From various reports lately, I don't have links handy but I've seen them shared here on HN, it is generally accepted that the nutritional value of the food is declining. This has been primarily attributed, from what I remember, to the condition of the soil. So, if we start producing everything in a greenhouse, won't that impact nutritional value as well.
- soil usually doesn't get time to recover and gets fertilized every year, nutrition can't build back up because of worsening chemical conditions due to monoculture and salts -> simply less nutrients are available to the plants with each cycle
- plants get bred to maximize yields, leading to first and foremost bigger plants, other factors (like nutritional value) are not priority #1
See https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-an....
The larger issue is that consumers have no way of assessing the nutritional value of the items they're purchasing at the point of purchase. Cost is mediated on the basis of weight, which results in water-rich, nutrient poor, taste-poor produce. Saline injection into meat is another similar issue.
How do we make growing nutritional food profitable? Foods that can be sold on the basis of nutrient specific benefits, like Golden Rice or Vitamn D enriched milk can be marketed and sold on that basis, but comparing two beefsteak tomatoes grown in differing soils is not possible at present at the point of sale.
Typical food certification strategies, such as Organic, DOP, AOC, and other regional growth indicators don't seem to fit the bill. It's also unclear whether or not there is a market for inspections on the basis of nutritional value - from an organizational standpoint, it shouldn't be too difficult to have an inspector randomly audit crops and send samples to a lab to be HPLC or Mass Spec'd, but whether or not another certification mark changes buying patterns is unclear.
They start around $1000 because it's a niche market. They appear to be infrared spectroscopy based which isn't too complicated, I was thinking about making an open source version. Should only be like $30 in parts. Would people buy this to test their produce before they buy?
[1] Called non destructive saccharimeters
Edit: actually it looks like they measure infrared polarization, not spectral absorption
(I’d argue that taste is already an example of Goodhart’s law, and that this is why fast food is popular despite being objectively bad).
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/organic-f...
https://www.livescience.com/7194-healthier-tomatoes-grown-se...
Healthy soil can only be cultivated at scale with the aid of petrochemical byproduct fertilizers, which are not likely to be a long-term feature of our agricultural system.
It should also be noted that the total energy consumed in growing food in the US (ignoring sunlight absorbed by the plants) is less than the energy used to COOK food in the US. It's roughly 1% of the total energy used by the US.
I’m more concerned with the long-term need to recover the potassium and phosphorus that washes into the ocean, which, despite still being theoretically solvable, is not currently economic enough to bother with even for the gold and uranium that’s also in the seawater.
- organic macronutrients, which we'd definitely notice if they weren't there
- organic micronutrients, which are generally carbon compounds, but carbon doesn't come from soil, it comes from the air
- electrolytes, which do come from soil, but are always replenished with fertilizer, because plants need them too
- inorganic micronutrients, essentially transition metals plus selenium and iodine, which are present in utterly tiny quantities in food (you need about half a milligram of selenium per day), and could certainly be replaced by fertilizer if we even tried, or easily supplemented. Speculation: manure could work well.
- (extra) that wacky little devil cobalamin, which is both organic and a transition metal (cobalt), but doesn't come from plants anyway
Now, I could certainly see some kinds of farming techniques impacting the nutritional quality of plants. If you can increase the water content of your broccoli ceteris paribus, you sell more broccoli but the concentration of vitamin C goes down. I could also see impacts on the physical properties (compaction, grinding) of soil leading to worse long-term crop yields. But in order to convince me that soil changes are going to impact the vitamin C content of orange juice, when the constituents of vitamin C come entirely from water and air, you need pretty strong evidence.
EDIT - old but seems like a decent review: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-an...
To recap, there are declines up to 30% in certain nutrients for certain vegetables. This seems to be mostly down to farmers choosing varietals that grow faster and handle transport better over time.
Personally it's still my opinion that this is no big deal. Even if, say, oranges are lower-quality than a century ago, they are now cheap, easy to obtain and available year-round. You might have to eat four oranges instead of one for whatever nutrient allotment you desire but...that's a heck of a lot easier than it was for our grandparents. As long as people aren't eating mainly combinations of flour and oil, they'll be fine.
"The apparent overall decreases for some nutrients are interesting and potentially of concern, but like Mayer and Johnson, we urge caution about their interpretation. Mineral decreases are popularly predicted for, or blamed on, mineral deficiencies in soil and fertilizer [5], but without sufficient consideration of contrary evidence and other possibilities.
