Ruh-roh:
Apparently produce in the U.S. not only tastes worse than it did in your grandparents' days, it also contains fewer nutrients — at least according to Donald R. Davis, a former research associate with the Biochemical Institute at the University of Texas, Austin. Davis claims the average vegetable found in today's supermarket is anywhere from 5% to 40% lower in minerals (including magnesium, iron, calcium and zinc) than those harvested just 50 years ago.
More below the fold.
The apple used to be the size of an apricot. The strawberry is actually hybridized from the West's wood strawberry, which is not even half as big. The native grape (vitus californica) has tiny, delicious berries many bird can swallow. Even though the locals are all exterminated due to sprawl, they've soured my taste for those galactic seedless grapes. And then the apples are gigantic! It seems all your getting with each increase in size (even in organics) is more ">empty carbohydrates.
- On the So-Called "Dilution Effect:" Today's vegetables might be larger, but if you think that means they contain more nutrients, you'd be wrong. Davis writes that jumbo-sized produce contains more "dry matter" than anything else, which dilutes mineral concentrations. In other words, when it comes to growing food, less is more. Scientific papers have cited one of the first reports of this effect, a 1981 study by W.M. Jarrell and R.B. Beverly in Advances in Agronomy, more than 180 times since its publication, "suggesting that the effect is widely regarded as common knowledge."
The article then implicates the "industrialization of agriculture" for harvesting crops earlier, which also allows the plants less time to absorb nutrients from the soil, and added soil potassium preventing even more absorption.
However, the article begins with a disclaimer... the spinach of Popeye days, for example, was often fairly dirtier, adding to the iron content. There may have been other inaccuracies, or simply bad data. Still:
Then again, good historical data provides the only real-world evidence of changes in foods over time, and such data does exist — one farm in Hertfordshire, England, for example, has archived its wheat samples since 1843.
The protein content of cereals like wheat and other staple crops was a serious concern this last year, as fertilizer prices exploded and food instability and hunger rose around the planet.
The blueberries, jalapenos, apples and broccoli and grapefruit all seem a lot bigger within my few years. Bigger is not always better with food. Plant carbohydrates in absence of fat or protein just make me want to consume a lot more (and I can consume quite too much, thank you). And if the blueberries are getting no more nutritious yet still plumper, you're wasting more calories consuming... more empty calories. Rather silly.