Fertilizer is actually the problem. The soil is losing magnesium because we don't practice crop rotation anymore, so we load up the soil with fertilizer, 90% of which runs off into our watersheds, wreaking havoc.

It can be solved by using less efficient / more complex farming practices which aren't amenable to mass production of monocultures. But that makes a lot less money, so it will never happen.

A different solution would be to pass legislation specifically to protect the nutritional value of our food. But that would just prompt the ag sector to pump the soil full of so much crap to meet the law's requirements that it'll speed up the collapse of ecological systems (in addition to possibly poisoning us).

> It can be solved by using less efficient / more complex farming practices which aren't amenable to mass production of monocultures. But that makes a lot less money, so it will never happen.

“Makes less money” is certainly one point of view. Another is “makes the food too expensive to afford for many, and shifts more land usage to farming, to make up for the reduced productivity per acre”. It is not even clear that it would reduce the profits of food producers: it depends on the shapes on supply curves. If every food producer is forced to produce food using expensive methods, and people are forced to buy food anyway (as they ultimately must eat), it is very well possible that the profits could actually increase: if demand for food is inelastic, people will just pay higher prices to get the same amount of food, which would only increase the total profits of agricultural industry.

Agricultural policy in the US shapes a lot of this, though, via subsidies. The financial system also shapes this through its lending policies. The implements of industrialized farming are what the ag lending sector is designed around; try to step out of that mainstream and you will have trouble accessing capital.

Wheat, corn, and soybeans are heavily subsidized by the US gov't and vegetables are not at all. Every little tiny program to subsidize vegetable growers is picked at every year (happening right now in my state legislature) -- it's always a fight to preserve.

The agricultural lending system in the US is fascinating. Look up Farm Credit Administration. We have a weird and unique system of paragovernmental financial institutions in the US that do farm lending, and even though it's not technically government-backed lending, everyone sees it as such, and so there are some interesting distortions in the market (compared to a more "free-market" system). It does seem quite centered around US gov't subsidies and farm/ag policies.

That's because wheat, corn, and soybeans are staples, while vegetables are luxury food items, especially fresh ones. At no point in history, regular people in agricultural societies ate as much vegetables as we do right now. The diets has always been based in overwhelming majorities on grains, roots and beans, and in places with lactose tolerance, also on dairy.

A single bell pepper today costs something between $1 and $2 where I am. Imagine the government subsidizes bell peppers so that they cost $.50. As a single bell pepper has less than 50 calories, you couldn't base your diet on it, you would still need some more calorie-rich food to actually give you required energy. Since vegetables (except root vegetables) are not calorie-dense, you'd need to eat seeds (e.g. grains) or oils anyway.

That's why, if your goal is to enable the nation to feed itself, you should rather subsidize the staples, not luxury consumption.

Corn and soy are not staples for humans, they're staples for industry. What doesn't get exported is used for livestock feed, ethanol, and filler for unhealthy foods. It makes a very small sector of our economy rich, it destroys huge swaths of our nation's ecology, and that result damages the health of animals (including us).

Feeding the nation isn't hard. We could feed this nation five times over with the amount of food we produce. The problem is, we'd probably shrivel up and die, because wheat, corn and soy aren't enough to keep a population healthy. We could actually produce more nutrition and calories with a fraction of the land just by switching from corn to oats. But then you'd be producing less, and hence selling less. That's not as profitable!

And vegetables are luxuries in the same sense that "nutrition" is a luxury. Just because humanity has historically had a shit diet (since the adoption of agriculture) doesn't mean it's a great idea to stop eating vegetables, or produce less of them. We get plenty of calories already - too many in fact. And most of the ones we do get are more harmful than good.

It would be better to get people to eat more of those low-calorie vegetables as it would help stem the American obesity crisis. And as we've seen in this report, vegetables already contain fewer nutrients than they did before - a reason to consume more of them, not less!

Rich nations don't have problems supplying calories. In fact they have the opposite problem, people eat too many calories. There is an obesity crisis underway.

A couple of years ago where was a very long draught in northern europe. The only fields that weren't burned brown was the new ecological farms that reinvented farming the old way. Their soil is kept alive deeper into the ground and can hold water much longer. So while their neighbours had to buy feed for their cows, the eco farmers could keep using their grass for feeding.

I suspect it can be solved in many different ways, but when you sell food by the pound, it's much more advantageous to distribute your limited quantity of nutrients in as much produce as possible.

This seems really, really hard to regulate.

When reading comments like this, which are good-natured, and a natural response, do you ever think “wouldn’t be great if we as humans had more trust built into our systems, and people actually making a best-effort attempt at honouring that trust”? Instead of everything being a scam until proven otherwise, and even then the scam is probably just one level deeper in what triggered the interest in that product in the first place.

