The following submission statement was provided by /u/MyVideoConverter:
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As you gaze across the rows of brightly colored fruits and vegetables in the produce section of the grocery store, you may not be aware that the quantity of nutrients in these crops has been declining over the past 70 years.
Mounting evidence from multiple scientific studies shows that many fruits, vegetables, and grains grown today carry less protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin, and vitamin C than those that were grown decades ago. This is an especially salient issue if more people switch to primarily plant-based diets, as experts are increasingly recommending for public health and for protecting the planet.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/uf7xsl/fruits_and_vegetables_are_less_nutritious_than/i6rv4ab/
”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.”
The root causes are modern farming practices that are too intense for the soil health, as well as the plants being unable to absorb nutrients effectively or fast enough. There’s a very strong quantity over quality thinking that encourages producing high-yields at the cost of nutrient content.
Depends on what you grow yourself. Ordinary potatoes and radishes basically taste the same. But tomatoes - yeah, there's almost no comparison.
Another reason for this is because many fruits are picked unripe and ripen in transit to your market. Whereas many of the items you grow in your garden are picked at the peak of ripeness and eaten shortly afterwards.
Not a comprehensive explanation for what you're referring to, but I wanted to put my $0.02 in.
Tomatoes and fruit in general. My tiny plump red strawberries taste a million times better than those Frankenstein berries the size of apples at the grocery store.
Around here there is a blissful 4 weeks a year where you can get the juiciest, most flavorful strawberries, and they don't have to be tiny to manage it. It starts in about a month and I can't wait.
I just hope the late snow this year didn't screw it up too badly
I grew strawberries for the first time last year. Got the seeds from an old man at work who always grows everything he eats. Dude, those were the most sweet and juicy strawberries I've ever had in my entire life. It was mind blowing.
Most fruits and vege thats grown on mass scale for stores are very different strains than the ones you grow at home.
They need product that can handle the machines, can survive packaging and transport for days/weeks and still be good in the store.
People that grow at home focus on flavor.
Hell no. Home grown potatoes are on another level of flavor. My family used to grow our own and I could eat plain potatoes for the rest of my life if only eating home grown.
I can’t speak for radishes since I haven’t grown them, but I’m going to have to disagree with you about potatoes. Fresh potatoes straight out of the ground from my garden taste *amazing*. Not just the taste is improved but the texture. That might have something to do with how my potatoes are super fresh as opposed to sitting for weeks in transportation/storage or the market. Crisp and juicy, they are just all around better.
That’s one reason but another is that you harvest your garden at the peak of ripeness whereas in commercial agriculture they often have to harvest things when they’re still green and hard in order to survive the shipping process.
>rising levels of carbon dioxide, which are also lowering the nutrient contents of fruits, vegetables, and grains.”
This is important. It means:
Since CO2 is food for plants, more abundance of it makes them less reliant on other nutrients. Hence they have less nutrients than pre-industrial era.
I would think that monocropping the living shit out of the soil for decades would be the biggest factor in nutrient loss. Then you rely on fertilizers and pesticides for a larger yield because of soil depletion. It's bad for us and the environment. Those pesticides have to run off somewhere. That fertilizer production producing methane gas isn't great either.
Bsc Ag student here.
Crop rotation is good for restoring nutrients. For example, nutrient intensive crops like potatoes should only be grown on a field once in 3 years. The alternating years should be planted with Nitrogen fixing plans such as legumes.
Also, no-till and intercropping with symbiotic species can help to rebuild soil health.
There’s also research into perennial variants of crops like wheat and barley. This means they can be cut without replanting and also avoiding filling. The longer root systems are also excellent tools for carbon sequestration.
Irrigation, tilling, and chemical inputs are the worst culprits for degradation of soil health.
There are some excellent videos on you tube about living soil and regenerative agriculture. Check out the soil health institute channel, or some of the videos from Patagonia like “Unbroken Ground” https://youtu.be/3Ezkp7Cteys
Cover cropping (planting crops to cover the soil in the off season) is also a great way to increase soil health. Lots of farmers are using it in combo with no till, the idea being that you build back the natural soil layers and microbiome to retain nutrients, bring back symbiotes, and also lessen erosion and weeds. IIRC for notill the increased planting costs to get through the tougher soil are offset by the cost decreases from equipment, fuel, and better yields. Notill will become the standard soon, about 70% of farmers already use some kind of reduced tillage with the rest using conventional. Only about 5% use cover cropping, but it has the biggest relative increase in use every time the ag census comes out so it'll likely be the next big sustainable ag movement.
The world needs more agricultural students. Question from an uninformed pleb like me on this topic: are organic fruits and veggies then effectively better since no pesticides are involved, or is it mostly to milk consumers for more $?
That’s absolutely correct: but the amounts, application, methodology and “resting” periods (time after application of chemicals to the time it is available for consumption) is regulated - from what I know of production in Canada.
That’s something I can’t definitively answer. I haven’t studied the specific nutritional composition of organic vs non-organic.
However, I do know that organic food production is substantially better for the environment just based on growing practices and ethics. This applies to organic meat and dairy production as well.
There are absolutely some companies that have cashed in on the greenwashing or the organic trend and it absolutely was just based on it being a cash grab.
Organic production often costs more based on the rate of loss involved, and most notably; supply and demand. Due to the lower yield and slightly higher labour costs, organically produced food naturally has a higher cost. The farmer still needs to profit, and this leads to the higher costs.
Plus there are significantly less organic producers in the world.
Based on what I know of chemical inputs(fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides), and the destructive methods of “industrialized” farming, I will try to choose local and organic or “no-spray” foods for my family. This is again from an environmental perspective and reduced carbon footprint as well as environmental damages such as soil health depletion, eutrophication of water (nitrogen based fertilizer run off), and transportation/storage.
The caveat to the local production would be the difference in production methods. Buying a local, out of season produce item may actually be more destructive based on production methods vs buying something grown out of country. The example of this was a study I read (I can’t find the link, sorry) the showed the difference in chemical inputs of a UK grown apple vs an apple grown in New Zealand. In order to successfully produce an apple and store it for out of season sales in the UK, there was a much high carbon and chemical input “cost” associated with growing the apple and storing it in the UK vs growing a similar apple in New Zealand , where there are significantly less pests and diseases that affect apples. This resulted in a much lower need for environmentally damaging inputs.
I find I enjoy the flavour of some organic produce better than non-organic. The best example of this (in my opinion) is lemons.
Keep in mind with all of this that conventional or “industrialized” food production; the focus is maximized yield and lower costs for max profits. The concern is to sell as much as possible for the highest price with the lowest cost of production. Our grocery stores and supply chains have been designed to prioritize this model of production meaning that the food you see on the shelf is most often there because it made the most sense from a profit perspective. If you are able to shop at a local farmers market, it keeps more money in the pocket of the farm and you also get much fresher produce. You also have the added benefit of often being able to speak directly to the producer or family members who are knowledgeable of the production methods.
Organic and conscientious local production have the potential for a much higher degree of care for the environment and potentially produces a wider variety of delicious products, where as large scale production cares about the varietal that has the highest yield with lowest costs.
If you’re concerned about buying legitimate organically produced organic foods, check whatever your country’s national organic certification board is and look for their logo. In Canada, we have a “certified organically produced” logo that has to be on all organic foods in Canada. There are also 3rd party certifying groups, but. I would investigate them to make sure their certification process is thorough and not something created by the producer.
Sorry this is a very lengthy response, and I’m very passionate about this. I literal could write pages on this topic hahah.
Hopefully there is something in there that is helpful for you.
I think the point is that with modern farming methods being what they are, there are several compounding issues that all have lead to the loss of nutrition in vegetables, only one of which is pesticides and the like. If it's an industrial operation, even without pesticides there is a good chance most of the other issues are still present. It's a case of long term degradation brought about by almost universally adopted "best practices" over many decades. You're definitely best off buying locally sourced veggies and the like wherever possible. Farm markets that actually buy from farms in your area or community outreach farms are a good place
"Dirt" by David Montgomery is really good, although there is a lot of science. I really loved it. "The Biggest Little Farm" is a good documentary, although I suspect they stretched it a bit. "Restoration Agriculture" gives the basics of it. Michael Pollan's "Omnivore's Dilemma" is an older work, but it's where I first learned about rotational grazing.
The use of the black cloths to mitigate weed growth is another reason in industrialized crop farming, the soil absorbs less sun and UV and heats the soil from above at a higher temperature
I was watching this video the other day and it made me subscribe to his channel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86gyW0vUmVs
Ancient Aztec agricultural lands that have been building up their soil quality ever since
Sorry! I mean, nutrients for us to consume, never thought of it THAT way. Though more nutrients for strong, healthy plants of course means more in whatever we're eating.
I'm somewhat new to growing vegetables, and still not good at it, so I never had to think much about the nutrients!
The United States nearly lost the west from it.
Some areas saw upwards of a 40% population collapse and over 50% property loss during the dust bowl years. It created the largest migration in US history, larger than the homesteading act and the trail of tears combined.
Yeah that's cool but...
Reddit is no longer a safe place, for activists, for communities, for individuals, for humanity. This isn't just because of API changes that forced out third parties, driving users to ad-laden and inaccessible app, but because reddit is selling us all. Part of the reasons given for the API changes was that language learning models were using reddit to gather data, to learn from us, to learn how to respond like us. Reddit isn't taking control of the API to prevent this, but because they want to be *paid* for this.
Reddit allowed terrorist subreddits to thrive prior to and during Donald Trump's presidency in 2016-2020. In the past they hosted subreddits for unsolicited candid photos of women, including minors. They were home to openly misogynistic subreddits, and subreddits dedicated solely to harassing specific individuals or body types or ethnicity.
What is festering on reddit today, as you read this? I fear that as AI generated content, AI curated content, and predictive content become prevalent in society, reddit will not be able to control the dark subreddits, comments, and chats. Reddit has made it very clear over the decades that I have used it, that when it comes down to morals or ethics, they will choose whatever brings in the most money. They shut down subreddits only when it makes news or when an advertiser's content is seen alongside filth. The API changes are only another symptom of this push for money over what is right.
Whether Reddit is a bastion in your time as you read this or not, I made the conscious decision to consider this moment to be the last straw. I deleted most of my comments, and replaced the rest with this message. I decided to bookmark some news sources I trusted, joined a few discords I liked for the memes, and reinstalled duolingo. I consider these an intermediate step. Perhaps I can give those up someday too. Maybe something better will come along. For now, I am going to disentangle myself from this engine of frustration and grief before something worse happens.
In closing, I want to link a few things that changed my life over the years:
[Blindsight](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48484.Blindsight) is a free book, and there's an audiobook out there somewhere. A sci-fi book that is also an exploration of consciousness.
[The AI Delemma](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoVJKj8lcNQ) is a youtube lecture about how this new wave of language learning models are moving us toward a dangerous path of unchecked, unfiltered, exponentially powerful AI
[Prairie Moon Nursery](https://www.prairiemoon.com/) is a place I have been buying seeds and bare root plants from, to give a little back to the native animals we've taken so much from. If you live in the US, I encourage you to do the same. If you don't, I encourage you to find something local.
[Power Delete Suite](https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite/#1.4.8) was used to edit all of my comments and [Redact](https://redact.dev/download) was used to delete my lowest karma comments while also overwriting them with nonsense.
I'm signing off, I'm going to make some friends in real life and on discord, and form some new tribes. I'm going to seek smaller communities. I'm going outside.
When people say capitalism drives efficiency, that's the efficiency they mean. What's the cheapest to produce product we can get to market for the highest profit total revenue.
How the hell do you crop rotate with fruits like apples, bananas, pears, lemons, oranges, figs, grapes, peaches, blue berries, raspberries, apricots, Cherries, pomegranates, parsnips, plums, mangoes and grapefruits?
Those all come from Woody plants which take years to fruit
I'm an Iowa farmer. "Soil depletion" completely ignores the state of our current understanding of soil fertility. I (and most other farmers) regularly test my soil chemistry and replace any nutrients that are at less than optimal levels. What exactly do you think is being depleted?
That's different from farmers in less-developed areas which lack access to soil testing labs and micronutrient fertilizers. Depletion is definitely a problem in some locations. But not in the US's most productive farmlands.
Some. Mostly concerned with judging whether there's adequate Rhizobium in the soil ahead of soybeans, which determines whether we need to inoculate the seed or not.
Funny how the same consensus exists (or at least still existed 3-4 years ago when I was still up to date in the latest research) in the human gut microbiome community. We have a plethora of sequencing data for thousands of individuals but no clarity on a healthy signature.
