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Comment by n4r9 | Hacker News Reader

Bananas can be a good example to get people thinking more carefully about agriculture and spin.

I remember a conversation with a coworker several years ago in which I was trying to convey the difficulty of sensibly defining "organic" farming. His first suggestion: "food that hasn't had chemicals put in it". When I asked him to explain what "chemical" means, he thought for a while then moved onto what was quite a clever second attempt: "food as it would grow anyway, without human intervention". I pointed out that without humans, bananas as he knew and loved them (I think he ate plenty) would become extinct quite quickly.

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I found an apple tree on an island in the middle of a lake once, while out kayaking. It had apparently been there for quite some time, completely untended to by human hands. I was excited to try a "natural" apple, for whatever reason I had the idea that it would be tastier than store bought apples. I regretted biting into it pretty much immediately. It was my first lesson on the importance of artificial selection in the palatability of our produce.

I have found out, since then, that apples grown for their edibility are grown from grafts, not seeds. Most likely, someone at some point stopped on that island and had lunch, and left apple seeds on the island, which eventually grew into a wild apple tree. Wild apples aren't edible, and the apples we know and love have been carefully bred to be the way they are.

This isn't strictly accurate.

In Kent, UK, there's an orchard with around 2,000 apple varieties (it's possible there were closer to 10,000 over the past few centuries). I'd guess more than a hundred of those wouldn't be palatable for consumption - varieties that have been selected for sauce, baking, cider, jelly (jam), etc.

Any seed-grown tree is going to produce fruit that has characteristics of both its parents - so it's not that 'wild apples aren't edible' (clearly that's not true) but rather hybrid apples aren't exactly like either parent. This is neither a bad nor a good thing.

I will say that apples grown for their type are replicated via grafts or cuttings.

>Any seed-grown tree is going to produce fruit that has characteristics of both its parents

Not apples, they're exactly the opposite:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple#Breeding

>This is because seedling apples are an example of "extreme heterozygotes", in that rather than inheriting genes from their parents to create a new apple with parental characteristics, they are instead significantly different from their parents, perhaps to compete with the many pests.

Perhaps not exactly the opposite (I'm not even sure how that'd work).

Apple breeders do identify favourable traits from existing cultivars, and may then do selective back-crossing:

https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/844-breeding-a-new...

As mimikites mentions every apple from seed is a complete unknown bearing no resemblance to parents. Some will be edible, many will be horrible. Find an edible one, keep that tree safe for grafts and cuttings!

For instance all granny smith's trace back to a single tree somewhere in Australia. If you let a variety die, it's gone forever as you'll never recreate it. Which is my biggest regret of the way supermarkets want to sell us just a few "standard" varieties. Countless fine apples have been lost forever.

Yes, I understand. I grow about 25 varieties of apples, some of which are extremely unpleasant to eat, but have been selected over centuries to be perfect for jams (crab apples) and cider making.

While a random specimen on an island in a lake is indeed most likely a seedling, my point was that assessing the quality of an apple is more nuanced than noting if one fruit at one point in time tastes nice.

OK, on that part we're in full agreement. One of my biggest regrets of modern food stores is the complete disappearance of local and more specialist apples - my personal favourites haven't been around for years. Which leaves few options for those without space for a dozen varieties.

I'd love to have more, but they're tricky in my climate (too hot and dry), and in Australia there's about 200-300 varieties only AFAIK.

If you're in / next time you are in the UK, be sure to get out to Brogdale - they have apple and cherry and cider festivals, with an astounding number of varieties (only two of each tree though).

It is profoundly sad that it's such a painful process to get varieties through quarantine and into Australia - I tried a Braddick's Nonpareil there one time - my instant favourite apple ever. May be similar to a Sturmer Pippin (which is available in AU).

You have to stop the human intervention at the right moment though. In my country there are maybe 10 apple varieties that are grown commercially and they are surely tastier than their wild ancestors.

