261–270 of 315 posts
I’ve been living in Ukraine for the past few months, trying to figure out why the food here, especially the vegetables, simply taste so good . The very same dishes (e.g. steak and veggies) from popular mid-range restaurants are far more enjoyable to me over here in Kiev than I ever ate in Canada. When I went back to Canada for a brief visit, my body was craving Ukrainian food. Now this study on vegetable mineral cont…
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I don't think the lack of minerals in food explains obesity issues. In fact, I'm pretty sure we know what causes obesity. Significantly lower levels of activity and increased sugar consumption are two of the main culprits.
Obesity is increasing for animals - pets and even wildlife: https://psmag.com/social-justice/just-people-getting-fatter-...
I’ve been living in Ukraine for the past few months, trying to figure out why the food here, especially the vegetables, simply taste so good . The very same dishes (e.g. steak and veggies) from popular mid-range restaurants are far more enjoyable to me over here in Kiev than I ever ate in Canada. When I went back to Canada for a brief visit, my body was craving Ukrainian food. Now this study on vegetable mineral cont…
I wonder what effect nuclear accidents have on the food as well.
Belarus itself is currently building its first nuclear power plant just 45 km (28 mi) away from the capital of Lithuania[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Exclusion_Zone#/medi...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarusian_nuclear_power_plant
https://journals.ashs.org/hortsci/view/journals/hortsci/44/1...
Freely available too, nice one.
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> The benefits of treating the soil as a living organism include increased fertility This is a pretty interesting (and correct) point, and there's a lot to say about it from a few different perspectives. You get much higher all-inclusive yields from a unit of land by growing several different crops in the same space. They (can) complement each other, using different resources from the ground and providing resources t…
That's quite the argument to extremes. Surely there are points in between the single rich farmer and the five million poor farmers. Could the balance be shifted somewhat to slightly more labor intensive farming practices without causing us all to become starving peasants? I suspect so.
Birds may perform a larger diffusion work part of the time (random droppings while flying), yet a large part of the time it would eat some fruits from one type of tree, then fly to another type of tree, and leave droppings that represent a mixture of the nutrients the different types of trees had access to, but for a large part what came from trees returns to trees even if it's different types of trees. So by producing one type of fruit the tree can trade it's nutrients through birds-as-traders with other trees. Humans ban birds from trees because we want to keep the fruits to ourselves.
Perhaps we are simply wasting too much of our faeces into rivers and the sea? and generally disturbing the natural transport patterns (hidden labour) performed by different types of animals.
Migratory birds might trade nutrients over huge distances, which may sound ridiculous since they can't hold their droppings that long, but their bodies in general also contain nutrients, and the bird could die at either end of the migratory path.
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Very interesting! Where could I learn more about this, in particular how to run my own experiments growing plants with the 17 elements and so on? Also, have you looked into aeroponics as well?
There are lots of good books on it and youtubes. It largely depends on what you want to grow. Fruiting plants are different than leafy plants, for example. I suggest starting with a nutrient blend like this: https://www.amazon.com/MasterBlend-4-18-38-Tomato-Vegetable-... You can look up the ratios of the elements for different plants on the web. It's all out there. mhpgardener on Youtube is amazing https://www.youtub…
I'm generally interesting in hydro-/aeroponics from the perspective of growing plants in space, via, as you mentioned, "programming" them - basically, what's the minimum of nutrients (not just minerals, but also water, air and sunlight) that's needed to grow food (and air) for people.
I also thought about actually programming plants, I wonder if there's any research in this direction - e.g. why do I need an orange plant to grow a trunk? If I could inject the right hormones at the right place, I could skip all that and just have it grow leaves (energy production) and fruit (energy consumption) without any other superfluous parts.
> 60% of adults do not achieve the average dietary intake (ADI) and 45% of Americans are magnesium deficient.
I'm always a bit skeptical of claims like this, and those percentages are huge. I'm wondering why I've never heard about it before (although I'm very ignorant about a lot of things.) Are there any government efforts to make magnesium supplements widely available, or some other way to solve this problem?
This happened due to extermination of soil life through modern farming practices of heavy tilling, fertilizing and monoculture crops. Dead soil is more susceptible to erosion and requires ever increasing amounts of synthetic fertilizer to grow anything. More soil has been lost from the US than the amount of food that has been produced. Soil fertility can be returned to historical levels by changing farming practices…
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> 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.
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?
"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind"
"Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."
God be our Nature/Universe as space, soil, water air, plants, life.
