What National Geographic says scientists say, "Scientists say that the root of the problem lies in modern agricultural processes that increase crop yields but disturb soil health. These include irrigation, fertilization, and harvesting methods that also disrupt essential interactions between plants and soil fungi, which reduces absorption of nutrients from the soil. These issues are occurring against the backdrop of climate change and rising levels of carbon dioxide, which are also lowering the nutrient contents of fruits, vegetables, and grains."
Modern media in a nutshell.
https://www.soils.org/news/science-news/lead-contamination-g...
And I am comparing to bio carrots we buy in Switzerland, so can't go much higher than that when shopping (apart from farmers markets maybe but that depends what kind of farm).
Maybe its about transport and premature harvest, like bananas - if you ever taste some in exotic locations where they harvest them in the morning, its hard to ever enjoy bleak taste of those available in western world.
On one hand it allows year-round affordable fruit and vegetables to lie in our stores. On the other hand it means we are now stuck buying tasteless bags of water.
It is an erosion of the 'middle class' of products that economies of scale across all products seem to cause. There are only two kinds of product left: the small-scale artisanal extremely pricy product (e.g. farmer's market), and the mass-produced MBA-optimized to death commercial product. Any product that becomes 'too successful' and reaches economies of scale falls victim to this and is subsequently repeatedly penny-pinched until nothing of value is left.
I.e. apart from the general trade-off problem between maximum yield and maximum taste, things are also exacerbated by the big supermarket chains demanding varieties that are delivering a "consistent taste year-round". As even the best tomatoes are only mediocre-tasting during winter, that apparently means standardising on mediocre-tasting tomatoes all year round, instead of mediocre tomatoes during winter and tasty tomatoes in the summer.
Similarly, I've started buying a lot more organic fruits and vegetables. The organic strawberries have way more taste than non-organic strawberries.
All kidding aside: please people read the full article, there's enough in there to at least partially support the claim quoted by the OP. Just not in that first paper.
It not only also offers significant weighting to breeds, but ultimately even rejects the idea of a temporal decline in nutritional value! "Based on the available limited data, and due to variations in sampling, analytical techniques and likely differences in growing location and season, no definitive temporal trends could be established."
Basically the observed differences could be easily explained by other simple factors than a mysterious decline, including breed selection. Grow less nutritious crops, get less nutritious food.
For future, I'll try to be more mindful.
They’ve used a single paper to write a broader article. You can find other papers that justify the other claims that the article makes.
Being a popular article as opposed to an article in a scientific journal means references are not also necessary, although I suspect if you reached out to the author they would provide you with a list of references they used.
Also, the idea that the media used to be better is even more laughable. In fact, popular science media, with all its flaws, is better than its ever been. The reality is popular science is just hard to do.
It’s really frustrating that this sort of lazy and dismissive middlebrow comment that misrepresents the article ends up stuck to the top.
That probably has something to do with it. However, plants don't make nutrients out of thin air. They cited samples that found the nutrient content in the soil at "regenerative" farms was much higher than other organic farms. It seems crazy to me to think that soil quality wouldn't be one of the main causes, on top of all the practices to get higher yield out of a smaller area. Which was discussed in the article.
That's still modern media in a nutshell though. Who are these "scientists" and also "experts" referenced in the next paragraph? They don't go into that but in true NG fashion they have some pretty pictures.
That said, from what I understand producers changed varieties to get veggies that are easier to grow, feed, and ship using using industrial ag processes. And those processes do require more irrigation and -- especially -- fertilization. Sorry I don't have any sources for that right now; I went to school for journalism.
> Mounting evidence from multiple scientific studies
It's not based on a single paper. The article may have been prompted by the publication of that paperm, but it is not limited to it.
Modern reading comprehension in a nutshell?
"Both Sides" cynicism feels centrist but it actually kills centrism because it turns centrism into a losing media strategy.
Listening to both sides is important to avoid selective information bias, but refusing to pick a winner or, worse, always picking the midpoint is a terrible policy that is responsible for enabling the current degradation in the public discourse.
Of course you are right that one may be objectively better than the other, but I'm also right in that such a choice ought be rejected on principle because neither deserves the validation of participation in such a charade.