However, taste is just one of many criteria when deciding which apples to grow. For example there are 50 years old apple trees in my neighbour's garden that are oh-my-god out of this world tasty. They are also small, do not produce regular quantities each year and prone to diseases. So they are not viable for commercial use but still the best apple you have ever tasted if you manage to find one.

So perhaps organic could also mean focusing on other criteria than growing fruit that is most viable to grow in huge quantities, that is more resistant to various diseases and other chemicals that kill insects/fungi, that look beautiful and have a long shelf life and taste good enough.

I think we should stop using shallow adjectives to signal quality.

"organic" is just a marketing label.

Instead of trying to sort everything into two bins and decide how to gatekeep "organic" how about we do science and education and labeling to teach people the details of how their food is bred and produced and how quality and effects vary.

Organic is not a marketing label - here[1] are the extra regulations which any food labelled as organic in US must be certified to satisfy. These regulations have been developed and studied for decades, here is one recent review [2]

[1]https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?c=ecfr&SID=9874504b6f1...

[2]https://phys.org/news/2016-02-agriculture-key-world-sustaina...

Interesting points..

>For example there are 50 years old apple trees in my neighbour's garden that are oh-my-god out of this world tasty.

Ha ha, I've eaten a few Indian fruits that are like that, both as a kid and later. One is jujube [1], called ber in Hindi. When living in Central India as a teenager, used to wander around in open, lightly forested areas near the town, which had these ber trees. We used to eat plenty of their fruit for free. Very tasty. Sweet. The still-slightly-unripe ones were the best. Overripe ones had a bit of a bad smell though. Yellowish-green in color when under-ripe, red when ripe, a bit smaller than, or the same size as a golf ball. I think they probably were high in sugar (fructose, maybe) since when sold in bazaars, flies were usually buzzing around them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jujube

Another one was karonda [2]. Tangy, sour, astringent, may best describe its taste. Makes your mouth literally water - a lot. Punjabi people make a pickle from it. I had some of that pickle once in a Bangalore restaurant. Mind-blowing taste.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carissa_carandas

johnny appleseed was kind of a hippie and wouldn't do the grafting thing, all the trees he sold were of the type you can't eat.

only thing you can do with those is make alcohol.

he was an alcohol merchant!

It's not an unvarnished good. Modern candies and apples have dulled modern tastebuds to sweetness so that you need a lot more sugar to like it. High dietary sugar is like a tobacco reboot.

Wild apples can be edible (and it's not like they're poisonous, just not tasty), but, yeah, they're usually best for just making jam. (They have lots of pectin, so they're a good adjunct for things -- blackberries, for example -- that don't.)

Apples are a bit special in that they don't grow true to seed; that's the reason for the grafting. If you plant a Braeburn, you don't get Braeburn fruit.

People don't really understand modernity. Humans developed modern civilization thousands of years ago. We've evolved our selves and our surroundings that way. Not really possible to go back now.

Is ~ 10,000 years enough to evolve ourselves, especially given that we evolved to eat other foods during the previous 190,000 years?

There has certainly been some adaptation: The ability do continue producing lactase into adulthood is well known. There is certainly disagreement about how much more adaptation there has been, which is why there is the whole "Paleo" food movement.

There's an adaptation question too for foods in the ancestral environment, not just in the last 10k years. What are the selection pressures? If you make it to about 50 as a woman, you're done with even the possibility of reproducing. So all you really need is a tolerance of whatever local food you have until you're that old; if long term exposure messes you up at 60 it doesn't matter. For someone today, wanting to extend their life as long as possible, there is probably a lot in the ancestral / paleo food range you should still avoid, and probably some foods only made possible with technology that provide superior long term outlooks.

Here's a practical, measurable definition of "organic": Less pesticide residue on produce. Farm animals which haven't been fed other animals, growth hormones, or antibiotics.

Those are important qualities for food, no need to disregard it as spin.

