Dirt Poor: Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutritious?

Re:Dirt Poor: Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutriti... by JackFr on Monday March 05, 2018 @10:26AM (#16521604)

The quality of Scientific American has dropped off significantly in the past 20 years, but this article is astonishingly bad:

* Vegetables are lower in nutrients than in the 1950's.

* Here is some serious academic research that shows that.

* It indicates that the cause is the breeding and cultivation of varieties which are lower in nutritional content by farmers.

* But I will assert absent any evidence, soil depletion.

WTF, Scientific American?

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Re:Dirt Poor: Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutriti... by ars on Monday March 05, 2018 @11:34AM (#16522171)

I noticed the same thing.

It would be easy enough to test - there's plenty of pristine, hardly used, soil around.

You can also test different cultivars in different soils and see what the real cause is.

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Re:Dirt Poor: Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutriti... by Juggerbot on Monday March 05, 2018 @02:28PM (#16523655)

>there's plenty of pristine, hardly used, soil around.

Gonna need a [citation needed] on that one.

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Re:Dirt Poor: Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutriti... by ars on Monday March 05, 2018 @04:39PM (#16524709)

Find an old growth forest and dig a little.

Or the side of a mountain/valley where it's hard to farm, but plants grow just fine.

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Re:Dirt Poor: Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutriti... by sfotm on Monday March 05, 2018 @03:01PM (#16523887)

Drive through the flyover states and you can see it all for yourself. If you're not on the interstate, you can drive at 80mph without seeing another car for some time.

It's actually really beautiful how untouched some parts of the US are. Hopefully they can stay that way for some time.

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Re:Dirt Poor: Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutriti... by dragonwriter on Monday March 05, 2018 @03:03PM (#16523903)

The Midwest may have a low density of cars, but the arable land is largely farmed; it isn't pristine, untouched wilderness.

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Re:Dirt Poor: Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutriti... by sfotm on Monday March 05, 2018 @03:22PM (#16524043)

I was born on a farm in rural Ohio, so I can appreciate the difference. I'm thinking more of Wyoming.

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Re:Dirt Poor: Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutriti... by scott_s on Monday March 05, 2018 @04:21PM (#16524524)

But that land is probably not suitable for farming - because if it was, someone would probably have a farm on it. So then you're comparing soil-not-great-for-farming from then and now, which is something, but it's not what we really care about (soil-used-for-farming).

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