Related to your question, I found the ideas in this long and winding essay to be quite interesting: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditation...

Terrible as it sounds trust is in computer terms a gaping security vulnerability. If anothet clever actor can take advantage of it they can gain all sorts of things at cost to you.

Distrust is like an immune system - it has costs and can occasionally hurt you but it developed and is ubiquitous for a reason.

Sadly human nature is what it is. It seems like it would take a long time for evolution to make humans not naturally lazy, greedy, jealous and xenophobic. It's also not clear that, even in a world where resources are abundant, there would be any evolutionary pressure to not be this way.

This comment was triggered by the essay “The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams” by Jia Tolentino in the book Trick Mirror, the essay also being available in audio form online. So the scam here was to get you to google that book, I wonder if my scam will convert anyone?

Frankly, it seems to me like it's rather relatively simple thing to regulate. We already mandate things like adding vitamins to milk or flour. Extending this to vegetables really doesn't seem like big problem: farmers would just have to buy magnesium-enriched fertilizer.

Why pour it in your diet when you can put it in a pill to eat directly along with 30 other vitamins?

Diet is quite more complicated that just taking a multivitamin, unfortunately. Some nutrients compete for absorption (Zn and Ca, for example) and shouldn’t be taken together. There’s also debate about the need for phytonutrients that also come along with plants. The data is mixed enough that the US Preventative Services Task Force isn’t yet willing to endorse supplements as a means of reducing cardiovascular or cancer risk.

My personal opinion is that the human body may be too complex to say we fully understand a seemingly straightforward solution like just taking a multivitamin. We evolved over an awfully long time before industrialized agriculture and supplements. I’m not trying to demonize them because they have solved the number 1 concern humans had for the last 10,000 years of not getting enough calories, but I think it’s wise to temper the hubris of thinking we understand the human body well enough to expect a simple fix from a pill.

For all of the things we know are present in food and necessary for nutrition, I suspect there are still a lot we don't know of.

Biodynamic farmed food seems like the best bet if you have access to it. At least you're avoiding the worst of the mega-farming shortcuts.

Vitamin absorption via pills doesn't seem to work very well.

This. It's actually very hard to get enough Mg from pills. Your body needs a lot.

Then the issue is to remember to take the pill. Much easier to forget than to forget to eat.

Also, can be hard to reach out to everyone and let them know that they need these pills. Many might not know what "magnesium" is?

It's simpler to add iodine to salt -- and maybe magnesium to the soil

Another issue is that the effect of a nutrient can sometimes differ based on what it is consumed alongside. Pills are not necessarily as effective as supplemented food.

Because anybody with sense prefers eating food to popping pills.

This is an instance of the orthogonality thesis, by the way. Your assertion is that "increased ability to think" should cause "increased desire to eat Traditional Food (tm)", which is no more true than the assertion "increased ability to think causes increased desire to consume Renaissance art". Desires are, by and large, orthogonal to the generalised ability to achieve desires (the ability which you label "sense"). Some desires are not orthogonal - the desire to survive and be healthy, for example, which is instrumental in achieving many other desires - but to argue your assertion on those grounds, you must prove that Traditional Food is sufficiently dramatically better for achieving some instrumental goal.

Come on, this is a bit too aggressive of a statement. On the other hand, there is some anecdotal evidence that nutrients in pills are not absorbed by our gut as well as more "naturally" delivered nutrients.

I wouldnt say anecdotal nutrient bioavailavilty is quite well-known and studied.

Why stop there? If you are getting fluids via IV, may as well add in nutrients.

I'm down. Add a glucostat for optimal blood sugar level too. Just get a waterproof Ergodox, wrap around 8k monitor, and a sensory dep tank (with optional high-tech minimal techno piped in).

I call it The Precog. It'll be a hit in SV.

This sounds grand, but I Googled, and couldn't find a provider/source, where do you buy?

Why regulate when you can market? If I knew that a brand of zucchini had high mineral content and flavor, I'd buy it at a premium

Sounds like a good way to have every milk container say "rBST free, from cows raised without hormones!" Which could also be stated "farmed in accordance with California law."

Yeah, in this case, I'd rather have the former... Since I'd assume the latter? Maybe that's me.

And, to be clear— I don't want to be dismissive of the importance of govt regulation! It's just that working out the marketing opportunities can happen much faster than effective regulation.

Veritasium did a video on this topic of vegetables becoming less nutritious

https://youtu.be/Yl_K2Ata6XY

He argues that the increased CO2 in the atmosphere is making the plants grow faster. This is making the plants produce more carbs wet to other nutrients, making the plant less nutritious compared to the past