[somenameforme]

This is the conclusion of the paper [1] that this article is based upon: "We suggest that any real declines are generally most easily explained by changes in cultivated varieties between 1950 and 1999, in which there may be trade-offs between yield and nutrient content."

What National Geographic says scientists say, "Scientists say that the root of the problem lies in modern agricultural processes that increase crop yields but disturb soil health. These include irrigation, fertilization, and harvesting methods that also disrupt essential interactions between plants and soil fungi, which reduces absorption of nutrients from the soil. These issues are occurring against the backdrop of climate change and rising levels of carbon dioxide, which are also lowering the nutrient contents of fruits, vegetables, and grains."

Modern media in a nutshell.

[1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15637215/

[dustymcp]

My anecdote from my garden is that my smaller cucumbers have way more taste, my smaller red bellpebbers are way more pebbery, potatoes have a richer taste, if this is just freshnes i dont know, but there for sure is a huge difference.

[amelius]

It was always the case that smaller vegetables are stronger in taste. I'm guessing that the larger ones took up more water, which diluted the taste, but without a difference of total nutrients.

[giantg2]

I believe this could be true. We see that lead is also diluted by increased size.

https://www.soils.org/news/science-news/lead-contamination-g...

[saiya-jin]

I don't think that's you. When I come home and eat stuff from my parents garden, the differences in some cases are massive. Carrots for example taste 10x more intense, even one that was taken from soil weeks ago.

And I am comparing to bio carrots we buy in Switzerland, so can't go much higher than that when shopping (apart from farmers markets maybe but that depends what kind of farm).

Maybe its about transport and premature harvest, like bananas - if you ever taste some in exotic locations where they harvest them in the morning, its hard to ever enjoy bleak taste of those available in western world.

[orlp]

Commercial mass-produced tomatoes, bananas and other climacteric fruit are picked heavily unripe, shipped in this more durable state, and in the destination country are rapidly artificially ripened in ethylene gas chambers. The same commercial mass-produced fruits and vegetables also have been cultivated for decades for resistance against disease, size, and shelf life. Taste is often only secondary to those.

On one hand it allows year-round affordable fruit and vegetables to lie in our stores. On the other hand it means we are now stuck buying tasteless bags of water.

It is an erosion of the 'middle class' of products that economies of scale across all products seem to cause. There are only two kinds of product left: the small-scale artisanal extremely pricy product (e.g. farmer's market), and the mass-produced MBA-optimized to death commercial product. Any product that becomes 'too successful' and reaches economies of scale falls victim to this and is subsequently repeatedly penny-pinched until nothing of value is left.

[throw0101a]

> Commercial mass-produced tomatoes, bananas and other climacteric fruit are picked heavily unripe […]

I've heard it said that frozen vegetables are often "fresher" than non-frozen: they're picked when they're actually ripe, and flash frozen a short distance from the farm. They can then be moved about and stored with much less fuss as long as they're kept cold.

Some trade-offs:

> Certain nutrients are also lost during the blanching process. In fact, the greatest loss of nutrients occurs at this time.

> Blanching takes place prior to freezing, and involves placing the produce in boiling water for a short time — usually a few minutes.

> This kills any harmful bacteria and prevents the loss of flavor, color and texture. Yet it also results in the loss of water-soluble nutrients, such as B-vitamins and vitamin C.

* https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/fresh-vs-frozen-fruit-a...

Seems to be an area of active research.

[jason-phillips]

> There are only two kinds of product left: the small-scale artisanal extremely pricy product (e.g. farmer's market), and the mass-produced MBA-optimized to death commercial product.

I discovered this phenomenon myself over the past decade, seeing the race to the bottom in automation, while at the same watching artisinal cottage industries sprout in East Austin in response.

Whether it was nitrogenated cold-brew coffee in kegs, handmade denim jeans, handmade cheeses and charcuterie, there was definitely a drive to produce high-quality, handmade items locally, seemingly in response to tasteless, soulless products begat by automation. I figured that is what the future held, two classes of product, one rather expensive and high quality, made by hand, and the other symbolized by a soulless $5 Garden Center plastic chair.

The reason why a market exists for those artisinal handmade products, I reckon, is because people at some level still crave the authenticity evidenced by something made by skilled craftspeople.

[boringg]

That or that people can discern quality and have an appreciation for quality.