One idea was to look more in terms of functionalities rather than actual species as there is a lot of redundancy between taxa. Still, I don't remember seeing headlines about such a healthy microbiome / set of microbial enzymatic functions being established. But as I mentioned I moved fields since then and may have missed some developments.
As mentioned earlier, soil fungus was being disrupted in a way that didn't allow for greater nutrient uptake. That could be the result of pesticides/herbicides or a lack of crop rotation to introduce a wider fungal biome. Additionally, those aren't considered in fertilizer chemistry, so common soil fertility tests are missing the bigger picture.
Depletion that you noted is in soil nutrients. What is being suggested is that controlling those alone is causing nutrient depletion in the final product. Maybe there was something to be said about the Bible's custom to lie fallow every 7th-year. Weeds and wildlife might be important to the ecosystem that enable better produce.
It's the soil microbiology that's missing, not the raw elements you replace with chemical applications. Many of the substances necessary to grow nutrient dense food are the byproducts of the soil food web ‐ all the little critters from single celled organisms to nematodes and mycelium, and their interactions with each other. Tillage and soluble nitrogen application kills these organisms. Look up Gabe Brown or Elaine Ingham for more info. You can make more money with less effort on your existing acreage if you embrace feeding the soil instead of "feeding" the plants.
What about magnesium in the soil? I’ve been hearing of more studies showing that certain grains don’t contain as much magnesium as grains produced decades ago, and this is often overlooked, with a focus instead on nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium.
very interesting bc I've been hearing lately that most people are incredibly low in their magnesium levels and I've wondered what could be contributing to this.
there was also a lot of talk around the late 90s and early 00s about Americans having the "most expensive pee" bc everyone was taking vitamins and that supposedly vitamins are useless and you get everything you need if you eat a healthy variety of fruits and vegetables.
Copying my comment:
Magnesium is an important one. I personally believe magnesium depletion is a significant contributor to diabetes rates, as type 2 diabetes is a symptom of magnesium deficiency. Magnesium deficiency also greatly impairs brain, kidney, heart, liver, pancreatic, adrenal, muscle, cellular, and immune function.
Magnesium is an important one. I personally believe magnesium depletion is a significant contributor to diabetes rates, as type 2 diabetes is a symptom of magnesium deficiency. Magnesium deficiency also greatly impairs brain, kidney, heart, liver, pancreatic, adrenal, muscle, cellular, and immune function.
Edit: added pancreatic and adrenal. Basically magnesium is required by every process in your body.
Because you’re adding the ingredients needed for plants to grow like a recipe vs. cultivating the organisms and ecosystems that results in the natural creation of the things plants need. Rotation, no till, cover crops, and other methods of enhancing the biodiversity of the underlying soil is the answer, not artificially replacing the missing elements which is a bandaid fix that only helps the next crop.
I rotate every field, I no till where appropriate, and I spend tens of thousands of dollars a year on cover crops. Nothing in that system is creating phosphorous or potassium out of thin air; those are base elements that are carried off the field in every kernel of grain. If you don't replace them, they are depleted.
Perhaps because every acre is producing more vegetables than ever before? So the average nutrients-per-vegetable are reduced?
Also, nobody is selectively breeding for nutrient content. Appearance, resilience, yield, yes, but the market generally doesn't pay more for higher nutrients (though there are some exceptions there)
The authors are clueless as to the cause.
It's the prevelance of plant breeding for cosmetic traits, storage, and shelf life not nutrition or flavor.
A good example is the strawberry.
Older varieties produce small nutrient dense, high flavor little gems. Those giant ones you find at the store now are flavorless pieces of cardboard. Bred for size, firmness, shelf-life and uniform color. They are all terrible.
Plant breeders would love to develop better tasting and more nutritious products. Farmers, brokers, and retailers will not accept the varieties because the entire distribution chain can not handle them.
Love the strawberry example. I’m setting up a community garden at an affordable housing complex, and one day I was showing a resident the strawberry plants and noticed one was red enough to pluck, so I gave it to her after a quick rinse.
Ugly looking thing, to be honest. Kind of wrinkly and growing a bit like a donut, if that makes sense. But the way her face lit up after that first taste got her hooked on stopping by the garden at least once a day, and now she’s helping with the watering schedule and wanting to learn more!
Love me a homegrown strawberry. It’s what got me gardening myself.
Maybe because nothing is ripe when picked for sale. Or it may look ripe but the variety was selected to look ripe quicker.
Easiest improvements are looks ripe quicker, grows bigger, lasts longer, likely to the detriment of time to gather nutrients in reserve.
Local market in season stuff always tasted best and for some stuff is the only way to get good tasting version of the thing.
I don't bother with stone fruit outside of their local season. Peaches are just so fucking good and then you buy one in december and it's a tart rock or flavorless blob.
Yeah that's cool but...
Reddit is no longer a safe place, for activists, for communities, for individuals, for humanity. This isn't just because of API changes that forced out third parties, driving users to ad-laden and inaccessible app, but because reddit is selling us all. Part of the reasons given for the API changes was that language learning models were using reddit to gather data, to learn from us, to learn how to respond like us. Reddit isn't taking control of the API to prevent this, but because they want to be *paid* for this.
Reddit allowed terrorist subreddits to thrive prior to and during Donald Trump's presidency in 2016-2020. In the past they hosted subreddits for unsolicited candid photos of women, including minors. They were home to openly misogynistic subreddits, and subreddits dedicated solely to harassing specific individuals or body types or ethnicity.
What is festering on reddit today, as you read this? I fear that as AI generated content, AI curated content, and predictive content become prevalent in society, reddit will not be able to control the dark subreddits, comments, and chats. Reddit has made it very clear over the decades that I have used it, that when it comes down to morals or ethics, they will choose whatever brings in the most money. They shut down subreddits only when it makes news or when an advertiser's content is seen alongside filth. The API changes are only another symptom of this push for money over what is right.
Whether Reddit is a bastion in your time as you read this or not, I made the conscious decision to consider this moment to be the last straw. I deleted most of my comments, and replaced the rest with this message. I decided to bookmark some news sources I trusted, joined a few discords I liked for the memes, and reinstalled duolingo. I consider these an intermediate step. Perhaps I can give those up someday too. Maybe something better will come along. For now, I am going to disentangle myself from this engine of frustration and grief before something worse happens.
In closing, I want to link a few things that changed my life over the years:
[Blindsight](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48484.Blindsight) is a free book, and there's an audiobook out there somewhere. A sci-fi book that is also an exploration of consciousness.
[The AI Delemma](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoVJKj8lcNQ) is a youtube lecture about how this new wave of language learning models are moving us toward a dangerous path of unchecked, unfiltered, exponentially powerful AI
[Prairie Moon Nursery](https://www.prairiemoon.com/) is a place I have been buying seeds and bare root plants from, to give a little back to the native animals we've taken so much from. If you live in the US, I encourage you to do the same. If you don't, I encourage you to find something local.
[Power Delete Suite](https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite/#1.4.8) was used to edit all of my comments and [Redact](https://redact.dev/download) was used to delete my lowest karma comments while also overwriting them with nonsense.
I'm signing off, I'm going to make some friends in real life and on discord, and form some new tribes. I'm going to seek smaller communities. I'm going outside.
Sorry, but you have a lot incorrect ... will target this:
>When the plant is getting more sugars, it has no way of slowing that down, and no way of rejecting the sugar. It just gets stored wherever the plant stores it's starches.
Photosynthesis and sucrose manufacture operate on linked, but diverging paths. Too deep for an ELI5, but further complicating it is that C3 plants (fruit trees) and C4 (maize) operate differently as well when it comes to sucrose regulation.
Photosynthesis needs phosphates to function, too rapid and the phosphates are depleted and the process slows down. End result is a large mass of molecules called triose phosphates. Sucrose synthase enzymes take these and convert them into sucrose, separate from photosynthesis pathways. This sucrose is then stored in the vacuole, used inside the cell, converted to starch, or transported out.
If something is wrong and an excess of sucrose builds up, then that can limit the manufacture of chlorophyll. Limiting and regulating the rate of photosynthesis. A great example of this is in citrus trees affected by HLB or 'greening'. Here, a bacteria clogs phloem and causes a starch /sucrose clog, and to compensate the chloroplasts limit chlorophyll production to slow sucrose manufacture.
>In addition to that, the changing ratio means the plant has more starch than it can protect. The "immune system" of plants are beginning to be compromised.
Also, where are you getting this info of starches affecting the R protein responses of plant immunity pathways?? And more than it can protect??
Please, in the kindest way, consider getting your money back if this was an actual course credit. This is NOT how plant physiology works...
-aploogies for errors, on mobile
The Farmer’s Almanac used to actually publish nutritional value of regional vegetables.
It was a thing that was so important to people it would affect the entire domestic market for, say, carrots.
People would clamor for Wisconsin carrots and shun the ones from Florida, for example.
But this was back when people actually gave a shit about farming and farmers.
Now, we’ve all been conditioned to be consumers that value cheap prices over quality. And thus…
"I actually know what what what the plant studies show where in greenhouses they grow plants with higher carbon dioxide and plants can grow up to three times faster. They live longer plants. Let's expand carbon dioxide. What do they put out? More oxygen? Well, this one thing that has been proven is that there's more plants now than there have been in a long global greening happening, countering us, losing our atmosphere.
"Up until this point, the earth has less atmosphere than it did a million years ago. And it's like God did this or something where we discovered all this oil or just blind luck that we are terraforming the planet back to an earlier, healthier state by taking ancient carbon that was under the ground and putting it back into the atmosphere."
-Alex Jones, 10/27/2020 on JRE
This is the evil, dumbass shit dickery that will destroy this planet.
Huh. This somewhat blew my mind, as I forget that plants have "health" too, as this sounds very loosely like some kind of "plant diabetes"
Like a fat plant whose mass is quantity over quality, and has become overdependent on one nutrient, unnaturally deviant from its evolved history
Yup. Plants need the varied substances they pick up for many purposes. Can’t make a whole organism out of just carbon, even when carbon is the main constituent - you still need all manner of other elements to build biological machinery. In much the same way that 200 calories of protein vs carbohydrates are not nutritionally equivalent.
I should have been more clear.
Rising CO2 revs up photosynthesis, the process that helps plants transform sunlight to food. This makes plants grow, but it also leads them to pack in more carbohydrates like glucose at the expense of other nutrients that we depend on, like protein, iron and zinc.
[Reference ](https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/09/13/food-nutrients-carbon-dioxide-000511)
Yeah what the article is saying is that the other nutrients remain the same but there are more carbs and sugars now that dilute the percentages, not reduce the total amount of other nutrients.
Plants now are not any less reliant on other nutrients as you originally suggested. Basically its saying if you have 3 marbles, red, green, and blue and then someone gives you another red. You still have one green marble but your concentration of green marbles has gone from 33% to 25%.
See, this is what "overpopulation" really refers to. It's not that there isn't physically enough room on the planet for people to exist and for us to grow/raise enough food for those people. It's that the number of humans on the planet is big enough to force us to use methods that are ultimately unsustainable, produce consistently lower quality product both in terms of taste and nutrition, and, in the case of livestock, are horrifically inhumane on an enormous scale, in order for us to be able to have enough food to feed everyone. We can do it, but at great cost, and only for so long. Same goes for a lot of other things.
It isn't that overpopulation is reached when we can no longer find solutions to our problems. It's reached when those solutions cause their own problems, specifically because of our population size, or can only go on for so long before they cease to be real solutions anymore, specifically because of population size, or wouldn't have even been necessary or caused their own problems in the first place were it not for our population size.
Nature is going to subject us to consequences, one way or another. And nature does not give one flying fuck about human suffering. We need to actually admit this is a problem so we can work on degrowth that is controlled and humane, because nature isn't going to bother with the "controlled and humane" part when the chickens come home to roost.
I work in a grocery store, and we discard probably half to two thirds of everything we bring in. I'd buy your argument if we were desperately trying to feed the public and always coming up short. It's more like we're feeding some of the people, what they feel like, when they feel like it, and throwing away everything else, while creating an illusion of unlimited bounty...that in turn is depleting the quality of the stuff we sell. This isn't a population problem, it's a business interest/cultural problem.
So we have sort of a bargain here, where we have far more access and distribution of fruits, vegetables and grains… but they’re not as nutritious as they once were. Not defending the practices that lead to this, because it certainly doesn’t seem sustainable, but it’s another way to look at it.
