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Fruits and vegetables are less nutritious than they used to be

nationalgeographic.com

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Re: Fruits and vegetables are less nutritious than they used to be

#161

Post by antris »

giantg2 wrote: post #160
antris wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who suggested forcing all people to become vegan? Also, by the same logic seatbelt laws would be "resorting to fascism" because it's forcing all people to use seatbelts. It's not fascism to have laws.

"Fascism is a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism, characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and the economy" Nothing is truly fascist with a dictatorship, but you were the one to start throwing around that term. That said, regimentation of one's diet and control over the agricultural industry, likely with the supression of opposition in…

You are reading way too much into my comments. All I was saying that it's a common ecofascist talking point to say that the problem is the number of people, and used the link as a source to how wasteful our food production is.

Now you are trying to bend this into the most uncharitable interpretation you can think of. In addition you're also just completely making up what I think. Sorry but I'm not gonna start defending your strawmans.

Re: Fruits and vegetables are less nutritious than they used to be

#162

Post by [deleted] »

giantg2 wrote: post #142
specialist wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slippery slope: removing subsidies for factory farmed meat inevitably leads to vegan fascism. Nice.

That's not at all what I'm saying. It's jumping to conclusions to think that we can just solve problems by using that 80% of production for people food crops vs animal feed. The paradigms are entirely different - from the types of crops the land can produce, to the labor involved in its production, etc. I also believe that the switch to plant based plastics over the coming decades will eat up whatever minor reduction…

[deleted]

Re: Fruits and vegetables are less nutritious than they used to be

#163

Post by specialist »

giantg2 wrote: post #142
specialist wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slippery slope: removing subsidies for factory farmed meat inevitably leads to vegan fascism. Nice.

That's not at all what I'm saying. It's jumping to conclusions to think that we can just solve problems by using that 80% of production for people food crops vs animal feed. The paradigms are entirely different - from the types of crops the land can produce, to the labor involved in its production, etc. I also believe that the switch to plant based plastics over the coming decades will eat up whatever minor reduction…

Ok, thanks for clarifying.

Agree wrt paradigms.

I have zero clue about plant-based plastics. Guessing you mean stuff like starch packing peanuts.

I don't know if removing subsidies would reduce meat consumption. Am eager to try. I'm tired of paying for corporate welfare.

Re: Fruits and vegetables are less nutritious than they used to be

#164

Post by giantg2 »

antris wrote: post #161
giantg2 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Fascism is a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism, characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and the economy" Nothing is truly fascist with a dictatorship, but you were the one to start throwing around that term. That said, regimentation of one's diet and control over the agricultural industry, likely with the supression of opposition in…

You are reading way too much into my comments. All I was saying that it's a common ecofascist talking point to say that the problem is the number of people, and used the link as a source to how wasteful our food production is. Now you are trying to bend this into the most uncharitable interpretation you can think of. In addition you're also just completely making up what I think. Sorry but I'm not gonna start defendi…

It seems a little uncharitable to say that I'm bending things to be uncharitable when you look at what was said (or not said).

If you wanted to talk about how wasteful our food production is, then why not say that and actually talk about that. Talking about land use that produces animal products and then calling it wasteful is a stretch when many people use those products, including n-order products like organic fertilizers or white sugar. It's not wasteful to fulfill the wants of the people. It could be inefficient or excessive, but those aren't the same as actual waste.

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/sustainability/...

If not applying the ecofacsist comment to my comment, then what? It seems completely irrelevant if you weren't using against my comment.

If anything, it seems you were strawmaning since you never did address the preferences nor sustainably portions that were key to my statement.

Re: Fruits and vegetables are less nutritious than they used to be

#165

Post by sizzle »

orlp wrote: post #79
saiya-jin wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's you. When I come home and eat stuff from my parents garden, the differences in some cases are massive. Carrots for example taste 10x more intense, even one that was taken from soil weeks ago. 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 p…

Commercial mass-produced tomatoes, bananas and other climacteric fruit are picked heavily unripe, shipped in this more durable state, and in the destination country are rapidly artificially ripened in ethylene gas chambers. The same commercial mass-produced fruits and vegetables also have been cultivated for decades for resistance against disease, size, and shelf life. Taste is often only secondary to those. On one h…

I have a local CSA organic veggie box dropped at my door picked from local farms. It is delicious and no pesticides, highly recommended anyone who can afford it to try.

You can search for CSA companies in your area here: https://www.localharvest.org

Re: Fruits and vegetables are less nutritious than they used to be

#166

Post by shagie »

PretzelPirate wrote: post #108
giantg2 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Intensive agriculture has been focusing too much on short-term yields, and too little on long-term soil performance." 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.

> I think a lot of this pressure is from there being too many people. 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.

In most cases, the pastureland for cattle for meat isn't suitable for growing anything more than grasses or may be inaccessible for growing other human consumable vegetables.

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.

Re: Fruits and vegetables are less nutritious than they used to be

#168

Post by dr_dshiv »

yesenadam wrote: post #119
dr_dshiv wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Random: ethylene is psychoactive. Haven’t tried it. But, some evidence that it was the abiogenic gas at the temple of Apollo at Delphi: Foster, J., & Lehoux, D. (2007). The Delphic oracle and the ethylene-intoxication hypothesis. Clinical Toxicology, 45(1), 85-89.

> The Delphic oracle and the ethylene-intoxication hypothesis Thanks, interesting read. The paper seems rather against the hypothesis, to say the least - it's a demolition. "this hypothesis is implausible since it is based on problematic scientific and textual evidence, as well as a fallacious argument. ...the evidence did not support the conclusion. ... if it was not the positivist bent of the argument that made it…

Quite so. Here’s a rather well written reply: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/155636507014778...

It’s funny that in neither paper was there ever an attempt to just try the stuff and, you know, attempt mantic divination. What has science come to?

Re: Fruits and vegetables are less nutritious than they used to be

#169

Post by pards »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #39
RhodesianHunter wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue at the heart of this is soil quality, not the genes of the crops. Anything you grow in your garden will likely be better out the gate. Doubly so if you compost.

+1 for composting. There's something satisfying about putting down a deep, dark brown soil to grow some veges in. I don't grow a lot (peas and corn generally), but it's magnificent eating. 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…

>> 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.

Re: Fruits and vegetables are less nutritious than they used to be

#170

Post by jjoonathan »

somenameforme wrote: post #158
jjoonathan wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blanket cynicism is really easy to manipulate: you don't have to do a good job yourself, you just have to convince the cynic that the other guy is just as bad, which is easy. "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…

Imagine you were tasked with deciding the greatest film of all time. And after some opaque process over which you have no meaningful influence, you were presented with your choices, the "sides:" "Generic Superhero Movie #1" or "Generic Superhero Movie #2". 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…

...and then audiences stop reading your opinion, because snobbery isn't useful for picking which movie to see on Friday night, and then producers and directors stop paying attention to you because you have no audience, and now you have traded away your ability to effect change for the self-indulgent fantasy of being above the fray.

> neither deserves the validation

Huffing your own farts is poor debate strategy.

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