food, and we stopped using crops for many industrial uses (ethanol, plant based plastics, etc), then just maybe. However, people want their plastics and there is pressure to move away from petroleum in the long term. My guess would be that plant based industrial products will readily take the place of any reduction in agricultural feed over the next 30 years. And of course this doesn't address convincing the majority of the population to go vegan, which would be the bigger challenge.
The pressure is here from us doing bad things. We're killing the soil, bugs, forests, wildlife, sea, mainly by purchasing the wrong things in the supermarket. [1]
We could use just 25% of our current agriculture land and still feed the population. There is nothing in the beef & dairy, which we could not get from other sources (preferably plant-based).
The problem are agriculture subsidies. We're heavily subsidizing production of beef, mutton & dairy, which needs 75% of our agricultural lands, instead of focusing on less resource-intensive sources of protein & fats [2].
If enough people switched (and there are some positive indicators that it's already happening), maybe we could save the earth before it's too late [3].
"Humans and Big Ag Livestock Now Account for 96 Percent of Mammal Biomass ... a study ... found that, while humans account for 0.01 percent of the planet’s biomass, our activity has reduced the biomass of wild marine and terrestrial mammals by six times and the biomass of plant matter by half." [6]
100 years ago humans&cattle was just 2% of the biomass. Now it's 98%.
If all people on earth eat as much meat as an average american, we would need 5+ earths. If as much as average european, then 4+ earths would be needed. There is not enough space to support this lifestyle any longer, people. [6]
> ...mainly by purchasing the wrong things in the supermarket.
I doubt that blaming the consumer is helpful. Stuff like fat shaming usually backfires. And leads to us-vs-them polarization.
Plus, are consumers really to blame when choices are constrained by others?
Plus, it absolves the actual villains. No different than the industry funded rhetoric around plastic recycling and carbon footprint. As though Big Ag is only responding to consumer demand, and is other wise powerless to effect change.
We need to find more effective strategies for constructive policymaking. Blame and shame isn't working.
Our current food pyramid is the result of industrial policy choices. Perhaps we can make other choices. Perhaps by demanding a seat at the table.
> Plus, it absolves the actual villains. No different than the industry funded rhetoric around plastic recycling and carbon footprint. As though Big Ag is only responding to consumer demand, and is other wise powerless to effect change.
> As though Big Ag is only responding to consumer demand, and is other wise powerless to effect change.
Plastic recycling is a ruse brought up by plastic manufacturers. It delayed meaningful action for decades.
The current situation with meat/dairy production is caused by BigAg lobying for subsidies, cementing its position with laws & institutions. They won't change on their own. They would like to seem like they do, but it's just a play we've already seen with cigatette manufactures, banks and oil/plastic producers. They are in it for the money. We need to remove that money.
I agree that we need to change the rules, but I've lost trust in our govermental systems long time ago.
> Our current food pyramid is the result of industrial policy choices. Perhaps we can make other choices. Perhaps by demanding a seat at the table.
Be the change you want to see in the world. If enough of us can change, the world will change.
This article mentions that regenerative agriculture as the solution. There is a lot of concern now about the potential for a global food shortage at the end of this year because of rising fertilizer prices (leading to less planting). Regenerative agriculture can help solve this as well by focusing on restoring the biome of the soil, thereby harnessing nitrogen from the air and minerals from the soil.
I agree and if anyone is curious I am part of a project to bring open source farming robots for regenerative agriculture to everyone. We’re working on building a monthly crowd funding following to sustainably fund the project while staying completely open source. We have a good prototype vehicle now and are working on a good solid kit design we can ship in the next year or two, and will work with our user community to design tools for soil prep, planting seeds and transplants, weeding, and harvesting all in a regenerative organic process. And anyone can start a business selling their own variant of the design. We believe this will drive down costs in the same way that 3D printers dropped in price by 100x when patents expired and an open community formed around the many new designs. More details in our latest update here:
What would you think about a farmer who doesn't know tech giving opinions on what the Tech sector should do? Farming is extremely hard and competitive, for mostly razor-thin margins and very high risks.