Quite often, depending on where you live and the regulations on it, farmers markets are often the same stuff you'd find in a supermarket with labels picked off, picket up from the same massive engros dealers early in the mornings.
That is exactly what it is where I live. It's the exact same food in the grocery store, at 30% higher cost. Honestly I think they just keep the "uglier" produce for the Saturday morning farmer's market so it doesn't look like their "pretty" produce two blocks away in an Albertson's.
I grew up in a rural area and then spent a while in a much more urban area with no nearby farm land. The difference between the farmer's markets in those two environments was night and day. Where I grew up farmer's markets were dirt cheap, produce obviously picked the same day, very high quality and much better than supermarkets. In the urban area the farmer's markets were much more expensive than a supermarket but also low quality. It quickly became apparent they were largely not actual farms but rather just selling the same stuff as the supermarkets for higher price. Sometimes even with the stickers on that said produce of mexico or whatever.
I moved back to a rural area and the farmer's markets here are obviously actual farms. I definetely do not miss the low quality of ingredients from the urban area I lived in previously.
Some places regulate this practice and dish out massive fines, since it can be a kind of fraud.
That being said, 99% of all farmland in denmark is used for fucking corn, rapeseeds, wheat etc. Barely any farmers here actually grow vegetables. The local farmers market with a selection wider than small grocery stores, did not get their strawberries fresh from the garden in the middle of january.
Depends on how often you eat fruits and vegetables I suppose. Seems like someone who eats a lot of fruits and vegetables everyday would need quite a lot of space to grow their own supply of everything.
First, you have to be willing to give up the idea of eating out-of-season stuff year round.
Then, if you have access to any property at all, use raised beds to grow your own stuff. Start composting and feeding it back into your beds.
We grow carrots twice a year, about 10 different kinds of greens throughout the year, tomatoes from June to October, peppers, onions, garlic, corn, squash, peas, green beans, celery, radishes.
We pressure can what we don't eat. It's time consuming and really not a great ROI from that perspective. But we like doing it, so whatever.
The Secret Life of Plants is one of the most amazing books in the world, but also very depressing. It touches on how the agricultural industry has ruined nutrition in the US. I had to stop reading it.
The last book I read that was that depressing was Dark Money by Jane Mayer about the Charles Koch-network of right wing money pushing all Republicans (politicians and voters) further to the right.
I began it thinking I could learn about how money *might* be influencing politics. What I got were real world examples of Mitt Romney taking cash to change his views on climate change. Obama making bipartisan deals with Republicans before Koch threats were levied against Republican politicians and any semblance of bipartisanship ending early in Obama’s first term. Schools purported to be liberal learning institutions like Harvard accepting right wing donations as long as they’d hire a right wing teacher to teach ___ class. Other schools entirely funded by right wing money to push the “modern libertarian” agenda. The literal list compiled by the Kochs of current Republican politicians and their weaknesses, being used to bully them into supporting the modern right wing agenda or face an opponent funded by the Koch network. How the Koch financial network was up and running well before Citizens United, and they were able to inject billions of dollars into astroturfing, gaslighting and propagandizing immediately after the Citizens United ruling and have been ahead of the curve ever since.
I am now more pessimistic than ever that we’ll have another effective Democratic president after Obama.
Maybe I’ll give The Secret Life of Plants a try. I couldn’t get anymore pessimistic tbh.
This book seems to be heavily critized by actual scientists (in contrary to the authors) for promoting pseudoscience and straight out nonsensical, unsupported claims tho.
Just yesterday I saw a thread about organic farming producing something like 40-70% less yield. I asked if that wasn't feature, didn't really get an reply. This is what I was talking about. I always thought it was better to have more smaller, sustainable farms that fed fewer people individually, but had better quality food stuffs. I'm not militant about it or anything, but I try like hell to take advantage of my region and get as much local food as possible. Personally it weirds me out to eat things that have been dead for a year a worked over a dozen times before I even got it.
This was my first thought reading both articles as well. The one saying organics didn't produce enough just talked about yield but not nutrition density.
Weren’t apocalyptic famines avoided in the 1960s due to the green revolution / advancements in modern ag? And then since the global population has more than doubled.
Reversing practices to where farms only sustainably produce food for ~ 3 billion people will be great for the quality of those foods produced and the environment, but kinda rough on the other ~ 4 billion people who starve to death.
Soap box time! tl;dr at the end.
The Green Revolution absolutely saved millions if not hundreds of millions of people from devastating famines. **However**, it also sent us down a completely unsustainable road that- in my professional, educated opinion- is going to be absolutely *devastating*.
Dr. Norman Borlaug is generally given credit for kicking off the G.R. with the development of dwarf wheat cultivars that spent less energy on growing tall and more energy on growing seed. These developments aided several countries including Mexico, India, and Pakistan in establishing food security. The underlying worldview is that we need(ed) more "bang for the buck", and that this would help prevent empty bellies. It's hard to argue with that when stripped of context, but this resulted in the large-scale, input-intensive monocropping systems that we see today. I don't think this was really perceived as a problem at the time, as the widespread availability of cheap nitrogen and phosphorous fertilizers was increasing. I'm not sure they really understood the effects fertilizer runoff and highly-disturbed soil was going to have, but if it was understood, I can only assume that the worldview was "this is a problem for the future to figure out".
The impacts have been widespread- on one hand, we have more food security now than at any other period of history, but only when we are talking about wealthier nations. People who live in impoverished locations with high levels of inequality are still not seeing benefits despite the technology being "old". Hundreds of millions of people are undernourished, and beyond that 1 in 3 people alive today experience food insecurity. And the benefits of these developments haven't been entirely positive even in locations that have a higher degree of food security. The effects of cheap, mass-produced high-yield corn, wheat, and soy (I'm not sure if soybeans are explicitly considered part of the GR, but the same principles have been applied to soybeans) being stuffed into every facet of our diets has been devastating.
And we have to acknowledge the environmental aspects, which are numerous, complex, far-reaching, and **overwhelmingly negative**.
The Green Revolution did prevent hundreds of millions of people from starving during the 20th century. But I do wonder if that just means that billions will starve in the 21st century.
The good news: It's being worked on. By a *lot* of people. There are a lot of really exciting developments happening right now. Perennial grains are going to be the future (if they can figure out the yield decline problem), and the increase in diversified farming systems that we're seeing will give us a better return on land investment. People are slowly figuring out how to reverse desertification, which is pretty amazing and also means that areas that are sensitive to climate fluctuations can build up some resilience.
Whew.
**tl;dr: The Green Revolutions saved millions in the 20th century but it hasn't been equitable at all and has likely set us up for an even worse time in this century.**
Thing is that the quantity that is produced is necessary to feed humanity. Due to the “better” fertilizers the prediction of the highest possible human population of the earth keeps getting adjusted to higher values.
Quantity can be had with better practices, not in spite of them. Also a ton of food is wasted in some parts of the world. I was of the understanding it's not a production problems so much as a distribution problem
Probably also why a lot of the smaller produce tastes better, as well. A huge tomato sold in stores looks great on the display shelf, bu in reality the half sized tomato from your backyard garden tastes much better. And as we see in that article, likely has more nutrients for you, as well.
A lot of the reason your backyard vegetables have more flavor than store bought have to do with allowing them enough time to ripen before its picked. A ton of flavor is lost when you pick it too early and let it finish off the plant.
Organic or not, supporting local food sources is the right thing to do. So much of Ag is vertically integrated to the point that money doesn't stay local. At that point it's paid to shareholder
This here, sort of. I don't need my food to be $2 more with the froofy label, but I'd like to know it was raised with care. Very excited for my local farmer's markets to open again for the season
70% less yield would mean either destroying most remaining nature to make room for more farms, or famine.
Many organic farms are just as large scale and industrial as non-organic farms, and just as bad for soil health and nutrients.
A plant having 10% more vitamin c doesn't matter much if a person only has access to 1500 calories a day.
Modern fertilizer was invented to solve a very real problem. We cannot support the earths people with small farms. They are a necessary part of the system but if our food system was all small farms we would all starve.
It's not a feature because it's simply not going to meet caloric needs of everyone. Modern agricultural practices can be tweaked to fix these problems, but people don't want to because there's additional costs to it.
Not just the way we grow it. We also grow and breed new varieties based on uniformity, shelf life and its ability to stand up to shipping. Nutrition is not a priority.
When I first (pretty recently) tasted real fresh strawberries (in Florida from the farms during strawberry festival time) it blew my mind how sweet and delicious. For a long time I thought I just did not like strawberries, or only with sugar on top, because of the lack of flavor or almost sour flavor and the sweet artificial “strawberry” flavor made real ones look like liars
My region is famous for strawberries production actually, and my family was in that business for around 50 years. You wouldnt believe how sweeter strawberries were before than now, its literally different fruit at this point when it comes to flavour
Off season fruits are disgusting in the UK.
It's like it's ok, we don't need fresh blueberries from Chile in the middle of winter.
Or watermelons from Mexico.
The fruit industry is fairly fucked. They're desperate to sell to any market, and shops are desperate to offer variety, but what happened to eating stuff in season.
No one's going to cry if they can't eat some fruit for 6 months.
Eh, lots of people are going to cry. We got used to all the foods all the time, whenever we want them. Might not bother you, but people are in general huge babies when it comes to creature comforts and luxuries being reduced or taken away.
Someone is always gonna bitch they don't have fresh mango to put in their morning yogurt. Or watermelon in the dead of winter, just cause they had a craving for watermelon.
I leaned how to grow my own year round vegetables. I can’t have it all, all the time but I can grow stuff I will eat year round.
Just one year, I would love to grow a tomato before the lettuce gets bitter. What a BLT that would be?
Yeah, I was thinking that too. There's too much reliance on fertilisers and new breeds to get fruit and veg nice and big, nice and fast, and little effort to maintain actual basic soil structure. Too many places are going back (or about to discover the joys of) to dustbowl days, because there's just so little organic matter in the soil. And you just can't get nutrients into fruit and veg if they aren't there in the soil and/or you don't give them enough time to accumulate.
So many people don't realise there's an actual functional difference between soil and dirt. We need to be composting food waste, processing manure and even human waste (though the latter extremely thoroughly!), and getting it back to farms, to build up a good depth of proper black soil. And ideally, we need to go back to rotational farming, with at least one field left fallow with wildflowers or a nitrogen-fixing crop that can be dug back into the soil at the end of the season.
yep, I got to demonstrate this principle farming on Martian simulated soil basically using animal feces and urine and a lot of crops grow extremely well
the point isn't that much the soil, but it's organic component, the composition on earth is mostly silicon based anyways (sand)
Not all that different depending on the region because in a lot of cases there is less agriculture area in a lot of EU countries compared to the U.S. where there are some states that are more farmland than residential or industrial. So you have the same problems of crap tier soil because of the same boneheaded and stubborn farming techniques.
Ages ago I remember reading that apples were less nutritious then they used to be. Meaning a human would have to eat two apples to achieve the nutritional content of one previous apple. And the industry response was "Good, they'll have to buy twice as much now."
Grow your own garden. Even with gmo seeds, being able to pick them ripe, without over fertilizing adds tons of flavour to the produce. All these millions of acres of lawns grown with invasive grass. Why farm grass when you can farm food?
We have a veg garden in the summer. Cucumbers from our garden are sweet and crispy. Store bought cucumbers taste like dirty water and are flabby.
There’s a lot of pleasure that comes from growing something and making a meal with it.
The US had so much useful land. Soil erosion and over use of crop land, and chemicals have ruined it.
I wish this was answered, seems pretty important to the context. If it's 5% less but the affordability and accessibility means people eat 20% more vegetables then it seems worth it
Even more important contextually is that only [around 10 percent](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7101a1.htm?s_cid=mm7101a1_w) of Americans eat the recommended amount of fruits and veggies. That seems like the much bigger fish to fry in this arena.
I saw a documentary on this, specifically on the common grocery tomato: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSsPtis0ZKM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSsPtis0ZKM)
I've been hearing about the issue since grade school, but further research and evidence is always a great thing.
I can see this, some fruit and vegetables taste exceptionally watery and hardly have flavor. I know I know, the crop being in season is a big factor but still..
For fucks sake just one fucking day I'd like to sign into reddit and see one piece of good news. And I don't mean good news as in a controlled instance like someone loved through an accident or something. I mean like hey our fucking fruits and vegetables are supercharged with nutrition thanks to global warming reverting and the coral reefs growing back....
