Well, who here buys their vegetables based on nutrition? Who even knows how nutritious their particular vegetables are (probably not if you have a lab)?
Companies optimize for what customers will pay for, and everything else falls by the wayside.
Best strawberries in the world are found in a small valley on the west coast of Norway where the combination of late summer, cool nights and long summer days with lots of sunlight makes for a long ripening process and perfect strawberries.
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.
In Paris in 1985 (only time I've been there) you could buy massive strawberries from street stalls by the kilo, the size of a small apple, cheap, and super-delicious. I don't know where they came from or why I've never seen them here in Australia.
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 remember a joke from my childhood, where an American tourist is browsing a local farmer's market commenting how small everything is compared to American produce, so when the tourist sees watermelons and asks “and what are these?”, the annoyed vendor just says “oh, they're just peas”.
In the US, companies optimize for what they can industrialize and ship out to an entire country regardless of locality. And customers want is changing pretty quickly. But for me, the “standard” grocery store produce aisle hasn’t changed much at all in the last few decades - mostly just organics that again are optimized for national supply chains and away from taste.
In a way, I would say I do - but not to a point where I buy completely untasty stuff just for the nutritional value. But I love it when I see, say, a beautiful cauliflower that looks fresh and tasty not only because I'm looking forward to the pleasure of tasting it but also because somewhere in the back of my head something tells me "that's good stuff".
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’m not sure anyone can, even with a lab. I think the metabolic and behavioral impact of many plant molecules is completely unclear at this point. We know what simple micronutrients are necessary to prevent obvious deficiency disorders, and you can take those in a pill today, but there are many more subtle disorders.
There’s a reason doctors suggest fresh fruits and vegetables, instead of inventing a multivitamin and psyllium husk supplement to replace vegetables.
There seems to be some common ground (even if soil is in dispute!) on high yield dilution though. The abstract states:
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”.
> Comparisons with matching archived soil samples show soil mineral content has not declined in locations cultivated intensively with various fertilizer treatments.
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
Blueberries that taste the same but are transparent in the middle. Tomatoes that tase water. Cucumber that look great and almost tasteless. You don't know what you are missing if you have never tasted the "real" deal.
Sure, but this is not about taste in the first place, it's about the nutritional value of your produce. After all, eating fulfills more than one purpose.
The kind of taste changes we're talking about here are not subjective though. E.g. they're not about "I like it more or less" but e.g. about the taste changing from sweeter to less sweet.
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.
Taste is subjective only to a very small degree. Most people would dislike the taste of rotten meat or spoiled milk. If taste would be fully subjective it could serve no purpose and there would be no reason for its existence.
I know you cannot be serious. If taste was not subjective there would hardly be the variety in meals we see all over the world.
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.
That's kinda true. Alternative, if you personal life style allows for it, you may start growing your own tomatoes -- you might not get them all year around that way, but the taste difference is so worth it.
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.
I don't believe table salt added to cucumber, tomato, or anything else is bad for most people. Likewise certain fats in reasonable quantities is probably quite good for you. It's also delicious. I would say that dousing anything in syrup, ketchup, or any standard salad dressing with sugar is a bad idea. Even honey is questionable.
I think salt and fat are not as unhealthy as people have made them out to be over recent decades. Especially considering what foods people choose to eat to replace the lost calories that usually come from fats.
Just like software. If there is bad design, several bugs on your first run and you can't find the documentation: It is probably just the top of the iceberg.
I am certain that a vast majority of people have never tasted a "real" tomato.
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 there's also a genetic component. I planted Roma seeds from a store bought tomato, grew the plant, and they still didn't have much flavour compared to any other garden tomato I've tried.
Yup. Store varieties are bread for exactly this: transportation. I read somewhere that unfortunately the taste and transportability are mutually exclusive when you go through traditional selective breeding.
Tomatoes are often hybrids, so growing from seed you'll be missing some of the characteristics of the parent. Not sure if this applies to roma tomatoes.
Can confirm. Does this also apply to canned Tomatos or are those allowed to ripe on soil, because damage didn’t matter? I think they taste better and I’ve Heard- than many top chefs prefer them over “fresh” tomatoes for cooking.
If tomatoes need to be red when they are canned, then I am going to make an educated guess that what you get in a can is truly ripe, red tomatoes canned near the farm operation. Never thought about that until now, makes sense though. I knew fruits and veggies are harvested pre-ripe for shipping and handling purposes, but canned don't need anything like that.
I tried a few canned tomatoes I don't think they are good. Maybe it will be good if it is produced in the farm. I believe most of them are produced in a factory, then you still need to transport tomatoes from the farm to a factory safely.