Plants need nutrients which they normally retrieve from the soil. Natural soil is rich in organic matter and minerals, a product of microorganisms consuming biomass and excrement. Note that it forms a cycle! Nutritious soil -> Growth -> Death -> Decomposition -> Soil enhancement. Plants are just the visible part of the cycle. The other part consists of microorganisms.
The use of pesticides, monocultures, and an absence of organic waste material and natural decomposition, effectively kills the microorganisms in the soil. This is what intensive agriculture does. Now, the soil is devoid of nutrients that plants need to grow. So farmers have to use fertilizer to substitute the required organic building blocks.
The problem with this, is that fertilizer just provides the most common organic building blocks. This is enough to grow, but not in the most healthy and fruitful way possible. It's comparable to humans living on a diet of water and rice. They'll survive, but their health will suffer from a lack of nutrients.
Now that intensive agriculture has literally killed the soil, there is no easy way back, and we are dependent on fertilizer to produce food of inferior quality.
Luckily, alternative ways of agriculture are picking up popularity. See for example, biodynamic farming: https://www.biodynamics.com/
I think a lot of this pressure is from there being too many people. I have seen the estimates of how many people earth can support, yet I have never seen numbers for how many people the earth can sustainably support, especially in our modern lifestyle of excess.
https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets
Would this still be a problem if we didn’t use most of our agricultural land to grow crops to feed to the animals we eat? It’s very inefficient to feed plants to cows and then eat the cow.
https://www.google.com/maps/@44.715929,-106.2792854,3a,75y,1... falls in the agricultural land category.
In the "what should we be growing" it is important to separate Iowa from Wyoming.
For much of Wyoming, the best land -> calorie conversion is through cattle.
Trying to farm Wyoming for human consumable vegetables leads to other issues such as growing season, depleting aquifers, and salinization of the soil.
This isn't to say that cattle don't have problems - but its not a simple "switch to farming plants to feed humans" in many areas.
The problem we have is that animal products are more profitable in general than vegetables, so people overproduce them. It's the same thing behind the housing crises we see everywhere - luxury apartments are more profitable than low income housing, so that's the vast majority of what gets produced even though it's not what is needed, and it just fuels speculative buying.
It depends on the lifestyle. If everyone agreed to go vegan and eat unprocessed food, and we stopped using crops for many industrial uses (ethanol, plant based plastics, etc), then just maybe. However, people want their plastics and there is pressure to move away from petroleum in the long term. My guess would be that plant based industrial products will readily take the place of any reduction in agricultural feed over the next 30 years. And of course this doesn't address convincing the majority of the population to go vegan, which would be the bigger challenge.
We could use just 25% of our current agriculture land and still feed the population. There is nothing in the beef & dairy, which we could not get from other sources (preferably plant-based).
The problem are agriculture subsidies. We're heavily subsidizing production of beef, mutton & dairy, which needs 75% of our agricultural lands, instead of focusing on less resource-intensive sources of protein & fats [2].
If enough people switched (and there are some positive indicators that it's already happening), maybe we could save the earth before it's too late [3].
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-kcal-poore [3] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...
The destruction of Earth & wildlife is horrendous. [4] [5] We
[4] https://xkcd.com/1338/ (compulsory) [5] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/21/human-ra...
"Humans and Big Ag Livestock Now Account for 96 Percent of Mammal Biomass ... a study ... found that, while humans account for 0.01 percent of the planet’s biomass, our activity has reduced the biomass of wild marine and terrestrial mammals by six times and the biomass of plant matter by half." [6]
100 years ago humans&cattle was just 2% of the biomass. Now it's 98%.
If all people on earth eat as much meat as an average american, we would need 5+ earths. If as much as average european, then 4+ earths would be needed. There is not enough space to support this lifestyle any longer, people. [6]
http://personal.psu.edu/afr3/blogs/siowfa12/2012/10/if-every...
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By learning to switch to plant-based diet we would be healthier, leaner, and we would be guardians of our blue not, not its destroyers.
I doubt that blaming the consumer is helpful. Stuff like fat shaming usually backfires. And leads to us-vs-them polarization.
Plus, are consumers really to blame when choices are constrained by others?
Plus, it absolves the actual villains. No different than the industry funded rhetoric around plastic recycling and carbon footprint. As though Big Ag is only responding to consumer demand, and is other wise powerless to effect change.