One of the biggest problems is weeds. If you use these naive methods you'll end up with weed infections and then you have to either dump a lot of herbicides to recover the land or blunt tumble, basically entombing all the topsoil.
Somehow journalists and people from the city know better than people risking their family's worth every year and working 12 hours a day on this. Every day. And even on weekends and holidays. You have no idea how hard it is.
I'm pretty sure farming is as efficient as it is now because farmers listened to technicians who weren't working in the fields all day, and were helped to break out of local maxima. Also - you don't think farmers' kids go to college and end up studying and writing about regenerative agriculture? Are you yourself a farmer's kid who went to college and became a techie?
This is a simplistic analysis. Farmers have to time things around season, weather events, water availability (e.g. almost dry wells), floods, and many other variables changing all the time. For example, after heavy rains machines can't get into the field because they get stuck. And if you plant right before rains then when the mud dries it becomes too hard for seedlings to break it. Making all this work is very hard.
Of course, many places are out of control blindly dumping fertilizer and herbicides. But that's mostly China and Third World countries. It would be smart to focus first on fixing things there. It's the same as with CO2 emissions. Don't put unrealistic demands in developed countries while leaving the rest to do whatever.
Are you replying the the right comment? I offered no analysis. I'm just not into Lysenkoism or generalized anti-intellectualism on principle. I don't think it is productive to attack the people making an argument instead of the argument itself, especially when you make the most negative assumptions about who they are.
I'm sure that there is merit in what you say and that you probably have experience. My only experience in farming was directly in the fields, none in any sort of decision-making.
Do you really think that farmers in developing countries have it easier than those in developed countries? That they can more easily afford the cost of environmental regulation?
The carbon footprint of the average American or Canadian is about 14 tones per year. For India, Indonesia, and Brazil it's about 2 tons per year. Thus it is fair to expect developed countries to do more to tackle climate change.
Having said that, industrial agriculture done right is better for the environment because it's more efficient. The amount of land needed to feed an average person is minimised, thus there's less pressure to convert forests, grasslands and peat bogs to farmland.
You sound like you don't know a lot of farmers then. Most farmers these days inherited their farms, and run it mostly the same way their parents did, with a little input from local AG programs. For the most part, farmers are some of the most conservative, stick with what worked in the past people I've ever met.
Joel Salatin talks a lot of shit about the typical farmer too, and with good reason. The difference there is that he's way more profitable than your average farmer on a per acre basis. He's documented everything he does at Polyface, and others have duplicated his success, yet hyper conservative farmers are still trying to farm the same broke ass way and complaining they can't make a living.
Fertilizer prices are rising in part because ammonia production is a rather energy intensive process and the price of natural gas used to produce ammonia is way up due to war time shortages. Ammonia, of course, is the primary source material for nitrogen based fertilizers.
The production of fertilizers such as ammonium nitrate and urea require ammonia. Ammonia is synthesized on large scales with the Haber-Bosch process. This process requires hydrogen, which is obtained by steam reforming of methane in natural gas.
When natural gas prices exploded in Europe, many fertilizer factories had to stop production:
Supply chain issues, logistics problems, and high demand lead to rising prices which lead the largest exporter of phosphate fertilizer, China, to halt exports to protect domestic supply. Russia is the biggest exporter of potassium fertilizer.
I would suggest that fertilizer prices are higher due to cost increases to manufacture them but also because grain prices are higher. There seems to be a relationship between the 2 which is independent of actual costs to manufacture the inputs. As grain prices increase input costs increase, likewise with the inverse, grain prices decrease input prices decrease. Supply and demand for sure but there seems to be market forces outside of simply supply vs demand.
They are also more abundant than they used to be and that's a valid tradeoff to consider. Would it be worth it to only have access to seasonal produce local to your region for that produce testing better? Make do with pickles and potatoes instead of fresh fruit and vegetables in late fall through early spring? If not, shelf life, productivity and greenhouse feasibility are relevant metrics in addition to taste and vitamins. Old ways of gardening are still available, but most people will end up using these as a supplement rather than replacement to supermarket food that is at least always there in sufficient amounts.
