This view is incredibly harmful. What lives in the soil is important too, small animals, insects, mushrooms... And the soil supports this. The density, temperature, texture are all factors to it.

Every time I get to the US, I'm aghast at the pitiful taste of the fruits and veggies. The way you are growing things produces volumes yes, but of tasteless empty shells of a plant.

Of course then you put sugar on everything because the raw thing is aweful to eat.

So you get obese people with nutrient deficiency, on top of a dead soil that is an ecological disaster.

Seing only one dimension of something or maximizing productivity always leads to some kind of unbalance, and the effects are far reaching.

I want to highlight that it's a relatively recent discovery that almost all plants live in a symbiotic relationship with fungi (Mycorrhiza) in the soil, which I wasn't taught in school.

Plants can also live without, but the existence of Mycorrhiza fungi impacts plant productivity and robustness.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhiza

We are good at growing a lot of food because big ag has figured out the science and is really damn good at it. In fact it is a miracle; only a few short generations ago famines were a common occurrence. Consistency of flavor and yield reigns supreme, because when someone orders a Big Mac or a Bud Light they want it to taste the same every time.

Now of course, there is a whole organic and craft market segment for people who disagree with that premise and it’s served quite well in the US for those who want to pay for it.

There's one easy proove, anything grown the way you describe taste like nothing compared to an healthy plant. Quality farming is not about volume or look but the actual quality of the produce.

I wouldn't call what you say science at all. As soon as you state that you know everything and that someone who disagrees is anti-science is just plain arrogance, not science. If you're really interested in science though, please read the huge amount of research on soil and plant that has been done since the 1950's so that you catch up at least....

Edit: Forgot to mention something, soil is not only for plants, there's a whole ecosystem that depends on it and need to be taken into account

Don't know about nutrients though, since I have no real means to check for that.

So it seems, at least for some plants it is possible to selectively breed them over long times to make them adapt to greenhouse/hydroponics/etc without losing their taste.

And I remember the real taste of berries, because I picked them in the wild in forests in my youth, and sometimes, though much less often even now.

That's absolutely not true, it's been tested by thousands of people and you can try it yourself. Taste is affected by variety and ripeness, waay before it has anything to do with the soil.

Do your study in the south of italia in the summer for a fair fight.

I'm not talking about eating for pleasure, but you can definitely taste that something is wrong with industrially grown veggies and fruits (and the same apply for animal farming).

Soil biology is no "magic" though.

> Now of course, there is a whole organic and craft market segment for people who disagree

It's almost as if you were suggesting that organic regenerative ag is based on some sort of non-scientific cult but that's not really the case.

From an agricultural stand point not necessarily from a consumers who are passionate about it perspective, there's a huge amount of culty anti science.

https://ohioline.osu.edu/factsheet/SAG-16

I would say that’s more than just chemistry, unless you mean chemistry in a sense that’s so general the statement becomes a tautology.

However, it results in a tomato that - while it looks like a normal tomato - the sugars and other flavours don't develop in the same way, rendering it bland.

If you want to buy tomatoes that taste good, you can get them from a farmers market and they will taste a lot better - even if grown in the same soil with the same techniques as the supermarket tomatoes. Alternatively canned/frozen/preserved tomatoes tend to be made with naturally ripened tomatoes. Obviously you can't really used those tomatoes the same way you'd use a raw tomato, though.

This isn't specific to tomatoes, many commercial fruits and veggies are picked before they're ripe.

And honestly I met so many farmers that have no idea what tomatoes should taste like it's not even funny. Dining at their table, I hear them rejoice the produce in their plate is so good while I cringe because they feels like clown noses compared to the real thing.

Just like people can't fathom that we used to have bird migrations that cover the entire sky, people don't realize what we have lost with food. And they think they do, they think you are some kind of bragging posh to tell them that that's not supposed to be like this.

But I ate strawberries from my mother in law garden yesterday. It felt like eating sweets.

I haven't eaten some like that for 20 years, and I'm a very picky buyer.

Her soil is full of life.

Fruits and vegetable have been selected for being awesome for centuries. If you treat them well, you will not want to eat a kit kat instead.

But I don't blame the kids that do: currently, the kit kat tastes way better that whatever they have for lunch.

And the message you are replying to is correct, supermarket tomatoes are different variety, farmers get paid for mass, not for taste.

Supermarkets have giant charts that determine shape, roundness, and colour of tomato. They will buy perfectly round, red tomato that tastes like water. They will not buy an ugly but tasty tomato from a farmer.

The variety matters, but that's not the end of the story.

Nutrients in plants decreased by small amount, but fresh plants in our diet decreased by 90%. Never in history have humans consumed exclusively fried chicken and deef fried potato. The diets are the real culprit.

There are complex factors, for example our supply chain takes tomatoes before they are ripe - a ripe tomato is so soft, it's impossible to get to the consumer in one piece

Give a person delicious plants, and they will eat them.

"fruits and vegetables grown decades ago were much richer in vitamins and minerals than the varieties most of us get today. The main culprit in this disturbing nutritional trend is soil depletion"

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-aN...

>Davis and his colleagues chalk up this declining nutritional content to the preponderance of agricultural practices designed to improve traits (size, growth rate, pest resistance) other than nutrition.

The part of the article that you've quoted is simply Davis' opinion, not the subject of that study. The author has a different opinion. I don't know who is right, which is why I said it's "not an uncommon view".

I don't know if that debate has been settled. The article doesn't cite any studies examining the cause of this nutrient depletion, and I didn't find any studies of the cause with a few Google Scholar searches for soil depletion and related terms. If you know of any research that answers the question I'd love to read it.

1: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07315724.2004.10...

And completely unfounded in reality.

You can get chewing gum vegetables just anywhere.

Growing alfalfa would help, but that is often not that profitable compared to reaping the soil and throwing on more artificial fertilizer until the soil is garbage.

Method boils down to, no till, plant a mix of cover crops, and don't plant mono culture. Ended up getting a inch of top soil a year.

You're starting halfway on the track. Most things you plant in arid soil won't grow, which is the situation where the GP started from. Sure, once you have a soil quality where your crop mix grows, it will take less than 50 years.

"How to get an inch of topsoil?" - "first, have an inch of topsoil" isn't really the scenario the GP was thinking of.

Or, crazy idea, just do exactly what we do with fertilizer. Identify what's missing, prepare it en masse, and add it back in. This could include microbes, minerals, certain types of organic material, you name it. As our understanding of a system improves so too does our ability to efficiently manipulate it to achieve the end result that we want.

For the record, I believe you drastically underestimate our current practices and capabilities. We've been performing nitrogen fixation on an industrial scale since the early 1900s.

Its not about capabilities, ita about cost.

"Organic and regenerative agriculture are revitalizing rural Montana economies" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27809279

"Have Fruits and Vegetables Become Less Nutritious? (2011)" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25032337