Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutritious? (2011)
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
It is a huge leap to go from "there's less Vitamin C in this supermarket carrot" to "you will get fewer diseases and/or live longer or better if you eat carrots from soil 100 years ago". The former is a claim about vitamin content. Easy to measure and write a paper about. It is another thing entirely, and totally outside the scope of a paper about mineral/vitamin content, to claim that eating modern carrots actually results in worse health. That claim is (fortunately for "nutritionists" and "functional nutrition" people) never actually backed up by any science whatsoever. It's the same with grass fed beef and all the other "organic" stuff - they are never actually connected to better health outcomes and they never live up to the wild claims made by journalists and bloggers.
If only there was some kind of study linking vitamin [1] and protein intake [2] to health [3]...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin#Deficient_intake
[2] https://www.nutrition.org.uk/nutritionscience/nutrients-food...
[3] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/high-intake-of-vit...
Your last link just shows a correlation, not any kind of causation. It is suggestive, and somebody should do the actual research which might tell us whether it is causative. But they won’t, because it would cost too much and nobody could profit monetarily from the results.
Nutritional science is in a pretty sad state right now. It’s cheap and easy to find correlation between things, but expensive and time consuming to actually test interventions to see whether they work.
I've always assumed nutritional guides on fruits are more like averages or something. There's no way each individual piece of fruit is exactly the same. Plants just don't grow that way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_metabolite#Plant_sec...
I also enjoy gardening, but from a scientific perspective, I cannot support a statement like this. There is enormous room for bias in assessment of produce grown yourself, because of the physical and emotional investment made in said produce.
I'm not sure that would even be possible considering how much time and effort a study like that would require. But you might be able to hypothesize that eating a clean/chemically free (ex: Round Up/Glyphosate) food item would be better for you.
Comparing a factory farm pig that was fed GMO Soy it's entire life and raised in conditions that encourage disease/sickness to a pig raised in a clean/organic pasture with no exposure to synthetics/chemicals, I would imagine there is a noticeable difference in health.
Wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that someone consuming this animal would benefit more than someone consuming the factory farmed pig?
No. This is the naturalistic fallacy [1] in new clothes.
We need the additional studies showing how stress and poor diet makes most factory-farmed meat less nutritionally dense than the pasture-raised stuff. Though even then, it isn’t anything inherent to the production method causing the variance.
you're presuming the conclusion. You're asking for (additional??) studies to show something you've stated without evidence. Unless I'm misunderstanding you.
I believe we have evidence for factory-farmed meat being less nutritionally dense than pasture-raised meat. But the reason isn’t the factory farming per se. It’s the correlates to factory farming.
So OP’s example is true. Just not for the reason hypothesised.
So what point were you trying to make by posting this?
I'm getting fed up with the quality of posts here, you can't base your reality around what feels nice, give us data or stop making baseless claims.
It’s a controlled study isolating the effect of letting the chickens run around. Lower fat ceteris paribus and higher fatty acid is generally considered good, and no, I’m not going to link to every paper that makes that point.
If you let diet vary then yes, you get more pronounced results [2].
> give us data or stop making baseless claims
This is a forum. Not your personal research service. These materials are a simple search away and you are refuting with zero evidence.
[2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/1475-2891-9-10
true but irrelevant. What you said earlier was about 'pasture raised'...
> factory-farmed meat being less nutritionally dense than pasture-raised meat
but they got the same nutrition because they were fed the same factory diet, free-range or not. So totally irrelevant.
> and you are refuting with zero evidence
No, you are claiming with zero evidence. I am asking for evidence, and then point out your one piece of subsequently cited 'evidence' wasn't.
Your next cite is pretty ambiguous too - you previously: "and poor diet makes most factory-farmed meat less nutritionally dense than the pasture-raised", your cited study:
> It is also noted that grain-fed beef consumers may achieve similar intakes of both n-3 and CLA through the consumption of higher fat grain-fed portions
So in that respect the same.
Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glutathione for example says "Systemic bioavailability of orally consumed glutathione is poor because..." so that don't help, and I can't see any evidence for or against that glutathione (or the other antioxidant) survives cooking.
Your posting unsubstantiated stuff is no more than an extension of ant-vaxxer's thinking, "this is fluffy and nice so it must be right".
Reality matters. What you want to believe doesn't.
Is that something worth dismissing out of hand?
A good example are the statin drugs. Drug companies did a lot of marketing around "well, our drug lowers LDL by 10% more than our competitor", which could be very well be true, but again, does that matter?
Unless you run studies that measure an outcome that matters, it's all conjecture. Vitamin C levels might be declining, but we don't have a issue with scurvy in developed nations, the impact of any decline might be insignificant.
It made me fell in love with vegetables and fruits and whatever the season I just can't wait when the next starts. I also think this approach is more sustainable.