If my food isn't nutritious I either wither away or am forced to eat more food, which comes with more calories. So, no: it seems like it is better to make do with seasonal foods than to live in a world where I can technically experience a tomato but... is it really a tomato if it just tastes like a tomato but otherwise confers none of the value of a tomato? (If you are saying the alternative is NO food, then sure; but I think the problem is that it is difficult to even get reasonable fruits and vegetables that are in season even if you live in a place where they can be grown as no one bothers to grow them anymore.)
I believe the argument they are making is that if the vegetable contains less magnesium, then you have to eat more of it to satisfy that dietary requirement (or your body's craving for it). So the vegetable still has a lot of the other macronutrients but now you have to eat "too many" of the macronutrients to satisfy your micronutrient needs.
In much of the world, "seasonal produce" in winter means essentially nothing fresh: everything had to be preserved from the earlier harvest, and the available methods of preservation were far more destructive (dry, pickle, etc) than today's frozen or canned options, never mind a cool chain than can effortlessly bring you a tropical banana for Christmas in Canada.
> Why not work towards abundant food that is as nutritious as possible?
Because we don't have a silver bullet. We have suggestions. But the world is increasing separating into cheap, low-nutrition food and expensive, nutritious food.
This comment is perfectly alienated from nature. Yes, significant seasonal and regional variation in diet is a worthwhile tradeoff for eating much more nutritious, tastier, cheaper, and more environmentally sustainable food than we have now. No, it does not mean we would have to eat like feudal peasants.
I have read zoos have started having to source fruit not raised for human consumption has the sugar levels are now getting too high. In some cases 30% more sugar content if I tember correct.
I believe it. Some of these new apple varieties are delicious. But that's probably because they're bred to be sweeter, and presumably less healthy. Still better than eating processed junk food, but not as healthy as their less-tasty predecessors!
Sugar even in the form of fructose isn't particularly healthy. Fruit counters through higher fiber for the most part. Ie grapes and watermelon have pretty high sugar content. Still compared to processed food fine but wouldnt want to eat them nonstop
This sparks an interest of mine. I want to grow my own garden of fruits and vegetables. I can grab seeds from my local hardware store. But are these genetically the best I can buy? Is there not a genetic strain of seeds that I can buy somewhere else, perhaps online, that produce both the most nutritious and delicious?
Thank you. I think this gets me in the right direction. "heirloom seeds" seems to be what I am looking for. Some online testify that they find heirlooms taste better. I'll have to do some more research and try them myself to see if its true.
They will taste better, but be prepared for much smaller sizes than you are used to. And there is nothing wrong with that, it's just that most vegetables are as large as they are because they absorb a lot of water and effectively their larger size in the most literal sense dilutes the bits that give the vegetables their taste. That's why for instance smaller tomatoes taste so much better than the larger ones.
They won't necessarily taste better. One of the things we've been breeding for is better flavor. Also yield and shelf life, so some will definitely taste better.
There isn't really a best seed. There are simply tradeoffs. That probably sounds familiar :-)
Disease resistance, water tolerance, soil conditions, climate, daylight, tolerance to heat and cold, pest resistance, taste, yield, time to grow, harvest period, storage period.
There are usually an incredible number of varieties for any given plant. It takes quite a few years to start to find ones that work the best for you. It's also doubly tricky as your conditions will change each year.
I like to plant a wide variety of seeds as that makes it likely that something delicious will thrive.
I'd also say that typically home grown fresh vegetables are so much tastier than ship bought that you might worry less about iothan you think.
your overly generous assumption about the safety risk aside, imagine a genetic modification and subsequent introduction of that modified organism into the ecosphere like a big leap of faith.
genetic mutation occuring in nature is of smaller scale (a few differences, a few individuals) and not subject to contradicting incentives that politics and markets are prone to.
> your overly generous assumption about the safety risk
This is not my assumption, this is scientific consensus, see the linked page.