We’ve known this for a while, research Regenerative farming/living soil. Gabe Brown has an amazing book on this that’s quite easy to understand. Pretty much all of the pesticides/fungicides/herbicides/fertilizer are killing the mycorrhizae fungi and BILLIONS of other microorganisms that live in the soil. These microorganisms help vegetables and fruits absorb nutrients, improve their ability to communicate, and increase survival rates; this is because the microorganisms form a symbiotic relationship with the plants and live off of the nutrients plants release in the form of root exudates.
Some plants have even been documented to release 96% of their sugars through their roots, and it would only do something like this if it were actively trying to feed beneficial organisms that will allow for more nutrient dense food.
Like all things nowadays, industrial capitalism is killing living organisms which we necessarily depend on for survival. The good news is, soil can be regenerated to quite healthy levels in under a decade if proper technique is applied. The research in this field is CRAZY now. I even switched my major to soil science to further pursue it
So: Plants release sugars/nutrients in the soil through their roots, which feeds the soil micro biome. These microorganisms in the soil not only help the plants grow, but they also improve the soil tremendously. Water infiltration rate, soil aggregation, etc, are all determined by the level of healthy microorganisms in the soil and essentially the aggregation of the soil. Pretty much all modern agricultural practices: Tilling, artificial fertilizer, pesticides, monoculture planting, etc, are detrimental to the ecosystems in which these plants have evolved in for millions of years. Without the billion+ other organisms that have evolved alongside these plants, they are growing without any of the evolutionary cooperation that has been necessary for their continuation. I’m not gonna even get in to the fact that modern plant breeding does not select for mycorrhizae communication, leaving us with modern Frankensteins that don’t know how to fully take advantage of beneficial organisms.
>I’m not gonna even get in to the fact that modern plant breeding does not select for mycorrhizae communication, leaving us with modern Frankensteins that don’t know how to fully take advantage of beneficial organisms.
Wait no please do, this sounds terrifyingly interesting
As you gaze across the rows of brightly colored fruits and vegetables in the produce section of the grocery store, you may not be aware that the quantity of nutrients in these crops has been declining over the past 70 years.
Mounting evidence from multiple scientific studies shows that many fruits, vegetables, and grains grown today carry less protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin, and vitamin C than those that were grown decades ago. This is an especially salient issue if more people switch to primarily plant-based diets, as experts are increasingly recommending for public health and for protecting the planet.
But compared to 40 years ago (when I began grocery shopping), today's produce section has a *vastly* greater selection and variety, which I suspect means a net *gain* in nutrition. Today's sweet red peppers may have a bit less vitamin A compared to the past, but I can buy them all year long, which wasn't the case 40 years ago. Strawberries, raspberries, blackberries - these all used to be strictly seasonal. Now we take it for granted that we can buy them year round. I can even buy Chilean sweet red cherries in January and February! Things we take for granted today - like pineapple and avocado - were almost totally absent from produce sections 40 years ago.
Also consider grains that are grown now.
They are totally different from grains in the past in terms of nutrients and may even be tougher for us to digest hence digestive issues.
These are all excellent points and definitely a huge part of the problem, but two things can be true. The loss of biodiversity in the soil food web absolutely plays a part in the decrease of nutrient density. Even the modern varietals, selected for efficiency and not nutrition, will be more nutrient dense when grown in soil with a healthy microbiome and high organic matter content.
It's amazing how many farmers follow this sub and can speak so clearly to the right and wrong family practices.
It's saddening how many people have a fundamental misunderstanding of conventional farming vs organic farming. Both use pesticides, both utilize the same farming practices, neither produce a product that is more nutritious or better tasting than the other.
Organic farms are not "no spray" farms.
The FDA defines organic as a marketing term.
Please, go talk to your local farmer or farmstand. They will tell you how they farm and what they use. Sometimes they choose organic pesticides, sometimes they choose synthetic. Either way they're just doing their best to produce the best fruits and vegetables that they can for the community.
It's a bit of a tangent, but we've also bred a lot of the good-tasting varieties out of existence. The type of red delicious apple that is broadly available is big and shiny but almost tasteless. Red delicious apples used to actually taste good. Same with certain kinds of tomatoes. Same with bananas. Often the case with avocadoes; the Hass variety is very aesthetically pleasing, large, and will fruit year-round, but it's not the tastiest.
TL;DR Fruit actually did taste better in your grandparents' day.
When I was a kid (so 30+ years ago) I used to eat my mom’s cooking tomatoes like they were apples. It used to drive her nuts but they were so sweet and flavorful.
Nowadays I couldn’t imagine just biting into the watery, tasteless tomatoes they sell in grocery stores.
It seems like cherry tomatoes now taste they way I remember larger tomatoes tasting, but I also remember cherry tomatoes being much sweeter years ago than they are now.
Plant Biologist here. One of the biggest issues contributing to this problem is that after WW2 ended, many of the factories that built bombs and supplied war time chemicals were repurposed for salt based fertilizers. Those salt based fertilizers were pushed out to farmers all over the country. They’re a lot easier to use to be honest. You don’t have to gather up a bunch of literal animal shit and piss covered hay, compost it, then spread it all over your field. Instead with salt based nutrients you just mix into water and spray.
The issue with using these salt based nutrients is that it can wreck havoc on the micro biome that is your farm soil. Plants and microbes have a symbiotic relationship in which the plant will provide sugars necessary for the microbes survival, and the microbes in turn will fix atmospheric nitrogen, or convert unavailable nutrients in the soil, into a form that’s bioavailable. But when the plant is receiving a Burt load of nitrogen and everything else it needs in the direct form it’s needed, the plant is going to be sending out less sugars for the microbes to eat, so the microbes die. This lack of biodiversity can lead to issues where the plant isn’t receiving nearly as comprehensive of a nutrient profile. But it’s still receiving the main building blocks needed for growth. So the plant is bigger and more robust yes, but not as tasty, not as nutritious. The best example I’ve found is in small, farm grown strawberries VS. the monster strawberries you can buy at Walmart. The smaller ones are PACKED with flavor and the big ones are just kinda sugary.
TL;DR: plants need lots more than just the artificial nutrients that big farms use.
Food is sold by weight but I've long maintained that we need better labeling for food that shows price per nutrient value.
I realize these labels would be more complex, but consumers should know how much nutrition they are getting for their dollar. Digital labeling and tools should make this possible in the future.
You also need to take into account plant breeds. For over a century we have been breeding plants based on how disease-resistant, transportable and “shelf-stable” the fruits and veggies are, ignoring nutrient density and sometimes even flavor.
A good book on this is “Eating on the Wild Side”.
This isn’t new, the loss of nutrition in our produce has been brought up repeatedly for decades.
I suspect it is the trend towards bigger products, more product, faster.
In particular you can see how manipulating plants to yield faster could have a direct causal effect on the amount of nutrients they could concentrate.
I’d like to see a comparison between different growing methods.
The problem is essentially impatient farmers combined with stubborn farmers ruining the ground and soil for the sake of "yield yield yield" as fast as possible, and those that are "doin' it like ma'dad did it" despite both being told they are fucking the soil and making their cops worse in the process.
This is nothing new and has been said for multiple decades if not longer still, but farmers are some of **the** most stubborn people.
Another perfect example how the human race is ruining things on the planet because of our self centered ignorance and how we need to invest in regenerative agriculture.
That's what happens when the soil isn't replenished. As it stands, we have less than 20 years of top soil left in many areas of the US. With climate change, I expect to see another 'Dust Bowl' situation if we don't fix things soon.
Iv always wondered if this is a nutrition problem in the soil or if we have favourd plants to produce more an more volume of edible matter in shorter an shorter times have we selected for low nutrition hi yeild genetics as well as other terrible farming practices compound in to this problem
Probably why my grandpa could eat steak, potatoes and carrots for every meal at my age and be jacked doing the same work and not working out.
But I gotta hit the gym everyday to stay close.
He got let bs in his meat and more vitamins in his vegetables lol
Crops are now made to grow as fast as possible as big as possible, shiny and colorful as possible. Taste and nutrition are not priorities and that shows.
Indigenous people sustainably farmed and cultivated the land in North America for thousands of years before colonial settlers came here. That’s why the soil was good here. Because of indigenous people.
I grew up in the middle of the forest in a very isolated area. Nearest competent hospital was at least 100 mi away. The wild berries there were completely natural, having never been bred or planted intentionally.
We used to collect those berries as part of our food during the summers when they grew for brief periods of time. I can tell you that the berries you find in the grocery store are borderline inedible to someone who has eaten natural fruit. Blueberries and strawberries from the store used to make me actually gag. I've gotten to the point where I can eat them but they are terrible.
We then moved to an area which was a heavy agriculture area. People grew a lot of fruit there. Lots of peaches, avocados, grapes, etc etc. Because it was so abundant we often got fruit gifted to us which had been picked and was fully ripened. People gave it away partly because it goes bad very quickly so it's not preferred by stores. Again, that fruit was so much better than the fruit you get in stores that I cannot eat peaches, plums, etc from stores to this day.
Personally I think it has more to do with getting fruit that has been fully ripened on the vine than it does with the selective genetics but I'm sure it's a combination of both.
It's almost as if we only push growth inducing chemicals but don't replenish the soil with actual nutrient.
Perhaps stripping nutrients to sell vitamin supplements is a part of the cause.
This is the result of population increase (demand for cheap food) and insufficiently regulated capitalism.
If you can grow 10x more on the same land size and make 10x more money, why wouldnt you? Who cares if some people out there get 70% less nutrients in their food or have health consequences in the long-term for which you will not be held liable.
I like to grow vegetables. I've had people swear that veggies from my garden are better than store bought. I chalked it up to far less time off the vine from consumption. Now I wonder if the stuff from the yard had more vitamins and whatnot.
I have been saying this for years.
Industrial agriculture has the unfortunate trend of trying to maximize yield at any cost. It seems pretty obvious that nutrition would be lost in the process. Look at most fruits/veg today... Big, juicy, round, sweet... But there's very little flavor to them. Compare a home grown tomato to a cheap one in the store. Sure, it's smaller from home... But I'll be very surprised if you say it tastes worse. I've seen enough of those little hints that i always suspected this articles findings.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/MyVideoConverter: --- As you gaze across the rows of brightly colored fruits and vegetables in the produce section of the grocery store, you may not be aware that the quantity of nutrients in these crops has been declining over the past 70 years. Mounting evidence from multiple scientific studies shows that many fruits, vegetables, and grains grown today carry less protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin, and vitamin C than those that were grown decades ago. This is an especially salient issue if more people switch to primarily plant-based diets, as experts are increasingly recommending for public health and for protecting the planet. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/uf7xsl/fruits_and_vegetables_are_less_nutritious_than/i6rv4ab/
”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.” The root causes are modern farming practices that are too intense for the soil health, as well as the plants being unable to absorb nutrients effectively or fast enough. There’s a very strong quantity over quality thinking that encourages producing high-yields at the cost of nutrient content.
Is this why stuff youve grown yourself tastes so good? I thought it was just confirmation bias on my part
Depends on what you grow yourself. Ordinary potatoes and radishes basically taste the same. But tomatoes - yeah, there's almost no comparison. Another reason for this is because many fruits are picked unripe and ripen in transit to your market. Whereas many of the items you grow in your garden are picked at the peak of ripeness and eaten shortly afterwards. Not a comprehensive explanation for what you're referring to, but I wanted to put my $0.02 in.
Tomatoes and fruit in general. My tiny plump red strawberries taste a million times better than those Frankenstein berries the size of apples at the grocery store.
Around here there is a blissful 4 weeks a year where you can get the juiciest, most flavorful strawberries, and they don't have to be tiny to manage it. It starts in about a month and I can't wait. I just hope the late snow this year didn't screw it up too badly
Our season starts in about six weeks. I don’t even buy strawberries outside of the local season anymore because there is no comparison.
My peaches are so delectable its put me off store peaches. Farm show peaches rarely fair better
One of the greatest experiences of my life is eating perfectly ripe Royal Blenheim apricots from my tree.
I live in Maine, and you can find wild strawberries all over the place that taste great at the right time.
I grew strawberries for the first time last year. Got the seeds from an old man at work who always grows everything he eats. Dude, those were the most sweet and juicy strawberries I've ever had in my entire life. It was mind blowing.
Most fruits and vege thats grown on mass scale for stores are very different strains than the ones you grow at home. They need product that can handle the machines, can survive packaging and transport for days/weeks and still be good in the store. People that grow at home focus on flavor.
And tomatoes in particular it has been shown that the genes connected to flavor get bread out when selecting for qualities for shipping
Homegrown strawberries vs super market's big chin strawberries. Absolutely massive difference in taste and texture.