For some it's not such a big difference but for others (tomatoes!) you might as well be eating a different plant.
0: Except for soups, but for that kind of application canned tomatoes are best, since they’re canned when fresh rather than being picked before ripening to survive shipping.
I do suspect that there are sites and apps, but don’t know of any off-hand.
Other than that, there are plenty of guides on the web regarding what to buy when. Just make a search for "seasonal vegetables and fruits" and you'll find a lot of infographics.
I have a small market nearby where I buy, once a week, directly from small local farmers. You can learn the calendar there quickly.
Then they ate some and were completely let down at how bland they were and I was just like, yeah, you can but that's why I don't.
So we bought those, too, and they were delicious.
Then tried buying some things that were out of season, and they were terrible.
Which is just to say, some cultures are still super in tune with the seasonality of foods.
Another advantage: more different kinds of greens than I knew existed. And they're basically all delicious stir-fried with garlic & salt.
I mean, every country that I've lived is well aware of what produce is in season.
For example tomatoes (it's covered in a few books on the subject) have lost a large part of their sugar content after the 80s due to mass market techniques and genes that yield more and less quickly riping ones, but of lower taste.
And yes, if you go to extremes like rotten meat, there is of course little dispute. However, many cultures have developed certain dishes that they consider delicacies while outsiders would find them revolting.
But even from everyday experience, I'm sure even you will reassess your position if you think about it a bit more. Have you never had the experience that some food that you absolutely love and need others to try gets you little more than a shoulder shrug from someone else?
Taste even changes over time which is another intuitive reason why your claim makes little sense. Do you remember the first time you've tried coffee or beer (if you drink those)? Most people are not too fond of these flavors at first, yet they drinks are among the most consumed beverages, at least in Western societies.
And in the end, you gotta eat something. I suppose instead of not eating anything healthy at all, the more prominent strategy seems to have been to accompany healthy produce with super-unhealthy condiments (basically, loads of sugar, salt, and fat) to make it tasty again. That's probably the more worrying consequence, though.
Of course, honey is questionable - just because it's a more-or-less natural product doesn't make it especially good for you.
Sugar, though, yeah. Sugar is the devil.
And seems almost impossible to avoid unless you cook everything from scratch and don't snack on anything premade.. it's so crazy.
Here in the UK (though I'm sure this applies globally), tomatoes sold in supermarkets taste like plastic. Reason being is that they are picked when they are green and they "ripen" by the time they get to the store shelf.
This is done because tomatoes are almost impossible to transfer safely in large quantities, because when they are ripe they are softer, bruise easily and they tend to go bad quickly.
So, grow your own tomatoes - it's surpisingly easy - and the taste is amazing.
I think they're picked right when they start to ripen then finish in the box/transit.
Big initial cost, but those tomatoes taste so sweet. It's also just a fun hobby, I don't intend to save money on it
The vast majority comes from wholesale auctions just like everything else.
Of course, "around here" is in a rural area, surrounded by...farms.
The issue I have with most store-bought produce is that it has practically no taste whatsoever. It tastes like water. Tomatoes taste like water. Peppers taste like water. I've never had store-bought berries (of any kind) taste anything.
I've noticed that when you pick an unripe tomato, or cherry, or grape, or whatever, they actually have a taste. Not a very good taste, I wouldn't like eating unripe cherries.
However, the same things from a supermarket have practically no taste. I've never had produce picked from my mother or grandparents' garden taste like water. If they're unripe, they'll taste bitter, sour, something. They will absolutely have some kind of actual taste.
Similar with strawberries, I was asking what sort they had but don't remember any more. He told us he selects them for taste, not optimizing for scale. But the plants are slightly harder to take care of and sometimes the harvest fails. But the taste is worth all the hazzle.
What you can see a lot on current market are "heirloom" varietals made by entrepreneurs that take industrial variatel, cross them to create new completely new varietals. But just because something doesn't look like modern tomato it doesn't mean it taste good.
You can still find old varietals in seed banks and around seed savers, but hip breeders are much more noisy in the market. I am not saying those new breeds are worthless, but they are kinda hit and miss and I would not consider them heirloom.
I think the reason is that those tomatoes never saw anything resembling soil or sunlight; they are grown in some fertilized solution inside a greenhouse and propelled to a rapid growth.
Here in Norway you can get quite tasty tomatoes sold in supermarkets. Here's[1] a "blog" article from one of them. There are other brands and tomato variants.
Of course they cost slightly more than the ones we import from wherever but the taste more than make up for it.
That said, I've never tasted a "real" tomato so not sure how close they come.
[1]: https://coop.no/mega/kjokkenhagen/verdens-soteste-tomater-dy...