Except, of course, that "organic" just means that it's carbon based. So everything goes. Thus "ecological", for example, is an alternative term used in some countries.

Yes, it's unfortunate that the word organic has multiple meanings. In chemistry, it is as you say, in food it means something else.

> Less pesticide residue on produce

This doesn't accord with any existing definitions, which restrict the type of pesticide as well as perhaps the amount. Which then begs the question of which pesticides should be classed as organic. We already have stringent constraints on pesticide residue levels.

> Here's a practical, measurable definition of "organic": Less pesticide residue on produce.

Most organic produce probably has more pesticide residue than non-organic produce. Definitely more toxic residue than non-organic produce, as it turns out that agrichemical firms want to optimize their pesticides to minimize human harm as opposed to "natural" pesticides that rely on being toxic to everything.

Considering reduction of pesticide use and exposure is one of the main objectives of the organic movement, which has been developing for over 60 years now - it would be a hopeless situation if it resulted in "more pesticide residue than non-organic produce".

Do you have any substantial sources for such a tragic claim?

For example here[1] is an EU funded meta-review from 2014 which finds: " the frequency of occurrence of pesticide residues was found to be four times higher in conventional crops, which also contained significantly higher concentrations of the toxic metal Cd. "

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-n...

Chickens are omnivores by nature. They regularly eat insects and other small animals such as reptiles and rodents. "Vegetarian fed hens" just seems so wrong to me.

Perhaps "food grown in a way that would survive the collapse of the agrochemical/seed industry."

As a conventional farmer, it is not unheard of to have chemicals fail due to factors such as the weather. The crop survives just fine, you just lose out on maximum yield potential.

As for seed, even certified organic growers rely on the seed industry, so I'm not sure that fits either.

At this point it feels like we are just retrofitting a meaning to a word. The truth of the matter to me is that "organic" says more about people's alienation from modernity than about the product we are trying to describe.

> "food as it would grow anyway, without human intervention"

If you look at the genomes of our major food crops, it turns out that we've done really weird things to them (such as duplicating all the chromosomes), and that's well before we started doing gene transplanting via modern GMO techniques.

A good visual indication of how wildly we've been able to transform crops by ancient domestication is maize. You've probably seen the standard corn cob. The closest wild relative (and probable pre-domesticated ancestor) is teosinte. A teosinte cob-equivalent has maybe a dozen kernels, which are not obviously edible. The difference is so stark that some don't believe that domestication started with teosinte because it looks too hard.

I'm not sure what you mean, there isn't really any 'spin' when it comes to organic, it's actually a very standardized set of rules and regulations that must be adhered to (see https://www.ams.usda.gov/rules-regulations/organic for USA).

You don't have to agree with every rule and regulation they've come up with. Personally I'm not that worried about GMOs but I do tend to buy organic anyways because it uses less pesticides and fertilizers.

Sure, I don't dispute that a set of rules exists. I'm just not convinced of a real need for it, and its existence serves to bolster the notion that "organic food" is well-defined and aligns with public perception.

The "spin" is more about how organic food is portrayed, and how that affects food markets and science.

It's okay for well-to-do folks to occasionally buy organic, but it's not a sustainable model for feeding a growing population and the more demand rises for organic, the harder it becomes to devote resources to a viable solution.

There's no evidence that GMO's pose a risk to health or the environment, yet (for example) the EU's chief scientific officer Anne Glover was essentially sacked for her support of GM crops.

> food as it would grow anyway, without human intervention

That’s literally how we get all our food anyways. Even the “organic” crops we grow today have been a product of intensive artificial selection by humans.

> "food as it would grow anyway, without human intervention". I pointed out that without humans, bananas as he knew and loved them (I think he ate plenty) would become extinct quite quickly

In a lot of cases, the result of that wouldn't be anything we would recognize as food. The vast majority of our crops have been so altered by humanity that the notion of their growing "without human intervention" is a farce.

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