The rise of Africa’s super vegetables | Hacker News Reader

The rise of Africa’s super vegetables

nature.com

75 pointsdanboarder27 comments

There seems to be a significant negative side effect to domestication, and then super-domestication of modern breed optimization and/or genetic engineering.

It kind of makes sense. Whether improvement happens slowly as farmers turn some wild grass into maize with a cultivar 100X the size of a wild variety or happens rapidly as modern breeders optimize for traits on a quick cycle, domestication is narrow optimization. The more you optimize a sales team for sales, the more other things (like knowing what they're selling) de-optimize.

Greyhounds are optimized exclusively for speed. So are thoroughbred horses. These breeds are fast, but often have issues with every other trait. Health, longevity, personality. They're not social compared to a foxhound, trainable compared to a labrador, strong compared to a husky, etc. They are also worse on all these scales than a wolf or a mutt, who have not been optimized for any specific trait.

Modern vegetables we have optimized them for ease of cultivation and shelf life. Modern tomatoes ripen all at once, so they're easy to pick and they last 10X longer, to reduce spoilage. Most taste pretty bad (comparatively), because they have not been optimized for taste.

My point is that (A) we don't really have a very solid understanding of what makes green vegetables healthful and (B) even if we did we are not optimizing for healthiness. (C) In an optimization environment, not optimizing = de-optimizing.

TLDR: Maybe the advantage of traditional greens, or part of the advantage is that these are (currently) non commercial breeds that haven't been "improved" yet.

Underestimating the tremendous skill and knowledge in hybridizing maize. The scientists involved are certainly aware of all you mention. Their task is exactly that of gaining beneficial features without sacrificing variation and sturdiness.

I did some work in maize and other plants while I was in grad school and for a while afterwards. So I speak from intimate experience at a big school, with someone who had just left Monsanto and moved to academia.

There was a lot less careful balancing like you're talking about and a lot more "hey this could increase yields!" because in academia it's publish-or-perish. Things might have been better at Monsanto from a balancing perspective, but it may also have been just as yield-focused.

I'm not saying that NOBODY is trying to balance. But your statement that scientists know this and work on it was completely unqualified, making it sound like they ALL do. Anecdotally I'm not sure that's true.

Of course yield increases are important and exciting. But they have to be delivered in a seed that will resist drought, insects, wind, heat and fungus. No farmer will plant a hybrid twice that fails them once.

In food crops, there are obviously many things being optimized for: yield, color, size, flavor, hardiness, ease/convenience to prepare and eat, pest resistance, toxicity, ability to be picked unripe and keep for a long time, etc.

But as far as I can tell, nutrition is seldom tracked or optimized for, and as a result most of the cheap and widely available foods end up being nutritionally weak compared to wild variants.

Even what flavor optimizations there are tend to favor predictability and wide appeal (that is, not alienating anyone) over complexity or bitterness.

We end up with foods which are large, bland, starchy, watery, seedless and easy to peel, highly uniform.

From a few days ago: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/14/books/review/the-dorito-ef... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9715561

> Except that in pursuit of flavor, it does. “In nature,” Schatzker writes, “flavor never appears without nutrition.” Flavor means nutrition. Omega-3 fatty acids have flavor. Phenylethanol, a chemical compound humans love and often describe as a “rose note” in tomatoes, is made by an essential amino acid, which its presence signifies. Flavor’s purpose is to help us become like ingestive homing pigeons. Our bodies learn to draw connections between flavors and the physiological responses they signal. Through this post-ingestive feedback, latent intelligence in our digestive systems is animated. We can seek out and find what we need, nutritionally, and stop eating once we get it.

> A perfect case is illustrated in an old study, begun in 1926, conducted by a Chicago pediatrician named Clara Davis. She foster-parented 15 babies “who’d never been exposed to ‘the ordinary foods of adult life’ ” and for six years let them eat whatever they wanted, in any order, from a list of 34 foods including “water, potatoes, corn meal, barley, beef, lamb, bone jelly, carrots, turnips, haddock, peaches, apples, fish, orange juice, bananas, brains, milk and cabbage.” They chose balanced diets — sometimes strange ones: One child ate liver and drank a pint of orange juice for breakfast. Their preferences changed often. Another child, who had started off with rickets, was early on given a glass of cod liver oil as medicine. Over the course of his illness, never encouraged, he drank it “ ‘irregularly and in varying amounts’ of his own free will until he was better,” Schatzker writes. This unconscious wisdom has been subsequently studied in goats and calves, showing repeatedly that if the body can make nutritional connections via physical feedback from flavor, it will be a good nutritionist.