Is that really true any more? The supply chains are incredibly fast now and I can't imagine there's enough time for this process to take place - even tomatoes from southern Spain are probably on shelves in a few days. It's not like shipping bananas from the Caribbean. I think it's more that the watery tomatoes are the varieties that grow the fastest and offer the best margins at the lower pricepoints.
An increasing number of tomato imports are coming from the mega greenhouses where they are harvested red and can be packed on site. This one is Dutch [1], but I remember hearing that they're building some in the UK. Clearly they're never going to be the same as growing them in a garden in Sicily and leaving them to ripen for a few days in the sun, but not bad for mass production, available year round and much, much better than the tomatoes in the supermarkets a couple of decades ago.
> So, grow your own tomatoes - it's surpisingly easy - and the taste is amazing.
I've been trying for a few years. It's been fun and the varieties are way more interesting, but I'm not in danger of flooding the market.
I'd imagine you can do the same with tomatoes?
(As an aside, some fruits including apples also produce ethylene a they ripen. This is why putting an apple and an avocado in a plastic bag will cause the avocado to ripen faster. It is also the origin of the saying "one bad apple spoils the whole basket", because bad apples produce a lot of ethylene and causes the rest of the basket to quickly overripe. More info can be found at https://kids.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frym.2018.00016 for example).
It is, even within relatively close main EU nations we had significant losses (~30% of gross weight) between organic/Biodynaimc suppliers from Italy to Germany where I did my first year of apprenticeship. My first job was to sort through the waste pumpkins and potatoes that arrived on a daily basis for 2 weeks in September in large crates for storage and distribution to the farm's stores/CSA/Farmers Market outlets.
It's funny because that farms soil was so rich that the seeds scattered around from wasted pumpkins in the compost pile were vining well into December. I found a few decent sized pumpkins (albeit green) when we had to turn the compost pile later in the Winter.
But suffice it to say, it's insane how much food gets lost due to transport!
> An increasing number of tomato imports are coming from the mega greenhouses where they are harvested red and can be packed on site.
Perhaps to hyper-local Markets that's the case, but having spent time in Supply Chain for large Auto-manufactures batch shipping is still the norm for such low-margin commodities and delays have only compounded further since COVID. Also, Holland is (or until recently as COVID may have changed that) the largest exporter of it's Green-house produce and biggest importer of Organic and Biodynamic produce in the EU. In short, for many in NL: they're not consuming their own supply.
> I've been trying for a few years. It's been fun and the varieties are way more interesting, but I'm not in danger of flooding the market.
I'm ashamed to say I haven't had a proper tomato this year, and this is coming from a former farmer and chef.
... Not as good as a warm tomato straigh off the plant on a sunny day, but not far off.
Similarly, canned tomatoes taste great[1] because they are picked ripe and packaged.
[1] Canned tomatoes have a slight cooked taste so they're never going to taste fresh, but are great in anything you're going to cook.
Turns out these taste very close to fresh natural tomatoes.
Source: I grew up picking tomatoes from my grandmother’s garden and eating them like apples.
Your problem is on word 4 - tomatoes do not grow well in the UK.
Places were tomatoes grow well locally do have good tomatoes (in season). I can confirm this personally for Switzerland, California, Bulgaria.
Especially for kids. In summer, my kids ask for a cold cucumber instead of a can of soda. I guess if the cucumber was too tasty they wouldn't really like it as much. It's "chewy water", just like watermelon but without the sweet.
I don't know what it is... mass production? Tomatoes bought in the city do not even taste good in season (like now). We now have bigger and tasteless fruits. Why? I want to enjoy eating, I don't care if it's 25% smaller. Now they try to fool us with more colourful pulp or exterior... but taste the same.
I guess it takes more time to grow them if we want them to have taste. Orchards in my grandfather's town are not even irrigated (or much less, because it's dry weather) and they taste amazing.
This only helps hyperpalatable and unhealthy foods to gain strength between young people.
I'm pretty sure that 99% clients would choose the one which is 25% cheaper. Especially if those products are used in (not only) fast food bars, canteens at schools etc.
It is the structural incentives of the modern food retailing industry [1]. Buyers (in aggregate, both corporate and end-buyers) do not care about taste as a primary purchasing decision point. It comes in around 4-6th in importance. Your and my preferences are seen as a rounding error of the market segments. Be really, really wealthy enough to source from your own farms and ranches next to where you live, or have lots of disposable time to raise your own food, or (like many here I suspect) pick your battles and cobble together a solution between a little raise your own, a little CSA, a little pick your own, a little farmer's markets, a little from co-ops, etc., which again, exacts a price of your disposable time, a luxury working poor do not possess.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/11/07/9313480...
I know two greenhouse growers, growing the same variety of tomato on the same rootstock in the same medium. One of them has ~5-5.5% DMC while the other has close to 8% in the mid-spring season.