> subsequent introduction of that modified organism into the ecosphere
This is not how the ecosphere works. The new mutation will only survive if it provides some benefits for the survival. If more nutritious fruits are like this, I see no problem here at all.
>> your overly generous assumption about the safety risk
>This is not my assumption, this is scientific consensus, see the linked page.
i very much doubt that:
* it could be proven (that gmo's WILL NOT harmfully interact with other organisms)
* there is (something aproaching) consensus on that topic
* wikipedia is a credible source for it
thou i share the view that gmo have massively enhanced our abilities, i also think that the risk is of the same magnitude.
+1 for composting. There's something satisfying about putting down a deep, dark brown soil to grow some veges in. I don't grow a lot (peas and corn generally), but it's magnificent eating.
As a result of the composting, once my last winter crop of peas had died out, a bunch of mis-matched tomatoes began growing out of the same patch, so I left the trellis up and let the plants develop. Roma tomatoes, cherry tomatoes and regular tomatoes all growing haphazardly, totally unplanned. A most pleasant surprise that kept me in bruschetta for a few weeks :)
There's something soul satisfying about eating something from your own yard; must be a deep-seeded DNA/evolution thing, like the smell of a campfire.
Back to composting: it's amazing how small a volume of trash we throw out now that we're putting foodstuffs into compost.
>> it's amazing how small a volume of trash we throw out now that we're putting foodstuffs into compost.
Toronto introduced its green bin program in 2002, where organic waste (food scraps, mostly) is collected separately and composted. The resulting compost is made available to residents for free.
It massively reduced the amount of garbage going to landfill AND enriches the local soil.
If you're in California, check out California Rare Fruit Growers. If elsewhere in North America, check out North American Fruit Explorers. Both focus on rare varieties that are really good to grow but are not commercially available. I imagine there are similar groups in other parts of the world.
I think the latest research was showing that soil and mycorrhizae networks are very critical to the nutritional content of various plants. The sad thing is that same study (need to find it again) showed that applying conventional fertilizer actively reduced mycorrhizae and biological diversity in the soil. The scary thing is there's not much awareness of this in mainstream media. The only thing I've seen in mainstream media about this soil problem was from a hermit Indian guru type on a spotify podcast.
There's a no-dig movement in organic farming that is based on the notion that tilling or otherwise disturbing soil is a bad thing because it disturbs the fungal ecosystem. Interesting if you are growing some stuff at home because practicing this actually means doing less work. Once established, a no-dig bed requires very little maintenance. You basically just leave it alone. You top it up with some compost once a year or so and you grow whatever you want. Even weeds stand less of a chance because those are what show up when you disturb the soil. So, if you don't do that, there are less weeds to deal with.
Sadly, I only have a balcony and no back yard but I try to grow lots of herbs there. Very tasty addition to my food. I have lots of Cilantro growing right now and my rosemary bushes are waking up from the winter as well. And I've planted out some basil cuttings from a cheap super market plant that in a few months will turn into a nice little basil jungle.
Also that modern ag uses heavy equipment which compacts the soil, reducing its ability to breath. Basically suffocates it, and unless you run a plow to 3m depth this is unfixable in less than say 10K years.
When gluten-free diets began to become popular, I had a similar question as to why a food that had been a staple of multiple civilisations for hundreds of years had suddenly become "bad for you". Dan Barber has a book on this called The Third Plate, which served as a great introduction for me on nutrition, but from a culinary perspective. He's also one of the chefs profiled in the first season of Netflix's Chef's Table.
The answer to this question is that we don't make bread like we used to. There's a wonderful documentary on Netflix about this, called "Cooked" (the episode entitled "Air" is about bread). Short answer: bread used to be fermented, and consisted of three ingredients. Today's regular supermarket bread is bad for you, unless you take the time to go to your local bakery and buy their sourdough.
My wife couldn't eat bread without falling asleep on the couch a couple of hours afterwards. But she can eat sourdough - which costs about the same as the gluten-free variety we used to buy. Also, it's beyond delicious.