> But for the body to develop credible associations — including feeling satiated — between dark greens and iron, or eggs from free-ranging chickens and carotenoids, or tomatoes and phenylethanol, it needs to be communicated with honestly. Otherwise it can’t learn. “All over nature, animals . . . limit their meal size not because they’re stuffed and couldn’t possibly eat another bite, but because they’ve hit a secondary compound wall,” i.e. met nutritional needs beyond calories. Synthetic-flavor technology makes bland ingredients attractive without supplying the myriad benefits of the real thing. The twin forces of flavor dilution and fake flavor have short-circuited the biological basis for mutable appetite.

> But as far as I can tell, nutrition is seldom tracked or optimized for

Nutrition optimizations are a harder sell than lots of other optimizations (most of the other optimizations don't rely on end-consumer awareness to pay off -- in many cases, consumer ignorance is beneficial for them.) But there are definitely firms working on nutrition-related optimizations. [0]

[0] e.g., for a couple examples from one firm, http://www.arcadiabio.com/technologies/nutritional-oils and http://www.arcadiabio.com/technologies/enhanced-quality-grai...

I absolutely don't want to diminish the work of breeders (and also genetic engineers). They have done magic, they're legit scientists and they are the reason we haven't starved to death even though the human population is at plague level.

I'm just pointing out what I think is a rule of thumb (not just in biology). By aggressively optimizing something, you are probably diminishing many of the things that you are not explicitly optimizing for. Breeders are sensitive to farmers' (their customers') demands and they are sensitive to supermarkets'. They demand breeds that sell and are otherwise are economical.

Ultimately consumers are pretty responsible. We are visual creatures. How thugs look affects our decisions. When we reason and when we talk we'll talk about all the things that are important. For food, that's taste.

But when we make decisions our instinct is that looks good = is good. We go for the best looking bananas, fish, or even mates. We buy more sweetcorn corn when its nicely peeled and presented even though it's not good to peel corn until you plan to cook it.

I strongly suspect we can quantify this with information theory. Genetic engineering and rapid selective breeding leading to monocultures reduces the genetic entropy that provides resilience or something.

Interesting! The market is doing more selection that the breeders are...by buying superficially better-looking bananas

>>Greyhounds are optimized exclusively for speed. So are thoroughbred horses. These breeds are fast, but often have issues with every other trait. Health, longevity, personality.

I don't think you have come across many greyhounds. They are by and large lovely dogs with a great personality.

Greyhounds tend to be more hyper than other breeds which is generally considered a negative personality trait. They can still be great dogs, but so can the vast majority of dogs out there.

The point is breeders cared less about hyper than they did speed.

I accept that. Maybe it was a badly chosen example.

The first plant mentioned, Solanum scabrum, is native to Australia (per a paper coauthored by the researcher mentioned in the article [1]). The wikipedia article for that species [2] misses that citation for the origin, but discusses the cultivation and selection as a leaf crop.

[1] http://www.researchgate.net/publication/235322354_Exploiting...

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

What's needed is some sort of branding strategy for taste. Stores love premium products. They have a much higher profit margin and they reduce price sensitivity on the mainstream products. "These expensive carrots are $4/bunch, these other ones at $2/bunch must be a good deal," even if $2/bunch isn't a good deal for carrots.

That strategy has worked well in the branded section of the grocery store; I'm sure they'd love to extend it into the produce section too.

Actual brand names wouldn't work; that would imply larger farms, which worry more about volume and consistency than taste.

Sort of like the labels "local" and "organic". Sometimes those are tastier, but usually the difference is imperceptible. It's also really annoying to pay the price premium for those labels when you're just looking for a possible side effect.

I'm guessing that it would probably be a store initiative rather than a supplier or industry one. It would take a while to establish the trust for such a brand and easy to overuse and destroy it, but I think it could be a great win-win for stores and taste-conscious consumers.

This is already starting to happen to an extent. Apples are one of the fruits that that had strong naming/branding of varieties early on. They also had pretty, resilient, cheap fruit that tasted terrible (looking at you red delicious!) early on.

Growers' consortiums invested in marketing varieties from their regions pretty successfully (pink lady, gala). Regional consortiums have sometimes had success with these kinds branding exorcises, either citing the region or the breeds.

Anyway, you can't copyright a breed but you can keep all the trees to yourself (for a while) and you can trademark the name. These two things are allowing producers to create produce "brands" that taste good and command a premium.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/11/10/358530280/wan...

All that said, shelf life and cultivation ease are huge money savers. "Real tomatoes" could cost three or four times the price of those anemic supermarket tomatoes just because of spoilage. "Cultivation ease" is a basket of traits, ripening all at once (terrible for taste and nutrition), plant height, disease/pest resistance, pesticide tolerance (Monsanto's world famous "roundup ready" crops) etc. They can add up to a lot.

How much of a premium would people pay for worse looking tomatoes that need to be eaten by tomorrow? Ultimately demand drives these things.

What's wrong with Red Delicious? I usually peel them (thick skin), but otherwise they are crispy and sweet (rather than tart), pretty much exactly how I expect my apples.