They taste different, but they yield different as well (higher quality means lower yields).
These are simply different species: The European blueberry (Vaccinium myrtillus) has dark meat, the North American blueberry (Vaccinium cyanococcus) has whiteish meat.
The farmed blueberries one can buy in a shop here in North Europe are large, and really very different from the blueberries/bilberries one can pick in the nature. Over here (Finland), both are available in shops; the "bilberry" (V. myrtillus) is bought for distribution from people who gather it from forests (often Asian or East European guest workers and even sometimes even retirees who do it for fun and additional income) while V. cyanococcus (V. corymbosum) is imported from commercial farms in Central and Southern Europe, and I suppose is mechanically harvested.
However I have noticed from when visiting small towns in Italy that tomatoes taste way better there than in Norway. Ours don’t have the explosion of taste I felt in Italy. I had no idea a chibatti with just tomato and mozzarella could taste that amazing.
[0] Mineral nutrient composition of vegetables, fruits and grains: The context of reports of apparent historical declines https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088915751...
Contemporaneous analyses of modern versus old crop varieties grown side-by-side, and archived samples, show lower mineral concentrations in varieties bred for higher yields where increased carbohydrate is not accompanied by proportional increases in minerals – a “dilution effect”.
So not that depleted soils don’t deplete vegetables, but the soils they found were not depleted. I wonder if they were focused on the same soils
Strawberries, berries, raspberries, carrots, tomatoes, cucumbers, salads, apples, pears, eggplants, etc. - shiny (do they wax them?), large, unified size, saturated color. Barely any taste, all watery. Grown in perfectly artificial industrial greenhouses.
Not a trace of soil on them, not a trace of imperfections. This is not how fruits and vegetables bought directly from a farmer on a market look and taste like.
sometimes, yes.
If you read the article, none of the quoted sources say anything about depleted soil. It says it in the title, that’s it. Bait.
What it actually says is plant breeding and other agricultural practices caused the nutritional decline. You breed plants for storage, transport, and yield, this is what you get. Large woody or watery plants that don’t taste as good and are diluted. Fruits picked unripe and enormous vegetables that stay fresh for weeks means less value.
It doesn’t seem to have much at all to do with the soil quality going down over decades and more to do with industrial food distribution.
That's the other cognitive bias: We still imagine old school farming, animals walking around the farm, happy farmers working outside. Advertisement and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ag-gag hide the grim reality.
As one of the generational old school farmers in exile, I'm quite aware of how food is produced. Most of it that you eat in unpleasant industrial settings but not the hydroponic greenhouses you imagine, and if not, in a way that exploits extremely poorly compensated labourers to do things machines haven't been perfected for yet.
Having been an environmentalist and activist this is contrary to about 18 years of personal experience. If anything it seems to be a mental manipulation that rationalizes such a claim as it somehow seems to not affect them personally 'right now' that it must not be so bad.
> If you read the article, none of the quoted sources say anything about depleted soil. It says it in the title, that’s it. Bait.
I read it, and this was actually about par-for-the-course type of 'journalism' of what was being written at the time--I spent much of my time trying to understand the correlations between diet and maladies like cancer, diabetes, and heart disease and found very little that went in depth as their simply wasn't much published research on the topic.
It was also written several months before I personally would dive head-long (I did a horticulture apprenticeship in Europe, and went back to the Culinary industry focused on Farm to table concepts) into the DEEP implications of how a broken food supply has damaged Society after having spent time in diagnostics and completed an undergad in biology.
> It doesn’t seem to have much at all to do with the soil quality going down over decades and more to do with industrial food distribution.
Actually it does, albeit very superficially, and its advocating for organic practices as a way to overcome that.
Selective breeding and hybridization is nothing new in Agriculture, what is new is this broken International food supply that can only exist because its highly subsidized which in turn suffocates the smaller more resilient system. It was the former's catastrophic failure under the logistical stress of COVID that many people suddenly saw the value of such a model in masse as CSA memberships sold out in record numbers all over the US, as did meat-shares. All while major Ag corps and Food Corps had to let fields rot and had their animals culled.
I only wrote this because in my my other tab I was reading this article [0] about the decrease in the average height of school children Worldwide due to poor nutrition in school meals--a system where much of the government subsidized, poor nutrient food ends up, at a large markup no less. As the increase in obesity along side it, which is in part a byproduct of processed and nutrient deficient food that messes up with the body's innate satiation feedback system.
The study also coincidences with the take-over of many small farms by large Agra/Pharma corps (1980s) and the wide usage of things like glyphosate resistant plants as staples in processed food. I highly recommend the book 'Harvest of Rage' as it explores much of what had become of Rural America since that take-over and the political climate that has come from it--crystallized by how demagogues like Trump come into office and have the ability to radicalize such a significant amount of people in the process.