We need to find more effective strategies for constructive policymaking. Blame and shame isn't working.
Our current food pyramid is the result of industrial policy choices. Perhaps we can make other choices. Perhaps by demanding a seat at the table.
https://community.twistedfields.com/t/march-2022-update-simu...
One of the biggest problems is weeds. If you use these naive methods you'll end up with weed infections and then you have to either dump a lot of herbicides to recover the land or blunt tumble, basically entombing all the topsoil.
Somehow journalists and people from the city know better than people risking their family's worth every year and working 12 hours a day on this. Every day. And even on weekends and holidays. You have no idea how hard it is.
Of course, many places are out of control blindly dumping fertilizer and herbicides. But that's mostly China and Third World countries. It would be smart to focus first on fixing things there. It's the same as with CO2 emissions. Don't put unrealistic demands in developed countries while leaving the rest to do whatever.
Joel Salatin talks a lot of shit about the typical farmer too, and with good reason. The difference there is that he's way more profitable than your average farmer on a per acre basis. He's documented everything he does at Polyface, and others have duplicated his success, yet hyper conservative farmers are still trying to farm the same broke ass way and complaining they can't make a living.
The production of fertilizers such as ammonium nitrate and urea require ammonia. Ammonia is synthesized on large scales with the Haber-Bosch process. This process requires hydrogen, which is obtained by steam reforming of methane in natural gas.
When natural gas prices exploded in Europe, many fertilizer factories had to stop production:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-15/soaring-e...
Supply chain issues, logistics problems, and high demand lead to rising prices which lead the largest exporter of phosphate fertilizer, China, to halt exports to protect domestic supply. Russia is the biggest exporter of potassium fertilizer.
Less nutrition doesn’t mean no nutrition. The vegetables are still plenty nutritious.
EDIT: And climate and environment friendly, to boot. Via regenerative agriculture.
Because we don't have a silver bullet. We have suggestions. But the world is increasing separating into cheap, low-nutrition food and expensive, nutritious food.
As to seasonality, I personally remember canned fruit being very tasty though that also had negative impacts on nutrition.
I have read zoos have started having to source fruit not raised for human consumption has the sugar levels are now getting too high. In some cases 30% more sugar content if I tember correct.
There isn't really a best seed. There are simply tradeoffs. That probably sounds familiar :-)
Disease resistance, water tolerance, soil conditions, climate, daylight, tolerance to heat and cold, pest resistance, taste, yield, time to grow, harvest period, storage period.
There are usually an incredible number of varieties for any given plant. It takes quite a few years to start to find ones that work the best for you. It's also doubly tricky as your conditions will change each year.
I like to plant a wide variety of seeds as that makes it likely that something delicious will thrive.
I'd also say that typically home grown fresh vegetables are so much tastier than ship bought that you might worry less about iothan you think.
(Probably a naive question, but I know very little about the topic, sorry)
Why not to make GMO crops without tradeoffs?
Anything you grow in your garden will likely be better out the gate. Doubly so if you compost.
As a result of the composting, once my last winter crop of peas had died out, a bunch of mis-matched tomatoes began growing out of the same patch, so I left the trellis up and let the plants develop. Roma tomatoes, cherry tomatoes and regular tomatoes all growing haphazardly, totally unplanned. A most pleasant surprise that kept me in bruschetta for a few weeks :)
There's something soul satisfying about eating something from your own yard; must be a deep-seeded DNA/evolution thing, like the smell of a campfire.
Back to composting: it's amazing how small a volume of trash we throw out now that we're putting foodstuffs into compost.
Toronto introduced its green bin program in 2002, where organic waste (food scraps, mostly) is collected separately and composted. The resulting compost is made available to residents for free.
It massively reduced the amount of garbage going to landfill AND enriches the local soil.
Sadly, I only have a balcony and no back yard but I try to grow lots of herbs there. Very tasty addition to my food. I have lots of Cilantro growing right now and my rosemary bushes are waking up from the winter as well. And I've planted out some basil cuttings from a cheap super market plant that in a few months will turn into a nice little basil jungle.
Eating fruit and veg is becoming increasingly pointless. No taste, no nutrients, lots of chems. May as well drink water
Except that it is not the same, it's not a solution...
it will not be whole again if you just consume the broken down parts.
