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Comment by hetspookjee | Hacker News Reader

It makes me sad that we need ultrasonic washers for fruit and vegetables.

For most of agricultural history people didn't eat raw vegetables at all, and only some raw fruits. Before the advent of modern agriculture night dirt was a common fertilizer and a serious vector for disease. It's still unsafe to ear raw fruits and vegetables in parts of the world with bad sanitization. I know a few people who have gotten seriously ill consuming fresh pressed fruit juice in North Africa.

It's a nice anecdote, but I've lived and travelled in various African countries and never been sick from consuming fruit, vegetables or pressed juice. I'd be much more worried about eating poorly butchered and stored meat. The idea people throughout history didn't eat raw fruits and vegetables is also quite wrong.

Again, after living in rural communities, they largely eat what they can get - which includes a lot of raw fruits and vegetables. Of course meat is important, but no more important than nuts, berries, tubers etc.

Here's a 2017 study from Egypt about the frequency of parasite cysts on fresh produce[1]. Here's another about salmonella generally in North Africa[2]. Both irrigation and washing of produce use water that may not be safe to drink. This isn't some anecdotal issue I'm bringing up.

[1] https://aeji.journals.ekb.eg/article_17804.html

[2] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2017.0156...

The only anecdote here is yours, because food-borne diseases are very common and a significant source of misery across the developing world

(That is, if you don't have undetected Helminthiase or some other disease)

> It's a nice anecdote, but I've lived and travelled in various African countries and never been sick from consuming fruit, vegetables or pressed juice.

That's all and good, but how do you even know that? One can live with parasites for quite a while before noticing any symptoms.

I come from a 'third world' country. We really wash our fruits and specially our vegetables. Even though they might come from large farming operations, you can still have people without proper sanitization handling them after taking a dump.

Heck, there are still places where you cannot enter a body of water without worms piercing your skin and having a party in your intestines. Our elementary school curriculum was pretty extensive on diseases and specially parasites.

> The idea people throughout history didn't eat raw fruits and vegetables is also quite wrong.

They did. People also died a lot. Although a berry growing somewhere in the wilderness will probably have less of a chance of carrying diseases or parasites that infect humans (on the account of not having encountered other humans). After farming? All bets are off.

> Although a berry growing somewhere in the wilderness will probably have less of a chance of carrying diseases or parasites that infect humans (on the account of not having encountered other humans).

Maybe less of a chance, still deadly.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echinococcus_multilocularis

We don’t spray pesticides on fruit to make people sad. Without them then fruit would be inaccessible to many people.

Where I live, fruit and vegetable farmers are routinely required to discard significant portions of the harvest per USDA mandates… maybe we could find some middle ground between poisoning people for obscene harvests and allowing pests to decimate crops?

> Without them then fruit would be inaccessible to many people.

This is just a lucky side effect, I'm 100% sure that main goal is for the pesticides industry just take their cut on the producers margin. By growing those margins, sure, but it's not something that should be forgotten.

No, the main goal of the pesticides industry is to supply chemicals that kill of various pests (insects, fungi etc) that would otherwise destroy a significant proportion of the harvest.

Without these pesticides food would be significantly more expensive and less accessible to many people.

I agree that we should talk about moving away from chemical dependent farming but we need to be aware of the full picture in order to avoid glib solutions.

I realize I should have been more nuanced, but you should too. The increase of production is undeniable, I'm not challenging that, and introduction of pesticides in the second half the the 20th century lowered drastically the cost of living of many. But the pesticide industry has become predatory, and their concerns have not been public welfare for a very long time.

Their concerns were never public welfare. They are companies. Their concerns are profit and market share.

I think what you are saying is that they have turned to predatory behaviour in order to grow profits and protect market share.

Your point would have been better made if you had said just that, with examples.

Without pesticides we could create more resistant cultivars.

I think we do both.

Without antibiotics we could cultivate more resistant humans. That's probably not a situation anyone wants, pencillin was huge for a reason.

Now looking into alternate forms of resistances while still enjoying modern treatments, theres an idea.

Bad analogy. Cultivating more resistant humans would raise a bunch of ethical questions.

That's the point of the analogy. Use of pesticides in some part allows us to have stable and cheap access to food. There are similar ethical arguments to be had about restricting pesticides.

Most wealthy westerns only see/know abundance. Pesticides, GMOs, these things prevent famine in most of the world.

> Without pesticides we could create more resistant cultivars.

Doesn't follow. We can create them today. Pretty sure farmers would be very happy on not having to dedicate resources to pest control.

It's probably not even feasible long term. Pests can and do adapt. The main problem is monoculture.

Also, those resistant cultivars are probably not going to do so well when it comes to other variables: shelf life, taste, etc.

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