0: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/11/201105183840.h...
However, some of the nutrients in the things we eat actually come from the bacteria in the soil, so it stands to reason that both the killing of the soils as well as breeding more sugar rich fruits in general may ultimately have adverse effects to our health.
Imho the taste is a big trade-off, but growing them on water takes way less space and also makes a failed harvest less likely.
https://dutchreview.com/news/innovation/second-largest-agric...
The older I get, you could blindfold me, and I could tell you I'm in my home area just by smell alone. It's almost like it's perfumed.
In the plant, you can taste the struggle.
I agree its a problem, but its clearly what is working in the market. If someone has excellent tasting fruit but can't store or transport it, its a business opportunity (if they can pull it off at scale). Most of the time you can't, hence the popularity of gardening and eating 'in-season' produce
Not only are you going to be helping the local economy, you'll be getting more nutritious food that tastes better and is usually better for the environment.
Do a little research on the farm and especially support the ones that practice bio-dynamic farming. It only takes 5 minutes and can have a big impact on the earth.
The farmers markets others others live near didn't pop out of nowhere. They took time and energy. They return far more value.
And is the supermarket veg only? Most of that is selected to travel and display well rather than for nutrition and taste. What about organic? What about local farmed produce?
There’s a lot of stats here but it’s light on specifics that would help us make choices that would actually help.
Organic isn’t a magic word that means better, and as it has become popular and more industrialized, it means less. There are plenty of questionably healthy practices which count as “organic”.
Something being grown nearby doesn’t make it automatically any better.
Finding local producers that can deliver seasonal heirloom varieties would be maximizing your chances. Growing your own getting your seed from somewhere like the seed savers exchange would have a bit better chances.
That said, a second question is where the current trend is going to lead then. If we are on a steady decline in nutritiousness of our produce what is the projection for 50 years from now?
Companies optimize for what customers will pay for, and everything else falls by the wayside.
Go to Denmark--they're small but packed full of flavor.
I would much rather have the smaller ones. I wonder if the large, crisp, apple-esc strawberries really sell better. They're certainly bigger.
Jokes aside, my personal experience is that strawberries grown in some grandmother's garden in a Nordic country, including Denmark, will beat the mass-produced stuff in the stores when it comes to taste. I can't imagine the same wouldn't apply to Canadian or Russian strawberries, grown under similar conditions, as well.
Apart from that, I had delicious small homegrown ones as a kid, and the occasional almost or totally tasteless medium-sized ones from shops ever since. I always wonder how it feels to be a farmer growing totally tasteless strawberries for a living.
I imagine it’s a bland but fruitful experience.
Plant hormones added
Could be, but arent't there other mechanisms? Like companies optimizing for profit, then using advertisement to lure customers in paying for it?
However, of course I'm just assuming that something is actually nutritious. You're right that I don't actually know that, and that kinda is the point of the article, right? We have all been taught that veggies are good for you, bla bla bla, but in the light of the article you can now at least wonder to what degree that is still as true as it was some years ago.
I would never buy vegetables if they weren’t important for nutrition.
There’s a reason doctors suggest fresh fruits and vegetables, instead of inventing a multivitamin and psyllium husk supplement to replace vegetables.
The argument that it doesn't scale negates the majority of Agriculture's 10K+ year history. This modern system of chemically driven commodification of food is rather new (post WWII). Granted the World's population is larger than what it was back then, which introduces challenges, but the truth is we are facing disease due to the over-consumption of the 'abundance' more than anything else in the West, and the East is following as well.
While I agree the current monetary incentives are not aligned for its success, and the business model that had proven profitable for small scale, local and often organic farms working for the past ~15 years has been essentially curtailed due to COVID, as so many restaurants are limited in capacity or shut down altogether, it is not beyond the realm of possibility to transition how we view Agriculture and Food as a whole. I think this re-calibration is necessary for the challneges we face as Species on Earth moving forward and sincerely believe COVID may be the the disruption we needed to question the 'business as usual' model.
There is a great deal of efficacy to the theory/practice that soil remediation to be an effective deterrent in reducing atmospheric CO2 levels; at its core the way Biodynamics has operated since its inception when it was introduced to the nobility in Austria since WWI is nothing more than a distillation of viable practices that follow sound microbiology methods. It may be attached to a great deal esoteric 'woo' but once you see past what is essentially Marketing what you have is the collective synthesis of 10,000+ of trial and error in Man's relationship and the Stewardship we've had with the Nature. That much cannot be disputed.
People not entirely obsessed with this topic forget that a food supply not dependent on inputs like artificial fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides aren't that old and that some countries never adopted it due to the costs associated.