>Short answer: bread used to be fermented, and consisted of three ingredients. Today's regular supermarket bread is bad for you, unless you take the time to go to your local bakery and buy their sourdough
Can you outline how the additional ingredients in "Today's regular supermarket bread" make them "bad for you"?
Here in Germany even local bakeries put stuff in their bread which doesn't belong there. A good chunk of population (including me) has switched to make their own bread. With a bit of routine (and patience) it's pretty easy (I am not talking about these machines which make your bread). I just finished two loaves where I even didn't add any yeast besides what's contained in the sourdough.
We have some high-end bakeries who sell real bread but you have to know them. Sourcing proper food in Germany is pretty difficult if you don't live in a big city.
Without reading the book, did you ever reach an answer? In my understanding, wheats and carbs were never optimal for us but if you are a starving medieval peasant on a bread or rice diet, you have worse things to worry about.
Fruits are lacking vitamins and minerals, not sugar. In fact, the carbohydrate content in fruits is increasing with increased CO2 concentrations (explained in the article).
Anyway, the reason why this is a problem is explained in the article.
“As many as three billion people around the planet, most of them in low- and middle-income countries, cannot regularly afford a healthy diet, and at least two billion are suffering from so-called hidden hunger, missing key micronutrients in their diets,” Sova says. “These people cannot afford additional nutrient declines in plant-based foods.”
Nutrient deprivation isn't just scurvy and rickets, it is also linked to many behavioural and long-term health problems.
I can't remember the technical terms for these issues (hypercaloric, nutrient deficient diets or something) but I watch a documentary covering malnutrition. They showed people eating cheap food with low nutrient dense foods because they were ignorant and/or poor. Another documentary, Vitamania (great watch), showed that we only need a small portion of nutrients compared to the volume of food we eat. So, I imagine it's more about health education and financial status than people "eating right" while over estimating their nutrient intake.
This plays a big part in the unhealthfulness of modern diets IMO, the reduction in magnesium content especially. Magnesium is extremely important and involved in so many enzymatic reactions, and so easily leeched out by high-sugar diets (and other stressors), that replenishing it (via supplementation) makes it look like a panacea.
The savesoil.org movement could be a possible solution. Incentivise farmers to plant cover crops when it's not season. This increases organic content in the soil, which over time increases the nutritional value in the fruits and vegetables.
”One of the largest scientific studies to draw attention to this issue was published in the December 2004 issue of the Journal of the American College of Nutrition.”
And what did that paper conclude?
“Conclusion: We suggest that any real declines are generally most easily explained by changes in cultivated varieties between 1950 and 1999, in which there may be trade-offs between yield and nutrient content.”
Nothing about “loss of mother earth’s soil nutrients”. But that wouldn’t sell ads would it?
not like they had to reach for straws to write that story anyway - there is an interesting, nuanced narrative to be told on the haber-bosch processes influence on food prices and the practices of industrial agriculture, particularly tilling. we used to grow food in soil, now we grow it in dirt.
That was the first study mentioned, solely for the purpose of confirming nutrition loss and not for the authors' speculations about causes. The next study was the Australian one cited to confirm protein loss.
If you want to know where they drew the statements about causes from, you might check the next three studies which, like the first two, are directly cited and linked within the text of the article.
But that probably wouldn't make a good comment, though.
I'm trying to find the source, however I read a while back that arugula (rocket) and green onion (chives/scallions) are two examples of plants that have not been selected for traits and are essentially the same as they were 1000 years ago. I recall the article (or maybe it was Nova?) going on to say that there were many more varieties of food plants in the same category, as an exception to so many which have been.
This article is mostly nonsense. The biggest problem is we want supermarkets to provide us with the same crops year-round at inexpensive prices. The apples you buy from overseas had to be taken when still green to survive months of storage.
If you want nutritious buy seasonal ripe greens and fruits from local organic farms. Don't expect to have red apples year-round. And expect to pay 50% more.
Holy shit, I had to surf without an ad blocker for a day, and it was like taking a trip into a dystopian future. I'm not looking forward to the time when the pihole ad-blocking methods are no longer effective.
