RE: Seeds of Conflict
April 26, 2013 at 12:45 am
(This post was last modified: April 26, 2013 at 1:10 am by The Grand Nudger.)
@ nutritional values
There are a couple of reasons that we might see a decrease in nutritional values for any given food. The first I'll mention is my favorite.
-We're dumbasses. If you were to check the listed nutritional value for a serving of spinach in 1950 and the value for an equivalent amount of "today's" spinach you might be extremely concerned at just how much iron appears to have vanished into thin air. You might be concerned - if you weren't aware that washing the produce before testing was not part of the methodology used at the time that the (earlier) measurement was taken. Cultivated soil just so happens to commonly contain a fair amount of iron - and this was mistakenly listed as the nutritional content of the spinach itself.
-We don't actually care - and we're very happy to trade the nutritional value of a single ear of corn for greater nutritional value per cultivated area. This one may not seem obvious - but I'll explain. Between 1900 and 1950 corn yields had early doubled in the US - from 20 bushels per acre to 40. Now, we don't have reliable nutritional data from that period - but the yield increase was impressive. If the corn grown in 1950 had half the nutritional value of the corn grown in 1900 it would have been a wash. Since 1950 corn yields have continued to climb. We're sitting at about 150 bushel per acre now (and some of us are aiming to see those yields doubled by 2030). If today's corn had one quarter of the nutritional value of 50's corn -again - it will have been a wash. Now, thankfully, nowhere in that research paper does anything even remotely come close to this sort of number. What we -do- see over this time period is that even in the cases where a cultivar in use today is less nutritious than the cultivar of yesteryear, the yields more than compensate. Further, we find that the availability of agricultural products to the consumer has increased year after year after year. In short, it doesn't matter how much of nutrient x is in a single ear of corn, it only matter that consumer a get b amounts of nutrient x -from any source-, and here we have a long track record of success - due in part, amusingly, to selecting varieties for traits other than nutritional value.
@ farmers
They are exceedingly dumb. Breathtakingly, impressively, mystifyingly dumb (they're human, see above). What these people learned at "daddys knee" was folklore and it seems to have completely eradicated their ability to compete with the corporate players. The folks at the corporate farms are the people who have turned magic in the dirt into a science. Now personally, I'd like to see more farmers and less corporate farms - but that isn't going to happen until farmers can run their operations like the big boys - IOW, like they had any idea wtf they were doing.
There are a couple of reasons that we might see a decrease in nutritional values for any given food. The first I'll mention is my favorite.
-We're dumbasses. If you were to check the listed nutritional value for a serving of spinach in 1950 and the value for an equivalent amount of "today's" spinach you might be extremely concerned at just how much iron appears to have vanished into thin air. You might be concerned - if you weren't aware that washing the produce before testing was not part of the methodology used at the time that the (earlier) measurement was taken. Cultivated soil just so happens to commonly contain a fair amount of iron - and this was mistakenly listed as the nutritional content of the spinach itself.
-We don't actually care - and we're very happy to trade the nutritional value of a single ear of corn for greater nutritional value per cultivated area. This one may not seem obvious - but I'll explain. Between 1900 and 1950 corn yields had early doubled in the US - from 20 bushels per acre to 40. Now, we don't have reliable nutritional data from that period - but the yield increase was impressive. If the corn grown in 1950 had half the nutritional value of the corn grown in 1900 it would have been a wash. Since 1950 corn yields have continued to climb. We're sitting at about 150 bushel per acre now (and some of us are aiming to see those yields doubled by 2030). If today's corn had one quarter of the nutritional value of 50's corn -again - it will have been a wash. Now, thankfully, nowhere in that research paper does anything even remotely come close to this sort of number. What we -do- see over this time period is that even in the cases where a cultivar in use today is less nutritious than the cultivar of yesteryear, the yields more than compensate. Further, we find that the availability of agricultural products to the consumer has increased year after year after year. In short, it doesn't matter how much of nutrient x is in a single ear of corn, it only matter that consumer a get b amounts of nutrient x -from any source-, and here we have a long track record of success - due in part, amusingly, to selecting varieties for traits other than nutritional value.
@ farmers
They are exceedingly dumb. Breathtakingly, impressively, mystifyingly dumb (they're human, see above). What these people learned at "daddys knee" was folklore and it seems to have completely eradicated their ability to compete with the corporate players. The folks at the corporate farms are the people who have turned magic in the dirt into a science. Now personally, I'd like to see more farmers and less corporate farms - but that isn't going to happen until farmers can run their operations like the big boys - IOW, like they had any idea wtf they were doing.
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