Explaining the significance of this topic without a great deal of context is entirely daunting but, large concentrated populations in former Empires didn't suffer because their wasn't enough BT corn to feed its cattle, and we would be remiss to forget that much.
Detroit's story with urban farming and the culture it brought back with it is a really amazing story that proves that something deemed not 'commercially viable' is not as important as the resilience of a community and a People if the will exists.
> So that tasteless tomato that you buy at the store might not be the best but it does feed you.
'Feed' is questionable, but what it clearly does is introduces a myriad of chemicals into your body that can and has cause(d) other health issues, all while still disappointing your palate.
Um, food riots were an absolute MAJOR thing in antiquity and right up until only very recently (<50 years). Urban farming doesn't work at scale. Not sure people realize how much scale modern agriculture has.
https://thinkingagriculture.io/innovation-efficiency-chemica...
I do, I've admitted to be obsessed with the topic and have spent a large part of my life dedicated towards it. Look at my posts to see what I've done.
> Um, food riots were an absolute MAJOR thing in antiquity and right up until only very recently (<50 years).
This is very disingenuous and deflecting comment. What is being argued here isn't that food scarcity didn't take place, for that one really should look towards currency debasement, peasant uprisings, and the clashes in slavery and indentured servitude as well caste systems and feudalism as the likely culprits. Disease and blight both Human as well as crop (like the potato famine) also play a significant part in this story.
But what is being argued is that the advent of CURRENT Ag practices, those reliant on those inputs, aren't commonplace as you are making it out to be in the total History of Agriculture as a whole.
But it must be said that scale means nothing when the most obvious byproduct is disease (heart disease and diabetes kills more than thing else in the West and obesity has been endemic for some time) and destruction of the environment along with it. And that's where we are.
> Urban farming doesn't work at scale.
Urban farming, logistically speaking, is pretty much how most of Europe was built. The wars changed a lot of the landscape of many Capitals and metropolitan areas and displaced many farms outwardly as distributions and supply chains expanded, but in my experience with 15+ European countries I lived/worked in most of the country-side is built in such a way where the cities surround the farms/orchards/vineyards outwardly. They served as a sort of nucleus, which makes sense if you were going design a system to serve a growing population and it's civilization.
The exception being coastal areas that seem to have a more spontaneous pattern about them, likely due to port city trade/imports.
I was reading a thing the other day (I'll link to it if I can find it) that was pointing out that something like 70% of the people in the world are still fed today by old school farming. Chemical/industrial agriculture only supplies food for about 30% of the world.
While that is possible, if solely measured by direct to consumer purchases/ I think that may be an understatement as the majority of it is used in the ancillary food system as fodder for livestock (GMO and subsidized corn for the most part).
The numbers are are really hard to get accurately, as the Food Industry as a whole cannot be correctly quantified by its Nature--they span from massive Mega Corp farms and it's food processors to under the radar subsistence local farms and markets that operate on a SystemD model.
I wish it were true, to be honest as it would indicate my revolution/cause has succeeded, my most ambitious target was to get involved and help break into the 50% threshold in my Lifetime: when I started and began this endeavor in my mid teens (the early 2000s) it was nearly ~85% percentage bias towards chemical based conventional Ag.
He's a commercial farmer that's been doing regenerative agriculture for a while now, he's got "the gift of gab" and his stuff is all scientifically grounded and verified in the real world on his working farm in N. Dakota.
Rather than being difficult or expensive the methods he's using save money, increase the quality and quantity of his topsoil year-on-year, and he actually makes more profit per acre than his neighbors.
1) Soil depletion - well documented for decades
2) Increased CO2 in the atmosphere https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2018.00924...
3) Companies are getting "better" at maximizing crop production by weight
4) Very lax regulations
There are a couple research papers and video documentaries that compare on the same area, sometime same hill, the difference in soil: one was marking as the only difference was treatment or zero treatment. Difference was around 5 inches / 15 cm higher soil in non treated parcel...
Now this is exactly the kind of question where everyone is going to find examples that suit their personal view, even with studies backing their point. It so much depends on region and soil, treatment, measurability of molecule effects etc...
Application and especially misapplication of various treatments (add fertilizer and fungicides to your list) can easily do significant harm to the soil ecology, which in turn causes get need for more or more intense treatments.
The easy answer is “never” the better answer is “smarter”.
Modern farming doesn't produce as nutritious fruit and vegetables as that of the past. (Where everything was organic, and the land was managed sensibly.)
Maybe we need to 'fortify' our veg, by adding calcium (chalk), and iron (fine iron filings) to it!
my father, and everyone else in my home town, had his vegetable garden. It was not "organic growth", not even in the insane legal sense where giving bordeaux mixture[0] is considered organic farming.
His stuff still tasted great, because it's not "inorganic" that make things tasteless, it's specific industrial production and distribution processes.