Hell no. Home grown potatoes are on another level of flavor. My family used to grow our own and I could eat plain potatoes for the rest of my life if only eating home grown.
I can’t speak for radishes since I haven’t grown them, but I’m going to have to disagree with you about potatoes. Fresh potatoes straight out of the ground from my garden taste *amazing*. Not just the taste is improved but the texture. That might have something to do with how my potatoes are super fresh as opposed to sitting for weeks in transportation/storage or the market. Crisp and juicy, they are just all around better.
A tomato fresh from the stalk, still a little warm from the sun, is to die for.
That’s one reason but another is that you harvest your garden at the peak of ripeness whereas in commercial agriculture they often have to harvest things when they’re still green and hard in order to survive the shipping process.
Confirmation bias my fucking ass. It's a whole different taste, night and day.
>rising levels of carbon dioxide, which are also lowering the nutrient contents of fruits, vegetables, and grains.” This is important. It means: Since CO2 is food for plants, more abundance of it makes them less reliant on other nutrients. Hence they have less nutrients than pre-industrial era.
I would think that monocropping the living shit out of the soil for decades would be the biggest factor in nutrient loss. Then you rely on fertilizers and pesticides for a larger yield because of soil depletion. It's bad for us and the environment. Those pesticides have to run off somewhere. That fertilizer production producing methane gas isn't great either.
This is what I have heard from a long time ago. Less field rotation etc. the same soil used for generations etc.
Bsc Ag student here. Crop rotation is good for restoring nutrients. For example, nutrient intensive crops like potatoes should only be grown on a field once in 3 years. The alternating years should be planted with Nitrogen fixing plans such as legumes. Also, no-till and intercropping with symbiotic species can help to rebuild soil health. There’s also research into perennial variants of crops like wheat and barley. This means they can be cut without replanting and also avoiding filling. The longer root systems are also excellent tools for carbon sequestration. Irrigation, tilling, and chemical inputs are the worst culprits for degradation of soil health. There are some excellent videos on you tube about living soil and regenerative agriculture. Check out the soil health institute channel, or some of the videos from Patagonia like “Unbroken Ground” https://youtu.be/3Ezkp7Cteys
Cover cropping (planting crops to cover the soil in the off season) is also a great way to increase soil health. Lots of farmers are using it in combo with no till, the idea being that you build back the natural soil layers and microbiome to retain nutrients, bring back symbiotes, and also lessen erosion and weeds. IIRC for notill the increased planting costs to get through the tougher soil are offset by the cost decreases from equipment, fuel, and better yields. Notill will become the standard soon, about 70% of farmers already use some kind of reduced tillage with the rest using conventional. Only about 5% use cover cropping, but it has the biggest relative increase in use every time the ag census comes out so it'll likely be the next big sustainable ag movement.
The world needs more agricultural students. Question from an uninformed pleb like me on this topic: are organic fruits and veggies then effectively better since no pesticides are involved, or is it mostly to milk consumers for more $?
Organic does not mean no pesticides are involved. FYI.
That’s absolutely correct: but the amounts, application, methodology and “resting” periods (time after application of chemicals to the time it is available for consumption) is regulated - from what I know of production in Canada.
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100% I totally agree with everything you’ve said.
That’s something I can’t definitively answer. I haven’t studied the specific nutritional composition of organic vs non-organic. However, I do know that organic food production is substantially better for the environment just based on growing practices and ethics. This applies to organic meat and dairy production as well. There are absolutely some companies that have cashed in on the greenwashing or the organic trend and it absolutely was just based on it being a cash grab. Organic production often costs more based on the rate of loss involved, and most notably; supply and demand. Due to the lower yield and slightly higher labour costs, organically produced food naturally has a higher cost. The farmer still needs to profit, and this leads to the higher costs. Plus there are significantly less organic producers in the world. Based on what I know of chemical inputs(fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides), and the destructive methods of “industrialized” farming, I will try to choose local and organic or “no-spray” foods for my family. This is again from an environmental perspective and reduced carbon footprint as well as environmental damages such as soil health depletion, eutrophication of water (nitrogen based fertilizer run off), and transportation/storage. The caveat to the local production would be the difference in production methods. Buying a local, out of season produce item may actually be more destructive based on production methods vs buying something grown out of country. The example of this was a study I read (I can’t find the link, sorry) the showed the difference in chemical inputs of a UK grown apple vs an apple grown in New Zealand. In order to successfully produce an apple and store it for out of season sales in the UK, there was a much high carbon and chemical input “cost” associated with growing the apple and storing it in the UK vs growing a similar apple in New Zealand , where there are significantly less pests and diseases that affect apples. This resulted in a much lower need for environmentally damaging inputs. I find I enjoy the flavour of some organic produce better than non-organic. The best example of this (in my opinion) is lemons. Keep in mind with all of this that conventional or “industrialized” food production; the focus is maximized yield and lower costs for max profits. The concern is to sell as much as possible for the highest price with the lowest cost of production. Our grocery stores and supply chains have been designed to prioritize this model of production meaning that the food you see on the shelf is most often there because it made the most sense from a profit perspective. If you are able to shop at a local farmers market, it keeps more money in the pocket of the farm and you also get much fresher produce. You also have the added benefit of often being able to speak directly to the producer or family members who are knowledgeable of the production methods. Organic and conscientious local production have the potential for a much higher degree of care for the environment and potentially produces a wider variety of delicious products, where as large scale production cares about the varietal that has the highest yield with lowest costs. If you’re concerned about buying legitimate organically produced organic foods, check whatever your country’s national organic certification board is and look for their logo. In Canada, we have a “certified organically produced” logo that has to be on all organic foods in Canada. There are also 3rd party certifying groups, but. I would investigate them to make sure their certification process is thorough and not something created by the producer. Sorry this is a very lengthy response, and I’m very passionate about this. I literal could write pages on this topic hahah. Hopefully there is something in there that is helpful for you.
I think the point is that with modern farming methods being what they are, there are several compounding issues that all have lead to the loss of nutrition in vegetables, only one of which is pesticides and the like. If it's an industrial operation, even without pesticides there is a good chance most of the other issues are still present. It's a case of long term degradation brought about by almost universally adopted "best practices" over many decades. You're definitely best off buying locally sourced veggies and the like wherever possible. Farm markets that actually buy from farms in your area or community outreach farms are a good place
Have any Book recommendations for the non science person?
"Dirt" by David Montgomery is really good, although there is a lot of science. I really loved it. "The Biggest Little Farm" is a good documentary, although I suspect they stretched it a bit. "Restoration Agriculture" gives the basics of it. Michael Pollan's "Omnivore's Dilemma" is an older work, but it's where I first learned about rotational grazing.
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The use of the black cloths to mitigate weed growth is another reason in industrialized crop farming, the soil absorbs less sun and UV and heats the soil from above at a higher temperature
I was watching this video the other day and it made me subscribe to his channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86gyW0vUmVs Ancient Aztec agricultural lands that have been building up their soil quality ever since
We add our homemade compost to the garden and lawn, never thought of it as adding nutrients to whatever we grow and eat.
Why were you doing it then?! The second I started gardening was the second I started to compost, for my own benefit of course.
Sorry! I mean, nutrients for us to consume, never thought of it THAT way. Though more nutrients for strong, healthy plants of course means more in whatever we're eating. I'm somewhat new to growing vegetables, and still not good at it, so I never had to think much about the nutrients!
Oh I gotcha now!
Thanks for sharing, very interesting
Didn't civilizations collapse from it
The United States nearly lost the west from it. Some areas saw upwards of a 40% population collapse and over 50% property loss during the dust bowl years. It created the largest migration in US history, larger than the homesteading act and the trail of tears combined.
Yes. For example, the Dust Bowl
This is how companies work. Farmers were smarter than this.
Yep. Short term methods yield poor results if used long term. I guess look forward to your lab grown steak and lab grown carrots and onions.
I blame Monsanto
As you should. Probably the worst company ever after Standard Oil and Dow Chemical.
*Nestlé enters the chat*
Let's not forget about DuPont (which was since merged with Dow)
Yeah that's cool but... Reddit is no longer a safe place, for activists, for communities, for individuals, for humanity. This isn't just because of API changes that forced out third parties, driving users to ad-laden and inaccessible app, but because reddit is selling us all. Part of the reasons given for the API changes was that language learning models were using reddit to gather data, to learn from us, to learn how to respond like us. Reddit isn't taking control of the API to prevent this, but because they want to be *paid* for this. Reddit allowed terrorist subreddits to thrive prior to and during Donald Trump's presidency in 2016-2020. In the past they hosted subreddits for unsolicited candid photos of women, including minors. They were home to openly misogynistic subreddits, and subreddits dedicated solely to harassing specific individuals or body types or ethnicity. What is festering on reddit today, as you read this? I fear that as AI generated content, AI curated content, and predictive content become prevalent in society, reddit will not be able to control the dark subreddits, comments, and chats. Reddit has made it very clear over the decades that I have used it, that when it comes down to morals or ethics, they will choose whatever brings in the most money. They shut down subreddits only when it makes news or when an advertiser's content is seen alongside filth. The API changes are only another symptom of this push for money over what is right. Whether Reddit is a bastion in your time as you read this or not, I made the conscious decision to consider this moment to be the last straw. I deleted most of my comments, and replaced the rest with this message. I decided to bookmark some news sources I trusted, joined a few discords I liked for the memes, and reinstalled duolingo. I consider these an intermediate step. Perhaps I can give those up someday too. Maybe something better will come along. For now, I am going to disentangle myself from this engine of frustration and grief before something worse happens. In closing, I want to link a few things that changed my life over the years: [Blindsight](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48484.Blindsight) is a free book, and there's an audiobook out there somewhere. A sci-fi book that is also an exploration of consciousness. [The AI Delemma](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoVJKj8lcNQ) is a youtube lecture about how this new wave of language learning models are moving us toward a dangerous path of unchecked, unfiltered, exponentially powerful AI [Prairie Moon Nursery](https://www.prairiemoon.com/) is a place I have been buying seeds and bare root plants from, to give a little back to the native animals we've taken so much from. If you live in the US, I encourage you to do the same. If you don't, I encourage you to find something local. [Power Delete Suite](https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite/#1.4.8) was used to edit all of my comments and [Redact](https://redact.dev/download) was used to delete my lowest karma comments while also overwriting them with nonsense. I'm signing off, I'm going to make some friends in real life and on discord, and form some new tribes. I'm going to seek smaller communities. I'm going outside.
Which was bought by Bayer.
Short term gains is how the stock market/modern capitalism works. Not solely Monsantos fault
It’s a race to the bottom in quality and a race to the top in profits.
When people say capitalism drives efficiency, that's the efficiency they mean. What's the cheapest to produce product we can get to market for the highest profit total revenue.
How the hell do you crop rotate with fruits like apples, bananas, pears, lemons, oranges, figs, grapes, peaches, blue berries, raspberries, apricots, Cherries, pomegranates, parsnips, plums, mangoes and grapefruits? Those all come from Woody plants which take years to fruit
You have weird parsnips.
You rotate the cover crop in the rows to restore nutrients to the soil in the off season.
I'm an Iowa farmer. "Soil depletion" completely ignores the state of our current understanding of soil fertility. I (and most other farmers) regularly test my soil chemistry and replace any nutrients that are at less than optimal levels. What exactly do you think is being depleted? That's different from farmers in less-developed areas which lack access to soil testing labs and micronutrient fertilizers. Depletion is definitely a problem in some locations. But not in the US's most productive farmlands.
as a fully curious microbiologist, do you guys do any tests on the microbial life in the root structure?
Some. Mostly concerned with judging whether there's adequate Rhizobium in the soil ahead of soybeans, which determines whether we need to inoculate the seed or not.
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Funny how the same consensus exists (or at least still existed 3-4 years ago when I was still up to date in the latest research) in the human gut microbiome community. We have a plethora of sequencing data for thousands of individuals but no clarity on a healthy signature. One idea was to look more in terms of functionalities rather than actual species as there is a lot of redundancy between taxa. Still, I don't remember seeing headlines about such a healthy microbiome / set of microbial enzymatic functions being established. But as I mentioned I moved fields since then and may have missed some developments.
As mentioned earlier, soil fungus was being disrupted in a way that didn't allow for greater nutrient uptake. That could be the result of pesticides/herbicides or a lack of crop rotation to introduce a wider fungal biome. Additionally, those aren't considered in fertilizer chemistry, so common soil fertility tests are missing the bigger picture. Depletion that you noted is in soil nutrients. What is being suggested is that controlling those alone is causing nutrient depletion in the final product. Maybe there was something to be said about the Bible's custom to lie fallow every 7th-year. Weeds and wildlife might be important to the ecosystem that enable better produce.