Good canned tomatoes are canned very quickly after being picked. They'll beat most supermarket tomatoes. They'll lose to fresh tomatoes picked at an appropriate time and eaten fresh.
Canned tomatoes are really interesting. They are a different variety of tomatoes (Roma tomatoes) that can be picked via machine. That's also why they taste differently. The automated picking is why they are cheaper (plus the variety is better for quantity). One wouldn't be able to sell the automatically picked tomatoes uncanned since their skin gets damaged.
I buy fresh Roma Tomatoes at Costco all the time. They come in some horrible plastic packaging that keeps them safe and with the vines still on. Not as good as home grown, but not terrible.
I think they're picked right when they start to ripen then finish in the box/transit.
There is an organisation called "The Farmers Own Market" (but in swedish). The rule is 250 km max distance from farm to market. The people selling has to be involved in the physical farming to be allowed to sell there. There are also webstores that sell for pickup at the farm or a central place in bigger towns (usually a parking outside a shopping mall).
Well, dunno about where you live, but around here, "farmers' markets" are actually attended by genuine small farmers, who genuinely grow the genuine produce they sell. Multiple vendors at the local markets are also Community-Supported Agriculture farms, and we've personally had shares from one in recent years (though not currently).
Of course, "around here" is in a rural area, surrounded by...farms.
I think it's not just that produce is picked unripe. As some sibling commenters say, there might be more to it. Either genetic, through selection, or chemical, through whatever they put in the soil for it to grow bigger / quicker.
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.
When I was a kid (35+ years ago) we used to buy tomatoes from a greenhouse locally. They had some boxes on the back with second sorting greens and a box for money. We grabbed 3-4 bags full of tomatoes, left the money and by the time we were home there was only two bags left. They were so good, I haven't seen anything remotely similar to that in the store. I wish I knew the name of those tomatoes, I would love to grow them myself.
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.
Well, even growing your own tomatoes might not help that much. Modern hybrid varietals are breeded for color uniformity which removed the taste. Let me tell you it is quite hard to source real heirloom varietals: there are tons of new "heirloom" varietals, but those are basically just modern varietals with some mutations that makes them not look like industrial ones.
Unfortunately lots of them were lost back in 50s and 60s with advent of seed companies. Also in Europe selling seeds of non approved varietals is not possible. Legislation is changing slowly, but a lot of diversity is lost forever.
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.
Our local supermarket does sell locally grown heirloom tomatoes, but because they are not perfectly round and not even in colour the entire section for four different heirloom tomatoes is about one tenth the size for the standard tomatoes (greenhouse and field).
> Reason being is that they are picked when they are green and they "ripen" by the time they get to the store shelf.
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.
> tomatoes sold in supermarkets taste like plastic
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.
> Reason being is that they are picked when they are green
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've heard that bananas can be caused to ripen rapidly by exposing them to ethylene gas. This means you can transport them green so they don't bruise and then quickly turn them yellow when they arrive at the destination for sale (like in the last warehouse).
Yes, but fruits and vegetables that are quickly ripened with ethylene remain much less tasty than those that ripened on the plant.
(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).
> 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 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.
I don't doubt your experiences, but organic farmers markets are not really comparable to the original discussion of "tomatoes sold in [UK] supermarkets".
I'm in the UK and I grow my own veg. The small on-the vine tomatos from Tesco are very acceptable - fragrant and sweet. The small cherry vine tomatoes from Waitrose are luscious.
... Not as good as a warm tomato straigh off the plant on a sunny day, but not far off.
I sometimes think tomatoes are all born with a fixed amount of flavour in them, and the larger they grow the more dilute that flavour becomes. Because I agree - the little ones are fine.
Smaller tomatoes taste better because they are easier to ship without damaging (they're lighter and have a much lower mass to surface area ratio). As such, producers and supply chains don't have to go to the same extremes (breeding them to be tough rather than flavorful/picking them completely green) to get them to the supermarket shelf intact.
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.
I don’t know where else they have them, but in Canadian supermarkets we have vine-ripened tomatoes and they are actually sold on the vine in small clusters.
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.
You can get usually decent tomatoes in the UK at local greengrocers / corner shops. Not as good as the ones you can get in France or Italy in season, but a lot better than supermarket ones.
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 grow multiple kinds of cucumbers each year and it took me a while to find one that stays watery and mild instead of getting lemony and overly flavorful. I like both but for a lot of recipes I want a real background kind of flavor.