[0] some toxic pollutant heavy metal compounds are 100% acceptable in organic farming, because they have been used for so long https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bordeaux_mixture
Then you'd starve on your golden standard, and probably revert to the 30 year life expectancy most of Humanity had prior to the advent of agriculture. Collectively as a Species I don't think there is a single thing, maybe making potable water widely available and vaccinations, that has contributed to the advent of Modern Society more than agriculture.
Foraging maybe a cute thing for the silver spoon crowds made popular by the guys at Noma/Rene Redzepi (I personally met some of the creative Team when they ate at our restaurant last year) but not only would it never scale, but you'd be screwed for anything to eat for 3-5 months out of the year in most of the World. And with the impact of climate change I doubt you'd last very long.
Organic isn't a panacea, its a re-framing of the relationship one has with their food and by extension ourselves as so many diseases are borne from what has been a literally toxic and hostile relationship.
I hope we get to see an analysis of Global COVID deaths in relation to heart disease, diabetes as well as a study of them as contributors to those deaths considered COVID related.
Agriculture is absolutely a boon to humanity. But that doesn't mean that I need to go along with big agra, does it? I don't agree with oil based fertilisers being used. And monocrops.
It is absolutely the system we have, but its not a good one. Smaller farming, locally sourced food would be a better way to go. I am a fan of permaculture - I'm itching to try this when circumstances permit. This is a way of densely growing food.
If you don't think you like greek salad, Let me tell you.
A Greek salad is only going to taste good in greece. Why? because all the ingredients that make up a greek salad are local and in season around the same time. Its not a complex salad and stands entirely on the strength of the produce that makes up its parts. In greece I found it bursting with flavor. The flavors were sublime with tomatoes rich in umami intermingling with spicy olive oil and savory farmer's cheese. Any version you get in America is going to be a pale insult,
In Ukraine, I gorged myself on blueberries. They tasted just like the ones I used to eat from a wild bush near my childhood house.
I'm currently in Turkey. Same story, grilled vegetables and kabaab give me far mroe satisfaction. the produce is JUST more filling, and satisfying.
American produce SUCKS.
How come? What there is Monsanto for?
TL;DR: there are things that are better, and there are things that are worse. As with any region, you need to know what the region excels at, and use that for best results.
Generally, I feel that US grocery stores make an overly heavy emphasis on shelf life. You can't have a tasty tomato that also has a long shelf life, but you can have a tasty bell pepper that does.
What you're seeing in Greece and Turkey aren't just ingredients. It's the culture: the understanding of what those dishes are _supposed_ to taste like. That just doesn't translate outside its natural habitat. Take the same ingredients, bring them to the US, have a US cook make you a salad, and you more likely than not you will get shit Greek salad. Same with trying to make Texas BBQ in Greece - you will get shit BBQ.
Outside produce, IMO the US has by far the best beer scene in the world, particularly on the coasts. Just 10 years ago there really wasn't much, and nowadays I see US beers in pubs in London. And by "beers" I don't mind piss water like Budweiser, but real, actual world class beers. It's well past the point where Europe is kinda disappointing, beer-wise.
And then you can dip bite-sized chunks of fresh bread, one by one, in the mixture of the olive oil and the vegetable/cheese juices; the sensation is more-or-less indescribable. The price of Greek salad used to be low (compared to main dishes) in restaurants some decades ago, but after noticing that lots of tourists just ate a salad plus the provided bread, the tourist industry raised the price.
If anyone can correct me on that with verifiable sources that would be appreciated.
I am with you on the taste of American produce. In the UK our fruit and veg is not to the standards you would get in sunny parts of the world, however, it is a cut above the bland fruit and vegetables that are sold in the USA. Also, American produce isn't actually that cheap considering that you might expect it to be the land of plenty.
More, I have never liked them. One of my children, though, couldn't be happier than with a bucket of them. Just eats them straight like an apple. How much of what people taste is novelty and affected by age?
I think the general trend in western nations is a decline in nutrient deficiencies despite modern agriculture practices.
Besides there is problem with GMO and pesticides. Later on we all have to pay for that with our health.
Ideally would be to have own food from own farm where you decide and control how to treat vegetables.
So, for example, if new generation fruit is 20% bigger, you're lacking that amount of nutrition in your diet.
And pesticides: if there were healthy for our bodies, we would eat them for our advantages, wouldn't we?
And the herbicide resistance usually allows for the usage of safer herbicides.
Ask yourself: do you have a choice? Are you really able to buy all products for any meal - really, any meal - that they were not treated with pesticides?
Another interesting question: is it possible to buy anywhere (even on the Internet) non-GMO corn? You know, the original one, created by nature which were possible to have 200 years ago?
Yes, absolutely.