[Snipping various scientific evidence they mention]
Factors other than soil mineral concentrations seem to have primary control of food mineral contents for the foods and minerals studied here. (The minerals I and Se are well known exceptions to this rule.) In the case of Fe, depletion is never an issue; instead, the issue is the ability of the plant to acquire the Fe that it needs. The fraction of soluble Fe in soils may be only about 10^-13 of total soil Fe."
In general, there seems to be an inverse relationship between nutrition and yield: higher nutrition + lower yield, or lower nutrition + higher yield. It's not hard to guess which we pick. But then the article (similar to another published in Discover magazine) focuses entirely and exclusively on soil quality as the primary issue.
[1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15637215/
[2] (SciHubbed) - https://sci-hub.st/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15637215/
I don’t think we are at the point where it’s either nutritional deficiency or obesity, but that seems like the ultimate risk here.
And fruit is in general very good for you, but of course it's also quite high in calories. A single navel orange has upwards of 70 calories [1]. So 2 oranges ~= 1 can of Coke. And fruit juice is even worse. A plain cup of orange juice has 112 calories. If somebody buys some form of it that's been sweetened or otherwise mixed, you can easily end up with your OJ having more calories than a Coke.
People can easily speed their way to obesity by eating things that they think (and are) 'good for them' without really appreciating how many calories they're consuming. Similar to how things like vegans can easily end up consuming way too many calories when doing things like using peanuts as a protein source. An 80kg man needs around 64 grams of protein a day. 64 grams of protein from peanuts (to take things to an extreme) would be more than 1400 calories. And that's from raw unseasoned peanuts, which have the best nutrition:calorie ratio.
[1] - https://www.verywellfit.com/oranges-nutrition-facts-calories...
Roughly speaking, 100 extra calories a day means 1 added pound of fat per month.
BBC Radio investigated it in 2019: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csz3ry
The next year they did the same for soil degradation, and found it a similarly complex topic: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08dx986
Both are <10 minute MP3 downloads
Perhaps not
https://www.rothamsted.ac.uk/articles/fact-or-fake-news-our-...
Besides, the measured reduction in nutritional content is a fraction compared to our yield increases over the years.
If you:
live in a developed country
have a reasonable income
live near a supermarket
and eat a varied diet,
then you most likely do not have any nutrient deficiencies
In the past infant mortality was extremely high, with frail infants invariably ending up as dead infants. And so in the past if you looked at somebody who was 15 years old, it's very likely that he'd live to roughly the same age as somebody today. It's not like he'd just start dropping around age 40. It was more a mix of people living to 5 years old and people living to 80 years old. Take the founding fathers as a random example:
==========
John Adams - 91
Benjamin Franklin - 84
Alexander Hamilton - 49 (killed in a duel)
John Jay - 84
Thomas Jefferson - 83
James Madison - 85
George Washington - 67 (speculation he may have been killed by a common medical practice of the time - bloodletting)
==========
Interestingly enough this goes all the way back to Ancient Greek times where you may be surprised upon some brief research to see how long any Greek you know of likely lived to, in spite of having effectively zero medical knowledge and hygienic practices such as shared butt sponges (in lieu of toilet paper) at the various public toilets. The reason I more contemporary samples is because one can reasonably argue a survivorship bias in the Ancient Greeks. Would you know of Philosophartes today if he had died when he was 40? Probably, but I can't prove that. The founding fathers though were all relatively young when their names were inscribed into history.
Declining nutritional and increasing caloric value is probably one of many contributors to rising diabetes rates though.
They aren’t talking about macronutrients like calorie content.
I was astonished when I first visited California how full of flavor the vegetables are. Just a whole different level.
I don't think we are seeing the former while the later is how you use the former for the production of actual food that is consumed. Converting fruits into smoothies makes them retain mostly only sugar, while vegetables (and fruits) under thermal treatment loose a lot of nutrients like fiber and vitamins.
Wait. So where does the potassium go in my banana when I blend it up?!
One concern in nutrition is separating fruit juice from fruit pulp. You probably wouldn't eat three oranges in a sitting without feeling full but you can certainly drink three oranges' juice. That's the number of fruit needed to make a cup of orange juice.
If you're adding juice to a kale smoothy it's more complicated. At a certain point of extortion, refinement, and concentration that juice can become a proxy for simply adding cane sugar.
If you're blending your fruit and eating the pulp then there is no change.
How much of what we farm is really just 'superficial agriculture' and not 'survival-driven agriculture'?
