[caminante]

> If you repeatedly harvest crops from soil without working on building it, this is what happens.

Per the article, that doesn't appear to be a critical factor.

> The problem is that while dwarf varieties and increased CO₂ levels allowed wheat and rice to grow larger, the amount of nutrients they sucked up out of the soil stayed roughly the same.

Sounds like you can grow/gather the same size apple faster, leaving less time to soak nutrients.

[hinkley]

This is not recent news to some of us.

The theoretical model put forth is this: the nutrition in fruits and seeds comes from the plant, not the ground. It’s substantially what’s been saved up all season. So when a smaller plant has bigger fruit, it doesn’t have the reserves you’d expect for such a volume of produce. Hence nutritionally anemic food.

Add to this fruits and veg selected for shipping stability. Longer times to rot, and thicker skins that don’t bruise when loaded into crates. That shitty bland tomato you bought probably wasn’t even ripe when it was picked. It ripened in transit, possibly by being exposed to chemicals that boost ripening. Underripe fruits were picked before they were ready.

[caminante]

> It ripened in transit,

Don't get me started on tomatoes. We have ourselves to blame for pivoting the supply to tomato varieties with no flavor. [0]

> But as growers bred tomatoes to meet those priorities, flavour gradually diminished. “Every time they bred it and tasted it, they thought, ‘that doesn’t taste so bad,'” says Tieman. “But after doing it over and over, the flavour has changed.”

[0]https://chatelaine.com/food/trends/tomatoes-taste-florida-re...

[hinkley]

I/we use tomatoes because the sad fate of the tomato is the best rallying cry we have.

I don’t even like tomatoes, but they piss a lot of people off.

I heard an NPR interview a few years ago where a farmer was trying to do for peaches what we have done for apples - make a palette of flavors instead of the 2 we get. Those are selected for shipping as well. They are only really flavorful just before they spoil, or when baked.

[nightski]

Tomatoes are very easy to grow in a garden and besides are more like a herb because they have basically no nutritional value at 15 calories a piece.

[kevincox]

The core problem seems like you can't see the nutritional value in the grocery store. So you can't prefer more nutritional produce so there is no incentive for the industry to cultivate more nutritional crops.

Imagine if every farm needed to test their produce for nutritional value and have nutrition labels at the store. I'm sure things would change.

[aeturnum]

It's probably both - right?

Because there's more CO₂ each individual plant will grow larger and draw up proportionally fewer nutrients. At the same time, we are also able to rotate crops more often, so whatever replenishes nutrients in soil is probably now "covering" a larger numbers of growth cycles.