It's saddening how fruits have lost its flavour. I'm thrilled to eat fruits/vegetables every time I go back to my grandfather town.
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 want to enjoy eating, I don't care if it's 25% smaller.
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.
I'm kinda into tomatoes: the same variety can result different taste and nutritional value (dry matter content) depending on the growing conditions.
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).
> Blueberries that taste the same but are transparent in the middle.
These are simply different species: The European blueberry (Vaccinium myrtillus) has dark meat, the North American blueberry (Vaccinium cyanococcus) has whiteish meat.
I understand the American name for Vaccinium myrtillus is in fact "bilberry".
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.
Some things are not too bad. Here in Norway it is pretty easy to pick wild blue berries or easy raspberries when out walking. The ones I get in the store don’t actually taste that different. But it probably differs from where you live. I thought in particular when living in the US that stuff tended to be really large great looking but quite tasteless.
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.
I would argue that it's less relevant whether produce has become less nutritious than in previous years, but that the more relevant question is whether it is still nutritious enough. There's not point in having excess vitamins, say, if most of it will not even be absorbed by your body.
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?
In Italy it's happening the same phenomenon. Big supermarkets are selling bigger tasteless fruits and vegetables, while little shops keep selling the little nutritious version.
If you want to grow crops in a low CO2 environment, just grow them in a greenhouse with near zero ventilation. The CO2 levels in the greenhouse will drop rapidly, and the plants will grow much slower. Don't add mulch or fresh topsoil, because that gives off a lot of carbon, especially when disturbed.
Well it kills some living organism. These don't develop. It has a result on environnement including soil. Now it's it measurable everywhere? No.
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...
Soil is alive, and plants have various direct and indirect symbiotic relationships with things in the soil.
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!
> Where everything was organic, and the land was managed sensibly
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.
I agree. I actually don't think organic is as good as whatever natural methods were used. I would prefer wild or food grown on less 'managed' land - that would be the gold standard for me.
> I agree. I actually don't think organic is as good as whatever natural methods were used. I would prefer wild or food grown on less 'managed' land - that would be the gold standard for me.
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.
That's all a bit harsh! My gold standard is fair surely! I don't eat like that often, but I can dream!
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.
So is it the soil or the new fast-growing varieties that are the problem? They talk about both issues interchangeably.
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.
Buy seasonal food that is actually grown seasonally (just because you bought a tomato in the summer doesn’t mean it was actually grown any differently). Buy heirloom varieties.
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.
FYI the majority of tomatoes grown in temperate Europe (most notably the Netherlands) is grown hydroponically in a substrate like stone wool.
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.
I grow hydroponic tomatoes for fun and they taste much better than supermarket tomatoes. It's probably to do with letting them ripen on the plant and build up their sugar content rather than anything to do with growing technique
There’s a cognitive bias where if you tell a certain kind of person a negative story about an environmental issue they will believe it, regardless of its content.
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.
On the other hand many plants aren't even getting in contact with soil any more and just get some liquid fertilizer in a greenhouse.
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.
Very few food crops are grown in hydroponics, and when they are, it's quite likely they have higher nutrition content than their conventional commercial crop counterparts.
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.
> There’s a cognitive bias where if you tell a certain kind of person a negative story about an environmental issue they will believe it, regardless of its content.
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.
There is a stats podcast from the BBC that examines some of these stats. In one of the episodes they look at the Tomatos in the UK. In short while things changed in that particular instance the previous numbers of certain nutrients were actually problematic to other factors(Sorry I'd have to listen again to remember what exactly. I believe it was either energy/coal or war related, but don't quote me on that).
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.
In the Netherlands we grow a lot of bell peppers on 'water'. Those sweet pepers are much larger than the ones grown on soal. But the only difference is the taste and the thickness of the skin. They might even be a little more healthy because they were grown in a lab like controlled environment.
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.
I am often shocked by the tastelessness of food in the Netherlands -- in contrast to anywhere I have ever lived. But the future is promising, as there is so much room for optimization.
I come from a rural "wasteland" in Croatia. The soil is very infertile to say the least. Yet, the same plants that survive there taste much much better locally then the "same" ones from presumably better controlled environment.
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.
I didn’t read the article. But I’ve always been under the assumption because of being told all my child hood that frozen veggies are healthier because they are snap frozen. They ripen, then get picked and cleaned and frozen. While “fresh” is picked early and ripens on its way to the store.
The alternative is not much better. If we didn't breed those plant for transportability and storage, then <1% would get to enjoy them.
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
> Dirt Poor: Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutritious?
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.