Vertasium has a video about this the shocking part was even weeds plants you'd never eat had fewer "nutrients" (if you call it that). Even comparing saved weed samples from 100 years ago the difference was evident.
I'm on a desktop and couldn't read the article either. I was shocked not to see a non-paywalled link posted in the comments. How are others reading it? I certainly haven't used my monthly quota for this site, which I never visit...
I recently read a great book that dug into this issue, explaining a lot of the history behind it and exploring potential future solutions. The Dorito Effect. Would recommend.
My understanding is actually that it was ruined by artificial fertilizer and monoculture, because those nutrients are drawn from the soil, and we only "feed" plants the nutrients required to grow and no other trace minerals. Eventually the soil becomes depleted and this causes them to be less nutritious.
Taste is affected similarly because we essentially chemically treat plants to make them take on more water and water them heavily to grow larger in size. Nearly every fruit and vegetable in the store is larger than it would be if left to grow wild, but they are more watery and less concentrated in flavor as well.
Yup this is exactly it. I don't think the issue is that our fruit is larger, but just that the soil is much more degraded. 90-95% of all plant species get the MAJORITY of their nutrients from mycorrhizal associations and some, like many orchids, are even obligate. Plant roots are generally primarily meant for communication and connection with fungi, not to extract nutrients from soil.
But when practicing monoculture, the #1 threat is pests and so we do everything we can to fight them. This includes using sterilized soils, an overreliance on pesticides, and the usage of artificial fertilizers. The artificial fertilizers are a particularly big problem when it comes to phosphorous because for most plants they rely on the depletion of locally available phosphorus before they start the complex chemical dance necessary to make the association with fungi
The really sad thing is that soil inoculated with fungi can hold 50-100x more water than sterilized soil. Without it water tends to drain and we use much more of it. Combine that with the fact that most of the phosphorus in artificial fertilizers is not actually accessible so we end up using more water which carries this leftover fertilizer which causes massive cyanobacterial/algal blooms that have already led to the extinction of many fish species.
It's a race to the bottom all to maintain the practice of monoculture. The research on mycorrhizae is relatively recent (mostly in the past 3 decades), but at this point the existing evidence is astoundingly clear. Plants with mycorrhizal associations better resist drought, frost, soil pathogens, produce more nutritious fruit, and can even produce more fruit mass (depending on the species, some will end up producing more leaves instead but this can be inverted with some manual labor)
Why don't you enhance your understanding by, for example, reading the article?
Soil depletion is mentioned, among other things. But it isn't so much a deficiency of nutrients as a disruption of the uptake of those nutrients.
Water is only mentioned in the context of less water being drawn into the plants.
It's left to the reader to guess what you mean by "chemically treat plants[...]" but FWIW the main culprit is selective breeding, not any chemical intervention.
Traditional breeding may have reduced the nutritional content of plants, but GM can be used to produce plants that are nutritious and high yielding.
One study took wild tomatoes and used GM to increase yield:
"Compared with the wild parent, our engineered lines have a threefold increase in fruit size and a tenfold increase in fruit number. Notably, fruit lycopene accumulation is improved by 500% compared with the widely cultivated S. lycopersicum."
Such things are not in the food supply. No doubt it is possible, and there has been research, but there are exactly 0 available GMO tomatoes available to buy as food in the US.
But a certain kind of person (such as the first commenter in this thread I was responding to) believes most of their food if it doesn't have an adjective ("organic" maybe?) is a genetically modified organism, and everything bad about food is attributed to genetic engineering, this is quite false and a result of people who don't know much sharing disinformation with each other.
What National Geographic says scientists say, "Scientists say that the root of the problem lies in modern agricultural processes that increase crop yields but disturb soil health. These include irrigation, fertilization, and harvesting methods that also disrupt essential interactions between plants and soil fungi, which reduces absorption of nutrients from the soil. These issues are occurring against the backdrop of climate change and rising levels of carbon dioxide, which are also lowering the nutrient contents of fruits, vegetables, and grains."
Modern media in a nutshell.
[1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15637215/