Seeds of Conflict

[Dawud]

Oh right - and the studies:

Anyone found them: seriously though its quite well known.

I can't be the only person that has heard this..

It's worth looking for evidence on as you'll hear it again Im sure.

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You miss the point Nony,

Mass farming reduces quality in favour of quantity - Im not saying that this is bad....

I'm just suggesting that this desire should inspire some skepticism if new developments and that blind acceptance of them could be just as dangerous as blind rejection

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I'm arguing for a healthy level of skepticism...

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Having talked with friends developing GM crops they don't seem that bad but a friend is involved in developing the seedless crops.

That one just seems too dodgy with regards to the power it could wield - absolute power and all that....

[Dragonetti]

I am not saying it is not evidence, but clarifying the source.

[A_Nony_Mouse]

What's scientific American like for you? Quite unreliable or fair? I'm not familiar with it...

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SciAm seems pretty rigorous after I researched it...

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U based in states or UK or like way down south TSQ?

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I mean Oz/NZ

SciAm was quite responsible until 1991 when it almost folded for sales that went into the toilet. It came back solely by "popularizing" what should have been serious coverage. It was the rise of the age of "what does it feel like to be a (blank)? Fill in a scientist name for the blank.

If you want serious coverage there is Science and New Scientist in that order and just about nothing else. Since 1991 SciAm as been on the order of Popular Science just less obvious about it.

[Dawud]

Well I think the point is made - find whatever evidence you like if you fancy...

[Dragonetti]

What's scientific American like for you? Quite unreliable or fair? I'm not familiar with it...

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SciAm seems pretty rigorous after I researched it...

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U based in states or UK or like way down south TSQ?

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I mean Oz/NZ

SciAm was quite responsible until 1991 when it almost folded for sales that went into the toilet. It came back solely by "popularizing" what should have been serious coverage. It was the rise of the age of "what does it feel like to be a (blank)? Fill in a scientist name for the blank.

If you want serious coverage there is Science and New Scientist in that order and just about nothing else. Since 1991 SciAm as been on the order of Popular Science just less obvious about it.

Correct! I would rather see a source from a Science/Health Journal, that is peer reviewed.

[A_Nony_Mouse]

I think we subsidize grain and corn too much! Fruits and vegetables are expensive for the average consumer. We need to make healthier food accessible to all consumers.

Dawud - The article is written by EarthTalk writers, and not Scientific America.

I agree I have an odd point of view but I do not see a value of fruits and vegetables beyond what can be done with their taste. And as a pretty fair amateur chef over some 40 years I have yet to find a problem.

IF there is anything essential from fruits and vegetables there are pills for it. Fruits per se? So what? But orange duck, be it Chinese or French is fantastic. NOT to claim I have perfected those dishes. It is only an issue of price that makes use of pasta in place of all meat. We can survive on something like 90% meat but we do not want to or cannot afford it.

I don't really want to raise a pissing contest over this. I do want to point out the essential of onions for breakfast for the pyramid workers is rather different from any modern conception of a meal to eat before going to work.* We ATE veggies for very good reasons. Today we have pills for almost everything we get from veggies except for the infinite variations of taste that make meat taste so much better.

I do not like plain carrots. My son does not like them plain. Most of my women and their children did not. Add a cream sauce or cheese sauce and they are eaten.

Potatoes? Butter or sour cream?

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* Skin and cut an onion in half along its "equator." Liberally coat the cut side with olive oil, butter, cream or anything similar. Bake until soft. Add oil as it expands. Add a bit more oil. Enjoy!

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You miss the point Nony,

Mass farming reduces quality in favour of quantity - Im not saying that this is bad....

I'm just suggesting that this desire should inspire some skepticism if new developments and that blind acceptance of them could be just as dangerous as blind rejection

It is obviously not bad in a chronically obese population. In theory it is an issue. In fact it is not.

[Dragonetti]

I was just pointing out most of the fast food products are subsidized. Corns, wheat, and certain meats (makes less than 15% of subsidy). These food are not healthy, but they are very cheap. The impoverish will buy the cheapest products available. Statistically speaking, the poorest of the community are also the most unhealthy and over weight.

[A_Nony_Mouse]

Well I think the point is made - find whatever evidence you like if you fancy...

Way back in the dark ages of the 1960 I got a BS in physics. I worked from some 20 years for the US Navy after being designated an EE. The largest amount I ever "signed out" was $76 million. Anything I post is open to question and I answer all legitimate questions and have since I joined in January this year.

[Anyone questioning the dollar amount is risking a very boring lecture on how DC headquarters worked. Trust me. It bores me too.]

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SciAm was quite responsible until 1991 when it almost folded for sales that went into the toilet. It came back solely by "popularizing" what should have been serious coverage. It was the rise of the age of "what does it feel like to be a (blank)? Fill in a scientist name for the blank.

If you want serious coverage there is Science and New Scientist in that order and just about nothing else. Since 1991 SciAm as been on the order of Popular Science just less obvious about it.

Correct! I would rather see a source from a Science/Health Journal, that is peer reviewed.

The simplifications went beyond simplification. The ascientific content increased to the point it dominated some articles. I still glance though it occasionally but have found no reason to change my opinion. It does seem to be a rational retreat in that it has stopped getting worse.

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I was just pointing out most of the fast food products are subsidized. Corns, wheat, and certain meats (makes less than 15% of subsidy). These food are not healthy, but they are very cheap. The impoverish will buy the cheapest products available. Statistically speaking, the poorest of the community are also the most unhealthy and over weight.

Farm subsidies are political which means unrelated to reality.

Here is something I picked up that throws all "common knowledge" knowledge about farming into a cocked hat.

All wheat (or barley or anything else) is not equal. There are qualities of wheat even from the same seed in neighboring farms in the same year. Companies who want such products only want the best that appeals to humans. So what are they going to do with the crops the bread companies and the Green Giant will not buy? Till it under or feed it to meat animals like cattle?

And if you know you have real shit land that will not grow what people will eat why not grow animal feed? And if there are people starving in Africa should we send them grain that Americans refuse to eat?

I can go further but that should be enough to show all this vegetarian crap really is crap. All this anti-meat stuff is just from stupid people.

Farmers are not dumb. They learn maximizing earnings at their fathers' knees. And then most food is produced by corporate farms where all the kids sitting on knees are never more than amateurs.

I have not figured a way to calculate it but it is something like if the entire country went vegetarian something like 80-90% of the grain crops would be wasted because people would not eat them. AND if production were decreased to only 10-20% only 10-20% would meet current quality standards.

The higher the quality standards for people the more left overs that have to be plowed under or fed to meat animals which we eat.

[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.

[Dawud]

Dragonetti: have you heared the conspiracy that you might be me or that I might be you?

To be fair your beard does look similar!