For example: gigantic monoculture fields of corn in the midwest US, groves of almonds and grazing crops in California, huge amounts of grasslands for beef. (I'm sure there's more examples too)
It just seems like many of the ways agriculture operates doesn't make sense from a needs-based perspective and certainly not from a nature-enhancement perspective either. Farmers just do their job of growing, and then money does its job of convincing.
A better example would be specifically corn used for ethanol because driving a car is not essential for survival.
The other two examples seem valid. Replacing part of your meat consumption with corn would reduce the required agricultural land.
An interesting quote which echos what you're saying here:
> That means that table corn, carrots, cabbage, apples and broccoli are all examples of what is called, paradoxically, “specialty crops” — and they largely don’t get the same support as the heavily subsidized industrial crops.
The absurdity here is that "specialty" crops are what you might call "food". Most corn is "what my food eats".
If survival was important, people could switch trivially. I would take a 99% vegetarian diet in exchange for not dying. Problem is that the costs may be collectivized, and weighted towards future generations.
"The present area of sugarcane (Saccarum officinarum) is about 13 million ha with a total commercial world production of about 1254.8 million ton/year cane or 55 million ton/year sucrose. (FAOSTAT, 2001)." [https://www.fao.org/land-water/databases-and-software/crop-i...]
That climbed to 1.9B tons by 2020. [WP ... 40% in Brazil] And 13Mha = 130,000 km^2 > 50,000 sq.mi. About the size of Iowa. And then, there's almonds.
https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/coexisten...
The error being made is assuming that corn cultivation being significant to global food supply means that corn is being cultivated primarily for food.
Production of both is currently rising rapidly.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31477819
George Monbiot: "[...] there is no major farm product as environmentally damaging as organic, pasture-fed beef."
Destroying forests to make pastures is environmentally destructive, but a large portion of our country can be utilized as pasture while maintaining an ecosystem not unlike how the land was before capitalism transformed it.
and the biggest one imo is dietary choices. Our meat consumption has lead to pasteurization of forest land to raise and feed the huge amount of livestocks needed to satisfy our meat craving.
We're not going to turn marginal grasslands into crops for human consumption, but using cattle to turn inedible grass into calories for human consumption is possible while maintaining that land as it was when bison roamed through it.
I also don't think that the US, for example, has to manage its land the same ways as other countries. If the US can effectively manage pasture and raise lots of cattle to eat, then we should be able to do that, and if other countries can't, then they should manage their land in a way that is optimal for their country. The US has a lot of grass pasture land that evolved over time to support the massive number of ruminants that roamed the US in the not too distant past.
Maybe the US should stop exports of beef and dairy and just focus on feeding its own people from well-managed land. But that would not be very popular, especially with our cattle industry.
You mean pasturization. Pasteurization would also be unfortunate though.
Where? France has increased its forest surface since 1840, while increasing population and meat consumption.
France, for example, has been pulling a lot of their beef from south america rather than eating locally raised cattle.
https://www.thelocal.fr/20180117/french-farmers-fear-ruin-ov...
> The source of his worry is a huge trade deal being negotiated by the European Union and the four Mercosur members Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay — an accord whose signature seems closer than ever.
> The new imports would represent just one percent of Europe's total beef production, and 4.5 percent of France's output.
So the deal hasn't been signed and wouldn't represent much.
From another article (https://www.franceagrimer.fr/fam/content/download/66996/docu...)
> Issues à près de 92 % de l’Union européenne, les importations de viande bovine chutent de 16,8 % sur un an, pour atteindre près de 283 milliers de tec en 2020
Which rougly translates to "92% of beef imports are coming from the UE. They fell by 16.8% to 283k tec in 2020".
There's a total in "tableau 2", page 3. 28.4% of the total meat is imported, 18.9% for the beef. The total non EU beef is thus 8% (100% of total beef imported - 92% of UE beef) * 18.9% (percentage of imported beef). Rounded up, it's 1.6%. I would hardly call that "outsourcing their diets and problems" and "pulling a lot of their beef from South America". More than 80% of the cattle eaten is localy raised, less than 2% comes from outside the EU.
South American beef is not a thing in France. We surely have plenty of other issues, but South American beef is not one of them.
Most meat, at least in France, is raised on land that couldn't support other kind of agriculture. The calorie intake of that land, without cows grazing on it, would be 0.
Cow grazing is a thing of the past unless you do milk for AOP cheese or premium meat. By the way cheap beef in supermarket is actually old milk cow
French beef and dairy-cattle-finally-eaten-as-beef eat 2/3 grass.