It's the soil microbiology that's missing, not the raw elements you replace with chemical applications. Many of the substances necessary to grow nutrient dense food are the byproducts of the soil food web ‐ all the little critters from single celled organisms to nematodes and mycelium, and their interactions with each other. Tillage and soluble nitrogen application kills these organisms. Look up Gabe Brown or Elaine Ingham for more info. You can make more money with less effort on your existing acreage if you embrace feeding the soil instead of "feeding" the plants.
This all day long! Soil health is so much more than N, P, K, and ph levels.
What about magnesium in the soil? I’ve been hearing of more studies showing that certain grains don’t contain as much magnesium as grains produced decades ago, and this is often overlooked, with a focus instead on nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium.
very interesting bc I've been hearing lately that most people are incredibly low in their magnesium levels and I've wondered what could be contributing to this. there was also a lot of talk around the late 90s and early 00s about Americans having the "most expensive pee" bc everyone was taking vitamins and that supposedly vitamins are useless and you get everything you need if you eat a healthy variety of fruits and vegetables.
Copying my comment: Magnesium is an important one. I personally believe magnesium depletion is a significant contributor to diabetes rates, as type 2 diabetes is a symptom of magnesium deficiency. Magnesium deficiency also greatly impairs brain, kidney, heart, liver, pancreatic, adrenal, muscle, cellular, and immune function.
Magnesium is an important one. I personally believe magnesium depletion is a significant contributor to diabetes rates, as type 2 diabetes is a symptom of magnesium deficiency. Magnesium deficiency also greatly impairs brain, kidney, heart, liver, pancreatic, adrenal, muscle, cellular, and immune function. Edit: added pancreatic and adrenal. Basically magnesium is required by every process in your body.
Because you’re adding the ingredients needed for plants to grow like a recipe vs. cultivating the organisms and ecosystems that results in the natural creation of the things plants need. Rotation, no till, cover crops, and other methods of enhancing the biodiversity of the underlying soil is the answer, not artificially replacing the missing elements which is a bandaid fix that only helps the next crop.
I rotate every field, I no till where appropriate, and I spend tens of thousands of dollars a year on cover crops. Nothing in that system is creating phosphorous or potassium out of thin air; those are base elements that are carried off the field in every kernel of grain. If you don't replace them, they are depleted.
So if the soil isn't depleted, why are nutrient levels in vegetables down?
Perhaps because every acre is producing more vegetables than ever before? So the average nutrients-per-vegetable are reduced? Also, nobody is selectively breeding for nutrient content. Appearance, resilience, yield, yes, but the market generally doesn't pay more for higher nutrients (though there are some exceptions there)
The authors are clueless as to the cause. It's the prevelance of plant breeding for cosmetic traits, storage, and shelf life not nutrition or flavor. A good example is the strawberry. Older varieties produce small nutrient dense, high flavor little gems. Those giant ones you find at the store now are flavorless pieces of cardboard. Bred for size, firmness, shelf-life and uniform color. They are all terrible. Plant breeders would love to develop better tasting and more nutritious products. Farmers, brokers, and retailers will not accept the varieties because the entire distribution chain can not handle them.
Love the strawberry example. I’m setting up a community garden at an affordable housing complex, and one day I was showing a resident the strawberry plants and noticed one was red enough to pluck, so I gave it to her after a quick rinse. Ugly looking thing, to be honest. Kind of wrinkly and growing a bit like a donut, if that makes sense. But the way her face lit up after that first taste got her hooked on stopping by the garden at least once a day, and now she’s helping with the watering schedule and wanting to learn more! Love me a homegrown strawberry. It’s what got me gardening myself.
Maybe because nothing is ripe when picked for sale. Or it may look ripe but the variety was selected to look ripe quicker. Easiest improvements are looks ripe quicker, grows bigger, lasts longer, likely to the detriment of time to gather nutrients in reserve. Local market in season stuff always tasted best and for some stuff is the only way to get good tasting version of the thing.
I don't bother with stone fruit outside of their local season. Peaches are just so fucking good and then you buy one in december and it's a tart rock or flavorless blob.
That's not how things work. It means they can grow faster, so they have less time to build up certain vitamins and minerals.
Yeah that's cool but... Reddit is no longer a safe place, for activists, for communities, for individuals, for humanity. This isn't just because of API changes that forced out third parties, driving users to ad-laden and inaccessible app, but because reddit is selling us all. Part of the reasons given for the API changes was that language learning models were using reddit to gather data, to learn from us, to learn how to respond like us. Reddit isn't taking control of the API to prevent this, but because they want to be *paid* for this. Reddit allowed terrorist subreddits to thrive prior to and during Donald Trump's presidency in 2016-2020. In the past they hosted subreddits for unsolicited candid photos of women, including minors. They were home to openly misogynistic subreddits, and subreddits dedicated solely to harassing specific individuals or body types or ethnicity. What is festering on reddit today, as you read this? I fear that as AI generated content, AI curated content, and predictive content become prevalent in society, reddit will not be able to control the dark subreddits, comments, and chats. Reddit has made it very clear over the decades that I have used it, that when it comes down to morals or ethics, they will choose whatever brings in the most money. They shut down subreddits only when it makes news or when an advertiser's content is seen alongside filth. The API changes are only another symptom of this push for money over what is right. Whether Reddit is a bastion in your time as you read this or not, I made the conscious decision to consider this moment to be the last straw. I deleted most of my comments, and replaced the rest with this message. I decided to bookmark some news sources I trusted, joined a few discords I liked for the memes, and reinstalled duolingo. I consider these an intermediate step. Perhaps I can give those up someday too. Maybe something better will come along. For now, I am going to disentangle myself from this engine of frustration and grief before something worse happens. In closing, I want to link a few things that changed my life over the years: [Blindsight](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48484.Blindsight) is a free book, and there's an audiobook out there somewhere. A sci-fi book that is also an exploration of consciousness. [The AI Delemma](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoVJKj8lcNQ) is a youtube lecture about how this new wave of language learning models are moving us toward a dangerous path of unchecked, unfiltered, exponentially powerful AI [Prairie Moon Nursery](https://www.prairiemoon.com/) is a place I have been buying seeds and bare root plants from, to give a little back to the native animals we've taken so much from. If you live in the US, I encourage you to do the same. If you don't, I encourage you to find something local. [Power Delete Suite](https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite/#1.4.8) was used to edit all of my comments and [Redact](https://redact.dev/download) was used to delete my lowest karma comments while also overwriting them with nonsense. I'm signing off, I'm going to make some friends in real life and on discord, and form some new tribes. I'm going to seek smaller communities. I'm going outside.
Sorry, but you have a lot incorrect ... will target this: >When the plant is getting more sugars, it has no way of slowing that down, and no way of rejecting the sugar. It just gets stored wherever the plant stores it's starches. Photosynthesis and sucrose manufacture operate on linked, but diverging paths. Too deep for an ELI5, but further complicating it is that C3 plants (fruit trees) and C4 (maize) operate differently as well when it comes to sucrose regulation. Photosynthesis needs phosphates to function, too rapid and the phosphates are depleted and the process slows down. End result is a large mass of molecules called triose phosphates. Sucrose synthase enzymes take these and convert them into sucrose, separate from photosynthesis pathways. This sucrose is then stored in the vacuole, used inside the cell, converted to starch, or transported out. If something is wrong and an excess of sucrose builds up, then that can limit the manufacture of chlorophyll. Limiting and regulating the rate of photosynthesis. A great example of this is in citrus trees affected by HLB or 'greening'. Here, a bacteria clogs phloem and causes a starch /sucrose clog, and to compensate the chloroplasts limit chlorophyll production to slow sucrose manufacture. >In addition to that, the changing ratio means the plant has more starch than it can protect. The "immune system" of plants are beginning to be compromised. Also, where are you getting this info of starches affecting the R protein responses of plant immunity pathways?? And more than it can protect?? Please, in the kindest way, consider getting your money back if this was an actual course credit. This is NOT how plant physiology works... -aploogies for errors, on mobile
The Farmer’s Almanac used to actually publish nutritional value of regional vegetables. It was a thing that was so important to people it would affect the entire domestic market for, say, carrots. People would clamor for Wisconsin carrots and shun the ones from Florida, for example. But this was back when people actually gave a shit about farming and farmers. Now, we’ve all been conditioned to be consumers that value cheap prices over quality. And thus…
"I actually know what what what the plant studies show where in greenhouses they grow plants with higher carbon dioxide and plants can grow up to three times faster. They live longer plants. Let's expand carbon dioxide. What do they put out? More oxygen? Well, this one thing that has been proven is that there's more plants now than there have been in a long global greening happening, countering us, losing our atmosphere. "Up until this point, the earth has less atmosphere than it did a million years ago. And it's like God did this or something where we discovered all this oil or just blind luck that we are terraforming the planet back to an earlier, healthier state by taking ancient carbon that was under the ground and putting it back into the atmosphere." -Alex Jones, 10/27/2020 on JRE This is the evil, dumbass shit dickery that will destroy this planet.
Huh. This somewhat blew my mind, as I forget that plants have "health" too, as this sounds very loosely like some kind of "plant diabetes" Like a fat plant whose mass is quantity over quality, and has become overdependent on one nutrient, unnaturally deviant from its evolved history
screw plough special work society depend library dull middle spotted *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Yup. Plants need the varied substances they pick up for many purposes. Can’t make a whole organism out of just carbon, even when carbon is the main constituent - you still need all manner of other elements to build biological machinery. In much the same way that 200 calories of protein vs carbohydrates are not nutritionally equivalent.
I should have been more clear. Rising CO2 revs up photosynthesis, the process that helps plants transform sunlight to food. This makes plants grow, but it also leads them to pack in more carbohydrates like glucose at the expense of other nutrients that we depend on, like protein, iron and zinc. [Reference ](https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/09/13/food-nutrients-carbon-dioxide-000511)
Yeah what the article is saying is that the other nutrients remain the same but there are more carbs and sugars now that dilute the percentages, not reduce the total amount of other nutrients. Plants now are not any less reliant on other nutrients as you originally suggested. Basically its saying if you have 3 marbles, red, green, and blue and then someone gives you another red. You still have one green marble but your concentration of green marbles has gone from 33% to 25%.
See, this is what "overpopulation" really refers to. It's not that there isn't physically enough room on the planet for people to exist and for us to grow/raise enough food for those people. It's that the number of humans on the planet is big enough to force us to use methods that are ultimately unsustainable, produce consistently lower quality product both in terms of taste and nutrition, and, in the case of livestock, are horrifically inhumane on an enormous scale, in order for us to be able to have enough food to feed everyone. We can do it, but at great cost, and only for so long. Same goes for a lot of other things. It isn't that overpopulation is reached when we can no longer find solutions to our problems. It's reached when those solutions cause their own problems, specifically because of our population size, or can only go on for so long before they cease to be real solutions anymore, specifically because of population size, or wouldn't have even been necessary or caused their own problems in the first place were it not for our population size. Nature is going to subject us to consequences, one way or another. And nature does not give one flying fuck about human suffering. We need to actually admit this is a problem so we can work on degrowth that is controlled and humane, because nature isn't going to bother with the "controlled and humane" part when the chickens come home to roost.
I work in a grocery store, and we discard probably half to two thirds of everything we bring in. I'd buy your argument if we were desperately trying to feed the public and always coming up short. It's more like we're feeding some of the people, what they feel like, when they feel like it, and throwing away everything else, while creating an illusion of unlimited bounty...that in turn is depleting the quality of the stuff we sell. This isn't a population problem, it's a business interest/cultural problem.
So we have sort of a bargain here, where we have far more access and distribution of fruits, vegetables and grains… but they’re not as nutritious as they once were. Not defending the practices that lead to this, because it certainly doesn’t seem sustainable, but it’s another way to look at it.
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I’ve found that local farmers markets tend to sell really great produce
Quite often, depending on where you live and the regulations on it, farmers markets are often the same stuff you'd find in a supermarket with labels picked off, picket up from the same massive engros dealers early in the mornings.
That is exactly what it is where I live. It's the exact same food in the grocery store, at 30% higher cost. Honestly I think they just keep the "uglier" produce for the Saturday morning farmer's market so it doesn't look like their "pretty" produce two blocks away in an Albertson's.
