Estimates that mineral levels in vegetables have dropped by up to 90% since 1914 • Hacker News Board

Re: Estimates that mineral levels in vegetables have dropped by up to 90% since 1914

#121

Post by primroot » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 9:53 PM UTC

pasabagi wrote: post #79

jjoonathan wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is actually a problem, I'd much rather someone figure out which minerals need to go into the fertilizer mix (plus some downstream monitoring) than to assume that putting poop on the vegetables makes them wholesome.

For what it's worth, I totally agree. Without artificial fertilizer, half the world would starve. I don't think that kind of process makes sense within the context of capitalism, though. One obvious driver in the downward nutritional trend is the fact that faster-growing, larger, longer-lasting vegetables are better products, even if they taste worse and do less for the body. The problem with products is they're opti…

> faster-growing, larger, longer-lasting vegetables are better product

Whatever product fits into the economies of scale, and selective commoditization solely for the sake of profit concentration not nutrition or environment.

But back to the idea of measuring everything. These are the counterpoints I can think about regarding measuring and controling:

* Measuring and controlling cost resources, some less, some more. E.g. It is easier to measure yields than to measure nutrition.

* There is imperfect knowledge on how to respond (control) after a given measurement, or even what measurements are important. E.g. Premature optimization, Goodhart's law, lack of certainty regarding nutrition.

* There are conflicting interests on what the result of controlling should be. E.g. more profits or more nutrition?

* Under appropriate circumstances systems can respond to variability or keep functioning without human control or input. This is resilience. E.g. Pollinating insects, edible weeds.

Re: Estimates that mineral levels in vegetables have dropped by up to 90% since 1914

#122

Post by jnbiche » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 9:55 PM UTC

phs318u wrote: post #89

jjoonathan wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have put up with a lot of shit -- literal and metaphorical -- over the last ten thousand years. I don't understand the assumption that it simply must be better than anything chemistry has to offer, and I find the aversion to measurement and control inherently suspicious.

> I find the aversion to ... control inherently suspicious. Interesting. Could you please expand on that? Personally, I find the desire to control inherently suspicious.

I'd assume he/she means control in the engineering sense of the word: testing and inspecting.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/control

Merriam Webster says that meaning (definition 1a) of the word "control" is archaic, but I still hear it used from time to time. It's commonly used in a number of European languages.

Re: Estimates that mineral levels in vegetables have dropped by up to 90% since 1914

#123

Post by xsmasher » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 9:56 PM UTC

fucking_tragedy wrote: post #20

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #6

Growing food has turned into an engineering problem where people think you solve it by investing the least possible resources into it. Whatever the consumer will buy and you can produce as cheaply as possible wins the day. Our tasteless vegetables are like cheap Bose (no highs, no lows, must be Bose) speakers or pressed paper furniture at Walmart. On the surface they look like a vegetable should look, but the taste,…

> Growing food has turned into an engineering problem where people think you solve it by investing the least possible resources into it. Our economic system optimizes for exactly this.

You optimize for what you can measure.

Food and consumer products will have to change greatly when hand-held tricorders let you compare nutritional value of two foods, or the amount of harmful chemicals on the surface of an item.

Re: Estimates that mineral levels in vegetables have dropped by up to 90% since 1914

#124

Post by mikelyons » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 9:57 PM UTC

fucking_tragedy wrote: post #119

mikelyons wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if we had one world religion where everyone's goal in life was to become infinitely loving and utterly selfless? Would we grow food for eachother differently? Would we be compensated differently for doing so?

No, it turns out that the adherents of the religion of "love thy neighbor" and "it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God" have no problem with our economic system.

I'm talking about psychedelic induced direct experiences of the point of life as utter selflessness and infinite love.

Re: Estimates that mineral levels in vegetables have dropped by up to 90% since 1914

#125

Post by mikelyons » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 9:58 PM UTC

jniedrauer wrote: post #87

mikelyons wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if we had one world religion where everyone's goal in life was to become infinitely loving and utterly selfless? Would we grow food for eachother differently? Would we be compensated differently for doing so?

You're describing humanism. We'd probably end up looking a lot like an ant colony. Unfortunately, as a non-hivemind species, it is unlikely that we will ever have that level of cohesion.