> French beef and dairy-cattle-finally-eaten-as-beef eat 2/3 grass.
> Forest area replaced by cattle accounts for 36 percent of all agriculture-linked tree cover loss worldwide
https://research.wri.org/gfr/forest-extent-indicators/defore...
When the land is only suitable for grass, it's grazed for awhile, after which it's basically desert.
South America also has some of the richest cattle land in the world in the Pampas, which has sustained beef production for hundreds of years on land which is otherwise unsuitable to food production.
Pressure on one company could stop the conversion of rainforest into soybeans. This doesn't solve the problem in a single stroke, nothing can, but it would help, and it doesn't require influence over the government of Brazil.
Yes, let's blame the consumer. First of all, the consumer has no idea how their specific spending habits contribute to an issue. For instance, an educated consumer (many consumers are not educated btw) might understand that eating meat causes deforestation, but they have no way of knowing if their specific purchase is contributing to that. Second, blaming the consumer makes any solution almost impossible because organizing a very large group of disinterested people is very hard. It would be much more effective to regulate the relatively small number of meat producers that are perpetuating deforestation and let the market work out decreasing consumption through increased costs.
Yes, let's. I don't think an argument can be held against this. As a meat eater, I understand I'm the driving force of this issue. It's an inconvenient truth, but it is the truth nonetheless. I'm rooting for alternatives like lab-grown meat to thrive, but no amount of wishful thinking allows me to skirt the fact that eating less meat would probably be not only good for the planet, but specifically for my own health.
> the consumer has no idea how their specific spending habits contribute to an issue
Let me point it out: in the developed world it's almost 100% guaranteed that it contributes significantly. You have to go to pretty far edge cases to find really sustainably produced meat. A case can be made that not all industrial farms contribute to deforestation per se, but they are all part of a system that has a high cost for our environment. Deforestation is bad, but it's not –and should not be– the only issue.
How did you come to that understanding? Did you dedicate your free time to studying the impact of meat eating, or was it part of your legally mandated education? A lot of people scrape by, barely able to make ends meet. They have children that require attention, or problems that require immediate action. They may have debts to pay, and no social safety net to help. At a fundamental level, they may have poor critical thinking skills. It's not realistic to expect every consumer to take the time to understand the consequences of every purchasing decision.
> A case can be made that not all industrial farms contribute to deforestation per se, but they are all part of a system that has a high cost for our environment.
But the package says it was humanely raised by family farms? Your trips to the grocery store are going to take a very long time if you need to do a supply chain analysis of every purchase.
If a person cuts down a tree for profit, and the removal of that tree is problematic, then that person is to blame. It doesn't make sense to blame someone many steps removed from the crime just because they, in a very indirect way, provided a very small incentive to commit the crime. The impact of the individual's consumption on the entirety of the industrial farming system is so small that, even if the individual consumer were to blame, they would be guilty of nothing more than the tiniest infraction. The issue with industrial farming arrises from the collective sum of demand, and thus requires a collective solution, i.e. centralized regulation.
But the parent commenter has an important point that should not be dismissed. It is far more effective to regulate/improve centrally at the producer side rather than "wait" for the goodwill of consumers.
You can't flood the world with cheap unsustainable meat (or other products), next put a far more expensive sustainable option next to it and think all of this will just magically play out.
Ideally, there should be no unsustainable goods being offered at all. The very word unsustainable pretty strongly suggests that ending the practice is a must.
It seems like something we could stand to invest a lot more in as a global civilization. An understated benefit is making the food supply more robust to volcanoes, asteroids, and nuclear winters.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/11/20/this-2-...
I come from a family of farmers since centuries, in Southern Europe. I am the owner of several large plots of land and I helped my family when I was a kid.
Growing food in greenhouses makes food cheaper than growing food outside greenhouses. Problem is quality. E. g. a tomato grown in a greenhouse does not taste as good as a tomato grown outside. In fact, the greenhouse tomato hardly has any taste.
Another problem is organic, eco-friendliness and all of those "luxuries of the first world": when growing in greenhouse, you'll have to use pesticides and all of those things that improve yield and keep plagues at bay. But then you are no longer ecological so some markets (e. g. Germany) close for you.