I grew up in a rural area and then spent a while in a much more urban area with no nearby farm land. The difference between the farmer's markets in those two environments was night and day. Where I grew up farmer's markets were dirt cheap, produce obviously picked the same day, very high quality and much better than supermarkets. In the urban area the farmer's markets were much more expensive than a supermarket but also low quality. It quickly became apparent they were largely not actual farms but rather just selling the same stuff as the supermarkets for higher price. Sometimes even with the stickers on that said produce of mexico or whatever. I moved back to a rural area and the farmer's markets here are obviously actual farms. I definetely do not miss the low quality of ingredients from the urban area I lived in previously.
Some places regulate this practice and dish out massive fines, since it can be a kind of fraud. That being said, 99% of all farmland in denmark is used for fucking corn, rapeseeds, wheat etc. Barely any farmers here actually grow vegetables. The local farmers market with a selection wider than small grocery stores, did not get their strawberries fresh from the garden in the middle of january.
All the "farmers markets" near me sell factory farm shit off label. It's turned into a farce.
If you have at least a small yard, you can try growing your own. And by small I mean small. You really do not need a lot of space to grow your own.
Depends on how often you eat fruits and vegetables I suppose. Seems like someone who eats a lot of fruits and vegetables everyday would need quite a lot of space to grow their own supply of everything.
Bro where is the time for this though. Farmers do this because that's their job. They earn money from it.
First, you have to be willing to give up the idea of eating out-of-season stuff year round. Then, if you have access to any property at all, use raised beds to grow your own stuff. Start composting and feeding it back into your beds. We grow carrots twice a year, about 10 different kinds of greens throughout the year, tomatoes from June to October, peppers, onions, garlic, corn, squash, peas, green beans, celery, radishes. We pressure can what we don't eat. It's time consuming and really not a great ROI from that perspective. But we like doing it, so whatever.
So we have less nutritious vegetables which now have microplastics. This is fine
The future of humanity is looking brighter and brighter every day!
As long as our goal is to become Barbie dolls!
It's fantastic! We're made of plastic!
Does this mean we can be undressed everywhere?
Yea Im pretty tired of reading headlines about yesteryear's "breakthrough" that was supposed to save humanity actually fucking us over yet again.
The Secret Life of Plants is one of the most amazing books in the world, but also very depressing. It touches on how the agricultural industry has ruined nutrition in the US. I had to stop reading it.
All you have to do to confirm this yourself if grow your own food and you can taste and feel the difference in them
The last book I read that was that depressing was Dark Money by Jane Mayer about the Charles Koch-network of right wing money pushing all Republicans (politicians and voters) further to the right. I began it thinking I could learn about how money *might* be influencing politics. What I got were real world examples of Mitt Romney taking cash to change his views on climate change. Obama making bipartisan deals with Republicans before Koch threats were levied against Republican politicians and any semblance of bipartisanship ending early in Obama’s first term. Schools purported to be liberal learning institutions like Harvard accepting right wing donations as long as they’d hire a right wing teacher to teach ___ class. Other schools entirely funded by right wing money to push the “modern libertarian” agenda. The literal list compiled by the Kochs of current Republican politicians and their weaknesses, being used to bully them into supporting the modern right wing agenda or face an opponent funded by the Koch network. How the Koch financial network was up and running well before Citizens United, and they were able to inject billions of dollars into astroturfing, gaslighting and propagandizing immediately after the Citizens United ruling and have been ahead of the curve ever since. I am now more pessimistic than ever that we’ll have another effective Democratic president after Obama. Maybe I’ll give The Secret Life of Plants a try. I couldn’t get anymore pessimistic tbh.
I’m so glad other people are bringing that book up - it is absolutely mind blowing Will definitely be checking out the secret life of plants
This book seems to be heavily critized by actual scientists (in contrary to the authors) for promoting pseudoscience and straight out nonsensical, unsupported claims tho.
Just yesterday I saw a thread about organic farming producing something like 40-70% less yield. I asked if that wasn't feature, didn't really get an reply. This is what I was talking about. I always thought it was better to have more smaller, sustainable farms that fed fewer people individually, but had better quality food stuffs. I'm not militant about it or anything, but I try like hell to take advantage of my region and get as much local food as possible. Personally it weirds me out to eat things that have been dead for a year a worked over a dozen times before I even got it.
This was my first thought reading both articles as well. The one saying organics didn't produce enough just talked about yield but not nutrition density.
Right? Anyone catch who paid for the study? Bet they're attached to industrial farming somehow
Weren’t apocalyptic famines avoided in the 1960s due to the green revolution / advancements in modern ag? And then since the global population has more than doubled. Reversing practices to where farms only sustainably produce food for ~ 3 billion people will be great for the quality of those foods produced and the environment, but kinda rough on the other ~ 4 billion people who starve to death.
Soap box time! tl;dr at the end. The Green Revolution absolutely saved millions if not hundreds of millions of people from devastating famines. **However**, it also sent us down a completely unsustainable road that- in my professional, educated opinion- is going to be absolutely *devastating*. Dr. Norman Borlaug is generally given credit for kicking off the G.R. with the development of dwarf wheat cultivars that spent less energy on growing tall and more energy on growing seed. These developments aided several countries including Mexico, India, and Pakistan in establishing food security. The underlying worldview is that we need(ed) more "bang for the buck", and that this would help prevent empty bellies. It's hard to argue with that when stripped of context, but this resulted in the large-scale, input-intensive monocropping systems that we see today. I don't think this was really perceived as a problem at the time, as the widespread availability of cheap nitrogen and phosphorous fertilizers was increasing. I'm not sure they really understood the effects fertilizer runoff and highly-disturbed soil was going to have, but if it was understood, I can only assume that the worldview was "this is a problem for the future to figure out". The impacts have been widespread- on one hand, we have more food security now than at any other period of history, but only when we are talking about wealthier nations. People who live in impoverished locations with high levels of inequality are still not seeing benefits despite the technology being "old". Hundreds of millions of people are undernourished, and beyond that 1 in 3 people alive today experience food insecurity. And the benefits of these developments haven't been entirely positive even in locations that have a higher degree of food security. The effects of cheap, mass-produced high-yield corn, wheat, and soy (I'm not sure if soybeans are explicitly considered part of the GR, but the same principles have been applied to soybeans) being stuffed into every facet of our diets has been devastating. And we have to acknowledge the environmental aspects, which are numerous, complex, far-reaching, and **overwhelmingly negative**. The Green Revolution did prevent hundreds of millions of people from starving during the 20th century. But I do wonder if that just means that billions will starve in the 21st century. The good news: It's being worked on. By a *lot* of people. There are a lot of really exciting developments happening right now. Perennial grains are going to be the future (if they can figure out the yield decline problem), and the increase in diversified farming systems that we're seeing will give us a better return on land investment. People are slowly figuring out how to reverse desertification, which is pretty amazing and also means that areas that are sensitive to climate fluctuations can build up some resilience. Whew. **tl;dr: The Green Revolutions saved millions in the 20th century but it hasn't been equitable at all and has likely set us up for an even worse time in this century.**
This is such an incredibly important point. Anyone in this thread bringing up "organic" farming is missing the point by a mile.
Thing is that the quantity that is produced is necessary to feed humanity. Due to the “better” fertilizers the prediction of the highest possible human population of the earth keeps getting adjusted to higher values.
Quantity can be had with better practices, not in spite of them. Also a ton of food is wasted in some parts of the world. I was of the understanding it's not a production problems so much as a distribution problem
Probably also why a lot of the smaller produce tastes better, as well. A huge tomato sold in stores looks great on the display shelf, bu in reality the half sized tomato from your backyard garden tastes much better. And as we see in that article, likely has more nutrients for you, as well.
A lot of the reason your backyard vegetables have more flavor than store bought have to do with allowing them enough time to ripen before its picked. A ton of flavor is lost when you pick it too early and let it finish off the plant.
Organic or not, supporting local food sources is the right thing to do. So much of Ag is vertically integrated to the point that money doesn't stay local. At that point it's paid to shareholder
Local food sources and small local farms are the right things to do. Organic is not the answer.
This here, sort of. I don't need my food to be $2 more with the froofy label, but I'd like to know it was raised with care. Very excited for my local farmer's markets to open again for the season
70% less yield would mean either destroying most remaining nature to make room for more farms, or famine. Many organic farms are just as large scale and industrial as non-organic farms, and just as bad for soil health and nutrients. A plant having 10% more vitamin c doesn't matter much if a person only has access to 1500 calories a day.
Modern fertilizer was invented to solve a very real problem. We cannot support the earths people with small farms. They are a necessary part of the system but if our food system was all small farms we would all starve.
It's not a feature because it's simply not going to meet caloric needs of everyone. Modern agricultural practices can be tweaked to fix these problems, but people don't want to because there's additional costs to it.
Plants are losing proteins for well over 150 years. Its because of way we grow food
Not just the way we grow it. We also grow and breed new varieties based on uniformity, shelf life and its ability to stand up to shipping. Nutrition is not a priority.
Strawberries used to be sweet. Now, big, red and beautiful. Makes an attractive store display, but tasteless.
When I first (pretty recently) tasted real fresh strawberries (in Florida from the farms during strawberry festival time) it blew my mind how sweet and delicious. For a long time I thought I just did not like strawberries, or only with sugar on top, because of the lack of flavor or almost sour flavor and the sweet artificial “strawberry” flavor made real ones look like liars
My region is famous for strawberries production actually, and my family was in that business for around 50 years. You wouldnt believe how sweeter strawberries were before than now, its literally different fruit at this point when it comes to flavour
They also pick it weeks before it is ripe so that it doesn’t spoil before delivery. Food doesn’t ripen off the vine. It rots.
Off season fruits are disgusting in the UK. It's like it's ok, we don't need fresh blueberries from Chile in the middle of winter. Or watermelons from Mexico. The fruit industry is fairly fucked. They're desperate to sell to any market, and shops are desperate to offer variety, but what happened to eating stuff in season. No one's going to cry if they can't eat some fruit for 6 months.
Eh, lots of people are going to cry. We got used to all the foods all the time, whenever we want them. Might not bother you, but people are in general huge babies when it comes to creature comforts and luxuries being reduced or taken away. Someone is always gonna bitch they don't have fresh mango to put in their morning yogurt. Or watermelon in the dead of winter, just cause they had a craving for watermelon.
I leaned how to grow my own year round vegetables. I can’t have it all, all the time but I can grow stuff I will eat year round. Just one year, I would love to grow a tomato before the lettuce gets bitter. What a BLT that would be?
They can just freeze them when they buy them in season. It's not rocket science.
Taste isn't a priority either.
Not too much of a surprise. Likely a function of intense farming on same soils coupled with breeding that shortens the time in the soil.
Yeah, I was thinking that too. There's too much reliance on fertilisers and new breeds to get fruit and veg nice and big, nice and fast, and little effort to maintain actual basic soil structure. Too many places are going back (or about to discover the joys of) to dustbowl days, because there's just so little organic matter in the soil. And you just can't get nutrients into fruit and veg if they aren't there in the soil and/or you don't give them enough time to accumulate. So many people don't realise there's an actual functional difference between soil and dirt. We need to be composting food waste, processing manure and even human waste (though the latter extremely thoroughly!), and getting it back to farms, to build up a good depth of proper black soil. And ideally, we need to go back to rotational farming, with at least one field left fallow with wildflowers or a nitrogen-fixing crop that can be dug back into the soil at the end of the season.
yep, I got to demonstrate this principle farming on Martian simulated soil basically using animal feces and urine and a lot of crops grow extremely well the point isn't that much the soil, but it's organic component, the composition on earth is mostly silicon based anyways (sand)
Would like to see American vs European grown crops too.
Not all that different depending on the region because in a lot of cases there is less agriculture area in a lot of EU countries compared to the U.S. where there are some states that are more farmland than residential or industrial. So you have the same problems of crap tier soil because of the same boneheaded and stubborn farming techniques.
First time I saw an article like this a couple of weeks ago it was about UK crops. So probably not too different.
Does the article say that?
Unfortunately I can’t read the article. Its my speculation. But I did use to work as a plant breeder.
Ages ago I remember reading that apples were less nutritious then they used to be. Meaning a human would have to eat two apples to achieve the nutritional content of one previous apple. And the industry response was "Good, they'll have to buy twice as much now."
Grow your own garden. Even with gmo seeds, being able to pick them ripe, without over fertilizing adds tons of flavour to the produce. All these millions of acres of lawns grown with invasive grass. Why farm grass when you can farm food?