I'm not actually referring to humanism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE1yPCeF1Cc

Re: Estimates that mineral levels in vegetables have dropped by up to 90% since 1914

#126

Post by robbiep » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 9:58 PM UTC

all_usernames wrote: post #40

opportune wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If organic food actually had a noticeably higher mineral count than nonorganic, I would start eating it. But I don’t see why organic food would actually have more minerals. Organic doesn’t mean healthier it just means that it uses different kinds of pesticides, to my knowledge

Organic farming includes crop rotation, fertilizer, soil quality, and erosion control standards that would hypothetically affect mineral contents. Monoculture (conventional corn or soybean for example) uses huge amounts of synthetic fertilizer to increase yields per acre far beyond what the soil can naturally sustain. Wide swaths of American farmland has lost literally feet of topsoil over the past 50 years. The soil…

> Organic farming includes crop rotation, fertilizer, soil quality, and erosion control standards that would hypothetically affect mineral contents.

So does ‘conventional’ farming

Re: Estimates that mineral levels in vegetables have dropped by up to 90% since 1914

#127

Post by Obi_Juan_Kenobi » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 10:00 PM UTC

opportune wrote: post #12

wil421 wrote: post #2

The link got that actual paper is much better than a sentence or two on LinkedIn. The paper’s title isn’t as catchy to put in nicely. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6163803/ From my link: >It is important to note that the USDA mineral content of vegetables and fruits has not been updated since 2000, and perhaps even longer, given that the data for 1992 was not able to be definitively confirmed for this…

If organic food actually had a noticeably higher mineral count than nonorganic, I would start eating it. But I don’t see why organic food would actually have more minerals. Organic doesn’t mean healthier it just means that it uses different kinds of pesticides, to my knowledge

It's going to be very much case-by-case. 'Organic' is a very big tent, with lots of different practices. Some is, as you say, quite conventional but with different chemical use. But organic can also incorporate other sustainable farming practices that are more likely to result in real differences.

Re: Estimates that mineral levels in vegetables have dropped by up to 90% since 1914

#128

Post by elmar » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 10:02 PM UTC

tempguy9999 wrote: post #13

elmar wrote: post #4

Well there are some that say that minerals on vegetables are not bio-available for the human digestive system, so in the end doesn't make a lot of difference.

> some that say who?

For example people following the Carnivore diet.

Re: Estimates that mineral levels in vegetables have dropped by up to 90% since 1914

#129

Post by AnthonyMouse » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 10:03 PM UTC

fucking_tragedy wrote: post #20

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #6

Growing food has turned into an engineering problem where people think you solve it by investing the least possible resources into it. Whatever the consumer will buy and you can produce as cheaply as possible wins the day. Our tasteless vegetables are like cheap Bose (no highs, no lows, must be Bose) speakers or pressed paper furniture at Walmart. On the surface they look like a vegetable should look, but the taste,…

> Growing food has turned into an engineering problem where people think you solve it by investing the least possible resources into it. Our economic system optimizes for exactly this.

> Our economic system optimizes for exactly this.

It seems to be a facet of globalization in particular. When all your food came from a dozen local farmers whose names you knew, they each had to worry about reputational damage for doing things like this.

Today the decision is made by a mid-level manager whose name you'll never know and who doesn't even work for the same company by the time the public discovers the issue. Even the company itself generally isn't known to the customers. Do you know if the food at your grocery store is from Cargill or Conagra or someone else? What does a company have to fear about reputational damage if you don't even know who they are?

Capitalism requires informed customers whereas globalism smushes different quality products from different quality producers into the same pipeline based on broad categories that don't fully capture what customers actually need out of the products.

But we also can't expect everyone to have to grow their own food just so they know what went into it. It takes some middle ground where farming has enough size to get reasonable economies of scale and specialization but not so much that nobody has any idea where their food actually comes from.

Re: Estimates that mineral levels in vegetables have dropped by up to 90% since 1914

#130

Post by fucking_tragedy » Fri, Sep 13, 2019, 10:04 PM UTC

commandlinefan wrote: post #93

fucking_tragedy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Growing food has turned into an engineering problem where people think you solve it by investing the least possible resources into it. Our economic system optimizes for exactly this.

… which is a good thing! The challenge is investing the right amount of resources that retain the necessary minerals, is ecologically sustainable long term and healthy. Anything more is waste, which has its own problems.

> The challenge is investing the right amount of resources that retain the necessary minerals, is ecologically sustainable long term and healthy.

Our economic system refuses to account for these things, and refuses any attempt at being held accountable for them, as well. It optimizes for a supply chain that depletes soil, replaces robust ecosystems with fragile monocultures, forgoes sustainability, and enjoys the luxury of not having to account for the negative externalities of turning a profit.