The problem with quality is it doesn’t scale well which is at odds with VC funding model (ie the backbone to SV business model)

[sizzle]

I have a local CSA organic veggie box dropped at my door picked from local farms. It is delicious and no pesticides, highly recommended anyone who can afford it to try.

You can search for CSA companies in your area here: https://www.localharvest.org

[dr_dshiv]

Random: ethylene is psychoactive. Haven’t tried it. But, some evidence that it was the abiogenic gas at the temple of Apollo at Delphi:

Foster, J., & Lehoux, D. (2007). The Delphic oracle and the ethylene-intoxication hypothesis. Clinical Toxicology, 45(1), 85-89.

[yesenadam]

> The Delphic oracle and the ethylene-intoxication hypothesis

Thanks, interesting read. The paper seems rather against the hypothesis, to say the least - it's a demolition.

"this hypothesis is implausible since it is based on problematic scientific and textual evidence, as well as a fallacious argument. ...the evidence did not support the conclusion. ... if it was not the positivist bent of the argument that made it so widely attractive, then how did such an implausible argument get such wide press?"

I don't want to give long quotes, but it says "developing the explanatory hypothesis required the combined efforts of an archeologist, a geologist, a chemist, and a toxicologist", but they offered a pathetically flimsy argument, which only seemed convincing due to the appearance of its scientific trappings, appeals to the glamour of the "interdisciplinary" and of explaining ancient mysteries with Science. It mostly looks at why it convinced anyone, and became widely known, although extremely low quality work.

paper PDF: https://sci-hub.se/10.1080/15563650601120800

[dr_dshiv]

Quite so. Here’s a rather well written reply: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/155636507014778...

It’s funny that in neither paper was there ever an attempt to just try the stuff and, you know, attempt mantic divination. What has science come to?

[giantg2]

Welcome have some types of produce that is stored for long periods of time and lose nutrients during storage. For example, apples that you buy in the store tend to me more than a year old.

[specialist]

Yes and:

> mass-produced MBA-optimized to death

Plus counterfeits, knockoffs, gray-market, etc. eg Fake Italian olive oil.

I don't know what to call this category, or their purveyors. Inauthentic? Market parasites? The eBay / Amazon (unregulated markets) problem?

[jjoonathan]

"The 80/20 version."

There are times when I'm willing to pay 5x to get something 20% better. Not all the time, though. Moralizing the choice feels like a sales gimmick.

[iggldiggl]

As you mention Switzerland, this newspaper article might be interesting: https://web.archive.org/web/20190601232951/https://www.tages...

I.e. apart from the general trade-off problem between maximum yield and maximum taste, things are also exacerbated by the big supermarket chains demanding varieties that are delivering a "consistent taste year-round". As even the best tomatoes are only mediocre-tasting during winter, that apparently means standardising on mediocre-tasting tomatoes all year round, instead of mediocre tomatoes during winter and tasty tomatoes in the summer.

[boringg]

Oh yah supermarket tomatoes are crap - literally all of them. They shouldn't be called tomatoes as they are more like soulless, tasteless, poor textured trash.

[ne0flex]

I've noticed this too with tomatoes. My parents grow tomatoes in their backyard during the summer. The amount of "meat" in the backyard grown tomatoes is noticeably a lot more than store-bought tomatoes. Stock-bought tomatoes are a lot more watery. and have less "meat" in them.

Similarly, I've started buying a lot more organic fruits and vegetables. The organic strawberries have way more taste than non-organic strawberries.

[greggsy]

Same goes for zucchini and eggplant. People often bring their excess zucchini’s into the office as a trophy, and potentially prize to some lucky staff member, but they’re tasteless.

[pessimizer]

There are at least four other papers directly referenced and linked in the article. You picked the first one.

[stinos]

Modern HN in a nutshell. Oh, wait.

All kidding aside: please people read the full article, there's enough in there to at least partially support the claim quoted by the OP. Just not in that first paper.

[somenameforme]

I'm sure you'd agree that what they claim scientists say gives absolutely no mention to the conclusion of the first paper they chose to reference. How do you interpret this? Let's check out the 2nd paper [1]. It seems in many ways even worse than the first.

It not only also offers significant weighting to breeds, but ultimately even rejects the idea of a temporal decline in nutritional value! "Based on the available limited data, and due to variations in sampling, analytical techniques and likely differences in growing location and season, no definitive temporal trends could be established."