It would really depend on what you consider "a pesticide" and if organic alternatives counted and if at that which ones, regardless it is still quite possible, you just have to understand where your food comes from.
> Another interesting question: is it possible to buy anywhere (even on the Internet) non-GMO corn?
Say you're a farmer in the midwest, here's a place to buy non-GMO seed corn to grow on your farm:
https://www.alseed.com/product-category/corn/viking-conventi...
Non-GMO corn is common, the supply chain is very aware if the product is GMO or not.
>You know, the original one, created by nature which were possible to have 200 years ago?
No such thing. Corn/maize has been manipulated by humans for millennia, the wild relative is essentially not recognizable as anything other than an ordinary wild grass species.
> It would really depend on what you consider "a pesticide" and [...]
OK, you're right, I agree here with you 100%.
No, it's much worse: "added GMO resistance" means that you can SPRAY IT MORE without the plant dying.
So you will actually get a more poisonous product in the end due to more spraying.
They did a very subversive wording manipulation and tricked the people.
I don't doubt that soil erosion is a real thing, thats why famrers use cover crops and tilling, but where does said nutrients come from??
Hydroponics seems to focus on salads, and herbs since they grow quicker.
I have not heard of many hydroponic vegetables.
Search for "dutch tomatoe greenhouse" or the like, it is quite impressive from a technical perspective.
According to a German tomatoe farmer also in southern European countries like Italy and Spain more and more tomatoes are grown in stone wool due to a deterioration of soils.
Vitamins and minerals (which you can still find in non-vegetables or supplements)
Fiber (which you can get from whole grains)
Prevents heart diseases (which is not exclusive to vegetables)
Makes a balanced diet (which is pretty vague, what’s so balancing about it?)
Taste good? (there are tastier foods...)
I’m still not seeing the point or hassle of vegetables. If you don’t even cook them right you can destroy the vitamins which are the primary benefit. Not to mention eating the quantity required to reach recommended levels is probably not sustainable.
For someone that doesn’t like eating and cooking, vegetables are a logistical nightmare, a little cup of broccoli only provides like 30 calories and just fills your stomach with useless fiber that makes it a struggle to eat other more efficient nutrient dense foods.
I feel like vegetables are more for spicing up a dish than as a primary source of nutrition.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/carbohydrates/f...
> Makes a balanced diet (which is pretty vague, what’s so balancing about it?)
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you...
A typical fruit or vegetable can have hundreds of phytonutrients and other chemical compounds that are just very hard to recreate in processed foods. This is in addition to the 30 or so micronutrients that we already know of that are essential for certain biological processes. In the black hole that is nutritional research, population and epidemiological studies simply show people who do include a lot of vegetables in their diet tend to have better health outcomes. It's likely you might draw a different conclusion from that research than people involved in the field, but it's probably one of the safest bets we can make when it comes to staying healthy.
As for the science factor, I am a bit suspicious of people who have made nutrition their life topic. I get vibes of eating disorders or very controlling food choices. Like the formerly obese or anorexic person who becomes a dietitian because they did not manage to get rid of the cognitive addiction (they chose a profession where they can talk about food all the time). This might explain the tendency for these research areas to go with diet fads, or promote food very poor in nutrients like lettuce while rarely talking dangers like pesticides or issues how you should even come close to the daily recommended values with modern-grown veggies.
Also, there are some shoddy science practices in highly promoted studies. They often seem to work with mindless questionnaires („how many grams of potato did you eat last week?“). Then there is a huge correlation vs. causation problem. In some countries only rich and educated people have time and money to cook or even think about their food choices.
But given above article about declining nutritional values and the availability of more efficient ways to avoid deficits (supplements, soylent variants) it can indeed be questioned why we are wasting so much time, resources and energy globally on what is essentially a pretty bag of water nowadays.
Additionally, cooking at home (which I did for years), including produce shopping, cutting, preparing, cleaning the waste is a huge investment of time, money and energy. If it doesn’t even lead to better health because you are essentially transforming bags of water into other forms it should probably not be considered more essential than other time consuming hobbies.
After including a soylent variant in my diet I somehow started only buying fruits and vegetables that I’m sure have some nutritional value (i.e. garlic or avocado but no more lettuce or oranges). Otherwise I mostly get them im restaurants, but rather for foodie reasons.
The essence of the article is garbage. But that's SciFi American I guess. It's pretty incoherent.
The reason IQs are rising across the world, including recently in the West, is in part better nutrients in young people and mothers.
Your grandparents could only buy things in season, it cost money for usual vegetables other than potato and carrots, frozen foods are of course great and fortification was ok back then, but it's better these days.
Who cares if carrots and potatoes had some better nutrients, if it's all you ever eat, that's not good.
I'd also like to test some old canned foods compared to today's foods. I don't fully trust old data being accurate especially retold in biased stories like this.