With more resistance to pesticides and herbicides, farmers can add more of these substances to plants, and that will incidentally kill other lifeforms in the soil ecosystem that affect the nutritional content of the soil.
Resistance to pests, not pesticides. This makes producers use fewer or no pesticides, not more. A naturally occuring pest resistance gene will be copied from one organism to the crop in question.
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?
>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?
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:
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.
This can be both true and irrelevant at the same time. The focus should be on the key nutrients for each food, that is, those food/nutrient pairs that significantly contribute to the required daily values, especially nutrients that the general population is deficient in.
I think the general trend in western nations is a decline in nutrient deficiencies despite modern agriculture practices.
The decline of deficiencies has a lot to do with fortifying processed foods with various nutrients, and generally food being cheap enough that poverty is more associated with obesity than starvation.
Obesity and nutrients deficiency aren't mutually exclusive. e.g. "Studies have shown that many people with obesity have inadequate intake of iron, calcium, magnesium, zinc, copper, folate and vitamins A and B12, likely as a result of poor diet quality"
I realized when I started traveling extensively how tasteless the food is. In thailand I just assumed they just knew how to better prepare the ingredients. Then I went to greece and had a proper greek salad.
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.
I don't know how much could be placebo effect. I have been in Ukraine for a few months and I am currently in Turkey as well, and it is entirely possible to buy gross/unripe/tasteless produce here, and especially Ukraine. I think you might be experiencing the 'grass is always greener' effect because there is definitely good produce if you know where to find it all over the United States, which is a humongous nation.
I was in kyiv and lviv. To be fair, I stayed in the more affluent areas so I'm sure I got access to the higher quality stuff. still, even in the restaurants I noticed a marked increase in quality when it came to salads.
Don't know if I'd extend it to _all_ American produce, but some of it does suck very bad indeed, especially tomatoes. I grew up in an area famous for its tomatoes, so my standards for what constitutes a good tomato are impossibly high. The only tomato that's not a complete abomination in northwestern US are those Kumato tomatoes that Trader Joe's has sometimes. On the other hand the United States quite possibly has by far the best apples in the world, if you're willing to pay like $2.50-3/lb - that's how much newer, patented varieties such as Sweetango cost. Bell peppers are about the same. US onions are great (and huge). US garlic is total inedible shit. US corn on the cob is great. Asparagus is great as well, when in season. Some varieties of strawberries are great, mysteriously, even if they aren't fully ripe.
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.
> The flavors were sublime with tomatoes rich in umami intermingling with spicy olive oil and savory farmer's cheese.
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.
I was once told by someone that watches TV all day that the Greek Salad originated as a mandatory menu item in Greece, hence this 'Greek Salad'. I researched this online and found no evidence for it. There was no grand dictator that once decreed that every restaurant must have salad on the menu.
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.
The large retail chains in Europe sell what I call porn-fruits and porn-vegetables. Especially places like EDEKA, REWE, Kaufland in Germany.
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.
Not the main commentator, I think farmers market or the weekly markets that happen in few places in cities are good and depending on when they have been imported asian/turkish stores can have fresh veggies(debatable), or if you are in a small town you could actually have a small local market nearby.
"Deutsche Piccolo" tomatoes from Kaufland taste quite good. They are also the most expensive ones from there.
But honestly the cheaper ones aren't worth their money, might as well buy colored water.
It's worse! In fact they get these perfect ones by throwing away the imperfects. You can but a lot of fruit and veg for animal feed; marked grade B or C at a fraction of the grade A price - because they are blemished or ugly.
That's likely not due to how they are grown but the genetics of the plant. If you took the seeds for one of them and grew it in your garden with sunshine and birdsong it would still look and taste the same. That's because good looking produce sells better than good tasting one, so that's how commercial plants are bred: for transportation and looks instead of taste.
Unlikely: most hybrid vegetables do not breed true. If you take seed from one of these vegetables and plant it it is most likely to be sterile (like that classic hybrid, the mule) or else revert to form of one of its ancestors, producing small or even inedible fruits.
I thought I didn't like tomatoes until I came here to Serbia. So much flavor. Though this only applies when they're in season (eg. in summer) - currently they're out of season so they're selling the plastic ones again I was exposed to in the U.S.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 312 ms ] threadCompanies 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.
[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
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.
[1] https://duijvestijntomaten.nl/en/packaging/
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.
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?
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.
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.
https://www.seedsavers.org/
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.
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.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csz3ry
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
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.
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 think the general trend in western nations is a decline in nutrient deficiencies despite modern agriculture practices.
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41366-018-0143-9
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
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.
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.