Basically the observed differences could be easily explained by other simple factors than a mysterious decline, including breed selection. Grow less nutritious crops, get less nutritious food.

[1] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8750575/

[specialist]

Well. I too am occasionally guilty of doing this. As a geek who knows how search is supposed to work, it's hard for me to drop the assumption that the highest hit is the most relevant. Even though I know it's not.

For future, I'll try to be more mindful.

[thawaya3113]

Because this article isn’t a review of a single paper?

They’ve used a single paper to write a broader article. You can find other papers that justify the other claims that the article makes.

Being a popular article as opposed to an article in a scientific journal means references are not also necessary, although I suspect if you reached out to the author they would provide you with a list of references they used.

Also, the idea that the media used to be better is even more laughable. In fact, popular science media, with all its flaws, is better than its ever been. The reality is popular science is just hard to do.

[matthewmacleod]

This isn’t an article that is “based on a paper”, and instead sources from multiple.

It’s really frustrating that this sort of lazy and dismissive middlebrow comment that misrepresents the article ends up stuck to the top.

[msrenee]

So there's like 4 or 5 different studies cited in that article. The one you're talking about, unless you found the rest of the article and it says something completely different, doesn't reach any conclusions about the cause. It just says that the researchers think the easiest explanation is different cultivars.

That probably has something to do with it. However, plants don't make nutrients out of thin air. They cited samples that found the nutrient content in the soil at "regenerative" farms was much higher than other organic farms. It seems crazy to me to think that soil quality wouldn't be one of the main causes, on top of all the practices to get higher yield out of a smaller area. Which was discussed in the article.

[troyvit]

To be fair, NG doesn't claim that the paper calls it changes in cultivated varieties, it says "Scientists say..."

That's still modern media in a nutshell though. Who are these "scientists" and also "experts" referenced in the next paragraph? They don't go into that but in true NG fashion they have some pretty pictures.

That said, from what I understand producers changed varieties to get veggies that are easier to grow, feed, and ship using using industrial ag processes. And those processes do require more irrigation and -- especially -- fertilization. Sorry I don't have any sources for that right now; I went to school for journalism.

[Angostura]

Paragraph 2, line 1:

> Mounting evidence from multiple scientific studies

It's not based on a single paper. The article may have been prompted by the publication of that paperm, but it is not limited to it.

Modern reading comprehension in a nutshell?

[KarlKemp]

The two statements aren’t contradictory. It may well be that modern agricultural processes require the use of these varieties.

[api]

Virtually all modern media exists to push a narrative, usually a Right Wing(tm) or Left Wing(tm) narrative. I'm not convinced you can get to the truth by "triangulating" since this assumes at least one party is actually saying something valid.

[jjoonathan]

Blanket cynicism is really easy to manipulate: you don't have to do a good job yourself, you just have to convince the cynic that the other guy is just as bad, which is easy.

"Both Sides" cynicism feels centrist but it actually kills centrism because it turns centrism into a losing media strategy.

Listening to both sides is important to avoid selective information bias, but refusing to pick a winner or, worse, always picking the midpoint is a terrible policy that is responsible for enabling the current degradation in the public discourse.

[somenameforme]

Imagine you were tasked with deciding the greatest film of all time. And after some opaque process over which you have no meaningful influence, you were presented with your choices, the "sides:" "Generic Superhero Movie #1" or "Generic Superhero Movie #2".

Of course you are right that one may be objectively better than the other, but I'm also right in that such a choice ought be rejected on principle because neither deserves the validation of participation in such a charade.

[jjoonathan]

...and then audiences stop reading your opinion, because snobbery isn't useful for picking which movie to see on Friday night, and then producers and directors stop paying attention to you because you have no audience, and now you have traded away your ability to effect change for the self-indulgent fantasy of being above the fray.

> neither deserves the validation

Huffing your own farts is poor debate strategy.

[somenameforme]

Look to the media. They sold any and all principles they once held in pursuit of "effecting change". And what happened? Everybody knows everything they say is worthless, they're further than ever from affecting, let alone effecting, anything and now they struggle, with no small degree of contempt and jealousy, to attract the viewership of a mid-tier YouTuber.

And this tale of modern media is not some new one. History and humanity endlessly repeats the same stories over and over, with little more than technological improvement offering a change in scenery. This is where the countless parables analogous to selling your soul to the devil come from: observing humanity. The moral being that it doesn't end quite like how you might have imagined.