What I've noticed with different specialized lines of fruit is that early-on, varieties tend to show up in small niches where they succeed because they taste great. As their popularity increases, more growers and larger buyers start to become involved at which point the exceptional taste of the fruit variety often gets diluted. I'm sure this is partially because of the harvesting process for larger tonnage buy volumes. But, I'm also guessing that 'tweaks' to that fruit also start getting applied for yield/producability etc. In my area, Red Delicious was mostly a bad mealy/bland texture, Fuji's started out great but are now are sometimes good/bad.

It will be interesting to see if a controlling interest in the 'brand name' of a fruit variety ends up managing the quality of a fruit.

Unless you know completely what you are doing on the gene level, if a species can have more than one desirable trait(phenotype) then it is a gamble to expect that optimizing for one will not diminish any of the rest.

Somehow as a society we understand this, the team sports we create require a blend of abilities that are nearly impossible to find in a single individual -- we find this out after the fact when we get good at optimizing the teams for winning. In folklore/fiction the superheroes are only optimized on a limited set of abilities or if they are too super we throw in "an Achilles heel"/"a Kryptonite".

That's pretty much always.

We never know exactly everything we are doing at the gene level (when breeding) and food plants always have more than one desirable trait.

These very same plants used to be very common in Indian cuisine too...

Solanum nigrum - http://www.flowersofindia.net/catalog/slides/Black%20Nightsh... Was a common home cooked item in Tamil Nadu (South India) called Manathakali Keerai in Tamil

Vigna unguiculata - called Karamani in Tamil, is also a very common vegetable in home cuisine of Tamil Nadu https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oifwbfSrKWA

Corchorus olitorius - http://www.flowersofindia.net/catalog/slides/Nalta%20Jute.ht... called Punakku, however is used only as traditional cattle feed and considered lowly for human consumption for unknown reasons and is a slang used to insult a person for foolishness or low IQ

Amaranthus - Mollai Keerai Moringa oleifera - Murungai, very popular and can be seen grown in most homes in rural/semi-urban Tamilnadu, and very popular in Sambhar - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKT--cbBmhk

Nice done connection references to the Indian subcontinent. Appreciate the links.

Interesting.

The article didn't try (as far as I saw) to say anything about the flavor of nighthade, which would have been interesting (as a Northern European, I have no idea if I can source this locally).

The Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_nightshade) said:

The leaves also contain high levels of vitamin A, B, and C, and phenolics and alkaloids, including cocaine, quinine, nicotine, and morphine

which was also interesting. I wonder if those levels are high enough to make the plant controversial, didn't do any further research.

The article does mention a few times that all of the vegetables in question are dark leafy greens, so they are extremely bitter. That's why so much effort is being put into recipe research, they aren't particularly palatable veggies on their own.

Palatable is also a cultural bias. You like familiar flavors and dislike unfamiliar flavors, generally. (I sometimes sum this up as "Asians ferment soybeans and Europeans think it's disgusting. Europeans ferment milk and Asians think it's disgusting.")

One big problem I've noticed is that American tastes are so strongly driven by junk food and highly processed factory products that actual fresh vegetables taste alien and weird.

I didn't know one could eat Solanums. I was always under the impression that nightshade (and the foliage of most members of the Solanaceae family) were just about all poisonous to some extent.

From Wikipedia: "The species most commonly called nightshade in North America and Britain is Solanum dulcamara, also called bittersweet or woody nightshade. Its foliage and egg-shaped red berries are poisonous, the active principle being solanine, which can cause convulsions and death if taken in large doses. The black nightshade (S. nigrum) is also generally considered poisonous, but its fully ripened fruit and foliage are cooked and eaten in some areas."

This family also contains a fair amount of psychoactive members most of which are also poisonous at the right dose. (Tobacco and Jimson Weed for instance and in fact some Solanums...http://sarahannelawless.com/2010/05/10/solanum/ ).

But.. there is nightshade, for sale in the market in the picture. My world view on Solanums has been shattered.

The agroecological benefits for this type of research are astounding. If you look at pictures of teosinte (O.G. corn) and compare it to modern varieties, the gains in terms of grain size (for feed corn), productivity, and resilience are astounding. Granted, those gains come from 1000's of years of agricultural evolution and a relatively new agro-industrial research partnership, but the fact remains that if we were to support agroecological solutions, like researching Africa's "super vegetables," the net benefits for our global food systems are potentially as important as the Green Revolution.

Edit: However, no matter what happens, it's important to always frame this research in terms of what people and communities, not businesses, actually want, and to keep in mind local food sovereignty.

Seed preservation and keeping gene banks is critical to the long-term food system. As the article points out, agribusiness is good for yield and cost, but bad for diversity. And lack of diversity leads to drastic collapse.

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