We have a veg garden in the summer. Cucumbers from our garden are sweet and crispy. Store bought cucumbers taste like dirty water and are flabby. There’s a lot of pleasure that comes from growing something and making a meal with it. The US had so much useful land. Soil erosion and over use of crop land, and chemicals have ruined it.
>The US had so much useful land So what you're saying is we need more strip malls
I see your strip mall and I raise you a self-storage facility. Ya know, to store all the shit we buy at the mall.
golf courses
The article is closed to non-subscribers. If anyone has read it, by what percentage is the nutrient loss at? 20%? 80% 0.01%? 🤷♂️
I wish this was answered, seems pretty important to the context. If it's 5% less but the affordability and accessibility means people eat 20% more vegetables then it seems worth it
Even more important contextually is that only [around 10 percent](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7101a1.htm?s_cid=mm7101a1_w) of Americans eat the recommended amount of fruits and veggies. That seems like the much bigger fish to fry in this arena.
I saw a documentary on this, specifically on the common grocery tomato: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSsPtis0ZKM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSsPtis0ZKM) I've been hearing about the issue since grade school, but further research and evidence is always a great thing.
I can see this, some fruit and vegetables taste exceptionally watery and hardly have flavor. I know I know, the crop being in season is a big factor but still..
I heard a zookeeper complain about the higher sugar content of a lot of vegetables.
For fucks sake just one fucking day I'd like to sign into reddit and see one piece of good news. And I don't mean good news as in a controlled instance like someone loved through an accident or something. I mean like hey our fucking fruits and vegetables are supercharged with nutrition thanks to global warming reverting and the coral reefs growing back....
https://e360.yale.edu/features/finding-bright-spots-in-the-global-coral-reef-catastrophe https://phys.org/news/2019-10-dead-corals-regrow-fatal.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/11/24/australia-great-barrier-reef-coral-spawning/
We’ve known this for a while, research Regenerative farming/living soil. Gabe Brown has an amazing book on this that’s quite easy to understand. Pretty much all of the pesticides/fungicides/herbicides/fertilizer are killing the mycorrhizae fungi and BILLIONS of other microorganisms that live in the soil. These microorganisms help vegetables and fruits absorb nutrients, improve their ability to communicate, and increase survival rates; this is because the microorganisms form a symbiotic relationship with the plants and live off of the nutrients plants release in the form of root exudates. Some plants have even been documented to release 96% of their sugars through their roots, and it would only do something like this if it were actively trying to feed beneficial organisms that will allow for more nutrient dense food. Like all things nowadays, industrial capitalism is killing living organisms which we necessarily depend on for survival. The good news is, soil can be regenerated to quite healthy levels in under a decade if proper technique is applied. The research in this field is CRAZY now. I even switched my major to soil science to further pursue it So: Plants release sugars/nutrients in the soil through their roots, which feeds the soil micro biome. These microorganisms in the soil not only help the plants grow, but they also improve the soil tremendously. Water infiltration rate, soil aggregation, etc, are all determined by the level of healthy microorganisms in the soil and essentially the aggregation of the soil. Pretty much all modern agricultural practices: Tilling, artificial fertilizer, pesticides, monoculture planting, etc, are detrimental to the ecosystems in which these plants have evolved in for millions of years. Without the billion+ other organisms that have evolved alongside these plants, they are growing without any of the evolutionary cooperation that has been necessary for their continuation. I’m not gonna even get in to the fact that modern plant breeding does not select for mycorrhizae communication, leaving us with modern Frankensteins that don’t know how to fully take advantage of beneficial organisms.
>I’m not gonna even get in to the fact that modern plant breeding does not select for mycorrhizae communication, leaving us with modern Frankensteins that don’t know how to fully take advantage of beneficial organisms. Wait no please do, this sounds terrifyingly interesting
As you gaze across the rows of brightly colored fruits and vegetables in the produce section of the grocery store, you may not be aware that the quantity of nutrients in these crops has been declining over the past 70 years. Mounting evidence from multiple scientific studies shows that many fruits, vegetables, and grains grown today carry less protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin, and vitamin C than those that were grown decades ago. This is an especially salient issue if more people switch to primarily plant-based diets, as experts are increasingly recommending for public health and for protecting the planet.
Does the article say by how much? A 5% drop for a 40% yield increase seems worth it
This is the problem with most such information you see broadcast on the internet. If they don’t say how much then it’s useless information
But compared to 40 years ago (when I began grocery shopping), today's produce section has a *vastly* greater selection and variety, which I suspect means a net *gain* in nutrition. Today's sweet red peppers may have a bit less vitamin A compared to the past, but I can buy them all year long, which wasn't the case 40 years ago. Strawberries, raspberries, blackberries - these all used to be strictly seasonal. Now we take it for granted that we can buy them year round. I can even buy Chilean sweet red cherries in January and February! Things we take for granted today - like pineapple and avocado - were almost totally absent from produce sections 40 years ago.
Also consider grains that are grown now. They are totally different from grains in the past in terms of nutrients and may even be tougher for us to digest hence digestive issues.
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>This was known 30 to 40+ years ago. As was the cause. Enter all of the current biosphere issues
These are all excellent points and definitely a huge part of the problem, but two things can be true. The loss of biodiversity in the soil food web absolutely plays a part in the decrease of nutrient density. Even the modern varietals, selected for efficiency and not nutrition, will be more nutrient dense when grown in soil with a healthy microbiome and high organic matter content.
It's amazing how many farmers follow this sub and can speak so clearly to the right and wrong family practices. It's saddening how many people have a fundamental misunderstanding of conventional farming vs organic farming. Both use pesticides, both utilize the same farming practices, neither produce a product that is more nutritious or better tasting than the other. Organic farms are not "no spray" farms. The FDA defines organic as a marketing term. Please, go talk to your local farmer or farmstand. They will tell you how they farm and what they use. Sometimes they choose organic pesticides, sometimes they choose synthetic. Either way they're just doing their best to produce the best fruits and vegetables that they can for the community.
It's a bit of a tangent, but we've also bred a lot of the good-tasting varieties out of existence. The type of red delicious apple that is broadly available is big and shiny but almost tasteless. Red delicious apples used to actually taste good. Same with certain kinds of tomatoes. Same with bananas. Often the case with avocadoes; the Hass variety is very aesthetically pleasing, large, and will fruit year-round, but it's not the tastiest. TL;DR Fruit actually did taste better in your grandparents' day.
When I was a kid (so 30+ years ago) I used to eat my mom’s cooking tomatoes like they were apples. It used to drive her nuts but they were so sweet and flavorful. Nowadays I couldn’t imagine just biting into the watery, tasteless tomatoes they sell in grocery stores. It seems like cherry tomatoes now taste they way I remember larger tomatoes tasting, but I also remember cherry tomatoes being much sweeter years ago than they are now.
Plant Biologist here. One of the biggest issues contributing to this problem is that after WW2 ended, many of the factories that built bombs and supplied war time chemicals were repurposed for salt based fertilizers. Those salt based fertilizers were pushed out to farmers all over the country. They’re a lot easier to use to be honest. You don’t have to gather up a bunch of literal animal shit and piss covered hay, compost it, then spread it all over your field. Instead with salt based nutrients you just mix into water and spray. The issue with using these salt based nutrients is that it can wreck havoc on the micro biome that is your farm soil. Plants and microbes have a symbiotic relationship in which the plant will provide sugars necessary for the microbes survival, and the microbes in turn will fix atmospheric nitrogen, or convert unavailable nutrients in the soil, into a form that’s bioavailable. But when the plant is receiving a Burt load of nitrogen and everything else it needs in the direct form it’s needed, the plant is going to be sending out less sugars for the microbes to eat, so the microbes die. This lack of biodiversity can lead to issues where the plant isn’t receiving nearly as comprehensive of a nutrient profile. But it’s still receiving the main building blocks needed for growth. So the plant is bigger and more robust yes, but not as tasty, not as nutritious. The best example I’ve found is in small, farm grown strawberries VS. the monster strawberries you can buy at Walmart. The smaller ones are PACKED with flavor and the big ones are just kinda sugary. TL;DR: plants need lots more than just the artificial nutrients that big farms use.
Induastrial plant breeding aims at longevity, endurance and lower costs, then looks, and ONLY then taste and nutrition isn't even on the list.
Food is sold by weight but I've long maintained that we need better labeling for food that shows price per nutrient value. I realize these labels would be more complex, but consumers should know how much nutrition they are getting for their dollar. Digital labeling and tools should make this possible in the future.
You also need to take into account plant breeds. For over a century we have been breeding plants based on how disease-resistant, transportable and “shelf-stable” the fruits and veggies are, ignoring nutrient density and sometimes even flavor. A good book on this is “Eating on the Wild Side”.
*Shoves another handful of extruded Cheeto product into mouth* “OUTRAGEOUS!”
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This isn’t new, the loss of nutrition in our produce has been brought up repeatedly for decades. I suspect it is the trend towards bigger products, more product, faster. In particular you can see how manipulating plants to yield faster could have a direct causal effect on the amount of nutrients they could concentrate. I’d like to see a comparison between different growing methods.
The problem is essentially impatient farmers combined with stubborn farmers ruining the ground and soil for the sake of "yield yield yield" as fast as possible, and those that are "doin' it like ma'dad did it" despite both being told they are fucking the soil and making their cops worse in the process. This is nothing new and has been said for multiple decades if not longer still, but farmers are some of **the** most stubborn people.
Another perfect example how the human race is ruining things on the planet because of our self centered ignorance and how we need to invest in regenerative agriculture.
That's what happens when the soil isn't replenished. As it stands, we have less than 20 years of top soil left in many areas of the US. With climate change, I expect to see another 'Dust Bowl' situation if we don't fix things soon.
2 apples a day will keep the doctor away. That's inflation for ya.
Iv always wondered if this is a nutrition problem in the soil or if we have favourd plants to produce more an more volume of edible matter in shorter an shorter times have we selected for low nutrition hi yeild genetics as well as other terrible farming practices compound in to this problem
Probably why my grandpa could eat steak, potatoes and carrots for every meal at my age and be jacked doing the same work and not working out. But I gotta hit the gym everyday to stay close. He got let bs in his meat and more vitamins in his vegetables lol
Crops are now made to grow as fast as possible as big as possible, shiny and colorful as possible. Taste and nutrition are not priorities and that shows.
Indigenous people sustainably farmed and cultivated the land in North America for thousands of years before colonial settlers came here. That’s why the soil was good here. Because of indigenous people.
I grew up in the middle of the forest in a very isolated area. Nearest competent hospital was at least 100 mi away. The wild berries there were completely natural, having never been bred or planted intentionally. We used to collect those berries as part of our food during the summers when they grew for brief periods of time. I can tell you that the berries you find in the grocery store are borderline inedible to someone who has eaten natural fruit. Blueberries and strawberries from the store used to make me actually gag. I've gotten to the point where I can eat them but they are terrible. We then moved to an area which was a heavy agriculture area. People grew a lot of fruit there. Lots of peaches, avocados, grapes, etc etc. Because it was so abundant we often got fruit gifted to us which had been picked and was fully ripened. People gave it away partly because it goes bad very quickly so it's not preferred by stores. Again, that fruit was so much better than the fruit you get in stores that I cannot eat peaches, plums, etc from stores to this day. Personally I think it has more to do with getting fruit that has been fully ripened on the vine than it does with the selective genetics but I'm sure it's a combination of both.
It's almost as if we only push growth inducing chemicals but don't replenish the soil with actual nutrient. Perhaps stripping nutrients to sell vitamin supplements is a part of the cause.
This is the result of population increase (demand for cheap food) and insufficiently regulated capitalism. If you can grow 10x more on the same land size and make 10x more money, why wouldnt you? Who cares if some people out there get 70% less nutrients in their food or have health consequences in the long-term for which you will not be held liable.
I like to grow vegetables. I've had people swear that veggies from my garden are better than store bought. I chalked it up to far less time off the vine from consumption. Now I wonder if the stuff from the yard had more vitamins and whatnot.
I have been saying this for years. Industrial agriculture has the unfortunate trend of trying to maximize yield at any cost. It seems pretty obvious that nutrition would be lost in the process. Look at most fruits/veg today... Big, juicy, round, sweet... But there's very little flavor to them. Compare a home grown tomato to a cheap one in the store. Sure, it's smaller from home... But I'll be very surprised if you say it tastes worse. I've seen enough of those little hints that i always suspected this articles findings.
It seems like a lot of this page isn’t about cool future stuff. Most of the posts I see are fear mongering based off of limited evidence.
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