The Hunger Affecting Billions
bbc.com
bbc.com
There's so many whole grain foods and whole plant foods that have more than enough nutrients. And, I don't just mean a couple. There's dozens even hundreds of super high nutrient dense natural foods out there. heck, even the weeds that grow in your sidewalk are literally packed with extremely high nutrient density: for example: Purslane. Purslane contains well over 200% of your DRI of Iron in just 200 calories. I could list hundreds more, and i've ranked them according to each nutrient here: https://kale.world/c. Just set the bar to Iron and you'll see what i mean. And it's not just Iron, it's pretty much every nutrient you could possibly need.
Even your standard Potatoes are really high in Iron (as long as you don't strip them of their skin which is the first thing everybody does). It's no wonder people end up with iron deficiency when you strip the skin off potatoes and fruits and eat processed rice (which once again strips off all the nutrients).
And for grains, there's so many things to choose from: Teff, Whole wheat, wild rice, oat flour, oats, cornmeal, farro, brown rice. You could literally pick almost any grain that hasn't been processed to death, and you'd find that it's pretty nutrient dense. It's the processing (and unsustainable agriculture practices) which reduces the nutrient density so much. the processing and the adding of sugar and oil which contains no nutrients.
Nature provides us which foods that are naturally high in minerals and vitamins without the constant need for humans to muck with it. I think we should focus less on trying to change things we don't understand and spend more time and effort actually just growing the foods sustainably in the first place.