> 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.
0: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/11/201105183840.h...