Can you outline how the additional ingredients in "Today's regular supermarket bread" make them "bad for you"?
We have some high-end bakeries who sell real bread but you have to know them. Sourcing proper food in Germany is pretty difficult if you don't live in a big city.
Anyway, the reason why this is a problem is explained in the article.
“As many as three billion people around the planet, most of them in low- and middle-income countries, cannot regularly afford a healthy diet, and at least two billion are suffering from so-called hidden hunger, missing key micronutrients in their diets,” Sova says. “These people cannot afford additional nutrient declines in plant-based foods.”
Nutrient deprivation isn't just scurvy and rickets, it is also linked to many behavioural and long-term health problems.
”One of the largest scientific studies to draw attention to this issue was published in the December 2004 issue of the Journal of the American College of Nutrition.”
And what did that paper conclude?
“Conclusion: We suggest that any real declines are generally most easily explained by changes in cultivated varieties between 1950 and 1999, in which there may be trade-offs between yield and nutrient content.”
Nothing about “loss of mother earth’s soil nutrients”. But that wouldn’t sell ads would it?
If you want to know where they drew the statements about causes from, you might check the next three studies which, like the first two, are directly cited and linked within the text of the article.
But that probably wouldn't make a good comment, though.
I'm sorry? You're taking NatGeo's word over the people who did the research because, "the authors were just speculating?"
That's not how research works. That's not how any of this works.
If you want nutritious buy seasonal ripe greens and fruits from local organic farms. Don't expect to have red apples year-round. And expect to pay 50% more.
If solutions in how to use less water as well as increasing nutrient uptake are interesting to you, check out aeroponics!
The shiny fruits and vegetables are useless, even bad for you. The small ones that look beaten and/or eaten are almost always better tasting.
So yeah, thanks for posting garbage
1. New variety ( red delicious, gala, fuji, honey crisp)
2. Customer says, "I really like it! Could you make it redder?"
3. Farmer/nursery selects for apple strain that is redder, implicitly deselecting all other characteristics.
4. Customer selects red'est version of variety in the super market and passes up less-red variety.
5. Non-red variety taken out or grafted over in orchards to super-red variety.
6. Customer says, "I don't know why, but I don't like the taste of galas anymore!"
7. goto 1
Taste is affected similarly because we essentially chemically treat plants to make them take on more water and water them heavily to grow larger in size. Nearly every fruit and vegetable in the store is larger than it would be if left to grow wild, but they are more watery and less concentrated in flavor as well.
But when practicing monoculture, the #1 threat is pests and so we do everything we can to fight them. This includes using sterilized soils, an overreliance on pesticides, and the usage of artificial fertilizers. The artificial fertilizers are a particularly big problem when it comes to phosphorous because for most plants they rely on the depletion of locally available phosphorus before they start the complex chemical dance necessary to make the association with fungi
The really sad thing is that soil inoculated with fungi can hold 50-100x more water than sterilized soil. Without it water tends to drain and we use much more of it. Combine that with the fact that most of the phosphorus in artificial fertilizers is not actually accessible so we end up using more water which carries this leftover fertilizer which causes massive cyanobacterial/algal blooms that have already led to the extinction of many fish species.
It's a race to the bottom all to maintain the practice of monoculture. The research on mycorrhizae is relatively recent (mostly in the past 3 decades), but at this point the existing evidence is astoundingly clear. Plants with mycorrhizal associations better resist drought, frost, soil pathogens, produce more nutritious fruit, and can even produce more fruit mass (depending on the species, some will end up producing more leaves instead but this can be inverted with some manual labor)
Soil depletion is mentioned, among other things. But it isn't so much a deficiency of nutrients as a disruption of the uptake of those nutrients.
Water is only mentioned in the context of less water being drawn into the plants.
It's left to the reader to guess what you mean by "chemically treat plants[...]" but FWIW the main culprit is selective breeding, not any chemical intervention.
Foods have been bred for shelf stability and size which leads to less flavor and nutrition.
One study took wild tomatoes and used GM to increase yield:
"Compared with the wild parent, our engineered lines have a threefold increase in fruit size and a tenfold increase in fruit number. Notably, fruit lycopene accumulation is improved by 500% compared with the widely cultivated S. lycopersicum."