Also, this whole thing about "peak agricultural land". Bullshit. Really. There's plenty of unused agricultural land. The main problem with agriculture as of today is prices of sold goods vs cost of production, and that's only because of globalization, cheap transport and cheap labor in third-world countries (Africa, South America). E. g. where I grew up, there were big extensions of almond trees. Yet already 30 years ago, it was cheaper to bring almonds from California than grow our own almonds here! That crop is almost gone now, except for people (like me) who still have some almond trees for our own consumption (not to sell).
And the actual problem will happen in a few years, one or two decades at most: most of the sons and daughters of farmers went to university or vocational school, and now they have other jobs. Not farming. What will happen if globalization reverses (like it seems to be doing since COVID-19 started)? or if transport costs so much that growing locally starts to make economical sense again? We will have lost that knowledge and skills about agriculture. My only hope is I am seeing a few of my school and university mates, who studied Economic Science, Psychology, Electric Engineering, Civil Engineering, etc and became so fed up with those jobs, that they went back to agriculture (and they are making money because they have an analytical mind and they know what to grow, when and who to sell to, and first thing they do is they have a "business plan" for their lands and crops). Something like what happened in electronics.
However, it is definitely possible and there are many studies on that since at least 20 years. The 2 big cons are: - Energy costs (artificial lightning) - Harvesting is a lot more difficult (at least with the current technology)
Wheat yield potential in controlled-environment vertical farms https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2002655117
Wheat May Be Grown Indoors, But The Cost… Potential yield in vertical farming could be up to 600 times greater per hectare than current farming methods: Study https://krishi.outlookindia.com/story/wheat-may-be-grown-ind...
BTW, one more thing I forgot in my earlier comment about why agriculture has been mostly abandoned in Western countries: phytosanitary products (e. g. pesticides). Many phytosanitary products that are no longer (or were never) allowed in the US, Canada, Europe, etc are perfectly legal in Africa, South America, Asia, etc so their yield is a lot higher, thus again contributing to smaller production cost.
Power consumption is also a factor. Without fans the humid environment is prone to fungal infections and certain pests can spread pretty quickly too.
Overall it is a benefit since it simply allows for climate control. But you also have to heat it in winter since the plants will be very susceptible to the cold in their pots. Still, greenhouses are barely an option in the hotter climates since the power consumption would be insane.
And nobody would grow potatoes in a greenhouse because that would be extremely labor intensive.
The tomatoes grow in their substrate on top of big cooling/heating pipes that can be easily regulated. There's automated ventilation at the top of the greenhouses. They release wasps inside the greenhouse to control pests. Through summer, they spray the greenhouses with a chalky material to block some of the light.
Picking carts can self-drive themselves via guiding tracks embedded in the concrete flooring. It's all very clever, the plants are insanely productive and the produce tasted good to me.
Meanwhile my homegrown tomatoes are a constant battle on every front (heat, water, pests, etc).
For greens, an conventional farm is $0.65/lb and a greenhouse is $2.33/lb.
> Assuming a 40-45% gross margin for a typical supermarket produce department, retail prices for greens would need to be approximately $1 a pound for conventional, $4 a pound for greenhouse, $5 a pound for vertical, and $12 a pound for container-grown. A typical head of bibb or butter lettuce weighs less than half a pound. Therefore, the lettuce can be grown in a greenhouse or vertical farm and sold at retail for $2 to $3 per head.
> Although greenhouse or vertical farming is three to five times more expensive than growing on a conventional outdoor farm, it still allows for competitive pricing to the consumer with other vegetables and sides.
The yield can go up, but the cost per unit goes up too.
You can't run a harvesting tractor through a greenhouse. So, a lot of produce from greenhouses or vertical farms (etc) ends up with a manual harvesting step.
This is why you pretty much see greenhouses exclusively used for foods which would require that manual step anyways.
Sure you can. Just needs to be big enough.
Note that this is an area that is rather specialized - a pepper picking robot isn't good for tomato picking or lettuce picking ( https://youtu.be/EFC3OvkVKaQ ). Compare that to the incredibly versatile human ( https://youtu.be/oxbJVqfIK1U ).
It's similar to the "burger flipper robot" problem. Possibility solvable, but also gonna be costly and buggy for v1 of the robot.
Increase yields 100x per sqft Increase costs 10x per lb
Not just the cheapest, but the easiest: in many countries, and especially (though not exclusively) the US, the primary purpose of farming is landowning, so the primary incentive is limiting inconvenience.
Remember that the reason we use so much land is because that's the cheapest way to grow food. We could grow more food on less land by farming more intensively. We don't because that would make the food more expensive. At an extreme, a greenhouse can increase yields 100x but at an increase in costs of 10x.