[AnthonyMouse]

It's worse than that. In many cases the consumer can't tell, but it still matters.

Take food, for example. If the tomato on your sandwich has fewer micronutrients than a different one, you may not be able to taste it, especially after the restaurant (or you) have slathered the sandwich with sauces full of salt and sugar and fat. So you want a chef you can trust who knows how to choose a tomato (and a farmer who knows how to grow one), whether you can taste the difference or not, or the result at scale is you end up deficient in various vitamins and minerals and can't figure out why you're tired all the time.

[pixl97]

Another analogy would be a tomato grown in contaminated soil may taste the same, you just pay for it in cancer 20 years later.

[AnthonyMouse]

That's not quite the same thing, because if the tomato is full of cadmium, whether or not you can taste it the 0.01% of the customers who are chemists and personally test all of their food for safety themselves are going to figure it out. Then every store will refuse shipment of any of those tomatoes and the cops will come to shoot the farmer's dog and run over the tomato field with their ludicrous panzer.

Whereas if they find that the tomato has 10% as much β-carotene as a tomato should or what have you, somebody will write an article about it that six in a thousand customers read and people will keep buying those tomatoes because they're cheaper and not even required to be labeled differently.

It's the difference between "so bad that people won't stand for it" and "worse, but people tolerate it", and the second one can be more of a problem specifically because people don't get mad enough about it to fix it.

[thatcat]

I doubt there are chemists sitting at home with an ICP testing heavy metal levels of all their produce. That would be a lot of work and expensive to maintain. In reality no one would even notice the toxicity unless FDA happened to check or someone got sick and traced it back.

[AndrewKemendo]

I follow a guy on Instagram who runs basically everything through a mass spectrometer:

https://www.instagram.com/massspeceverything

Here’s the Taco Bell hot sauce: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C-A3FfOueRm/?igsh=MzRlODBiNWF...

[AnthonyMouse]

> I doubt there are chemists sitting at home with an ICP testing heavy metal levels of all their produce.

It only takes one. Also, who says they're doing it at home? One hypochondriac willing to stay after work to use the equipment to quell their fears (or substantiate them) is all it takes.

[fragmede]

that's a really weird thing to hang the food safety of western civilization on.

[AndrewKemendo]

This is precisely how fragile our society is.

[Kinrany]

And yet: https://xkcd.com/2347/

[amy-petrik-214]

Okay, guys, come on now. back off here. Beta carotene. Vitamins. Shortage in food. The thesis is along the lines of "near-perfection but non-perfection flaws that people miss are important, OH NO, they're not important because everything was fine when they weren't perfect" -- but AHA! what about tomatoes with suboptimal vitamin levels! you couldn't even taste that! Honestly this is ridiculous, tomatoes, seriously?

Guess what. There's a lot of ADEK vitamines (fat soluble) out there. There's a lot stored up in our bodies. So much so that you can get a disease by pumping up the stores too much! Typically: TWO YEARS worth. And if that didn't set off a flag in your mind "oh, you mean vitamin A, of which two units are metabolically extracted from beta carotene" than you need to shut up right now throwing around beta carotene as an essential nutrient because you don't even know fundamental human metabolism!

Long story short, you know what else is really good at handling sloppy near-perfection-but-not-perfect differences -- -- -- biology. We've got 30% or so of our genome made of self-replicating viruses that snuck into a germ cell a billion years ago, yet somehow it all works, we've got 10 gorillion cells made from a single cellular machine at one point, building a functional reproductive-worthy body, and somehow that all works. People understand gusts and ideas as to what it's all doing, but do we know all of it, maybe not even most of it? No, we don't even know. It's like how magnets work, nobody knows. But big picture, the body has some capacity of adaptation and ranges of acceptable conditions, yet this TOMATO HYPOTHESIS seems to view the body as some sort of formula one engine that requires micrometers level clearances so it can go 20,000 RPM instead of the typical 6,000, and oh the medical castastrophe that should happen should someone eat a tomato of diminished nutritive content.

Now, I don't know what kind of world we live in here. Do we live in TOMATOLAND where people eat with every meal ketchup and marina sauce as the main dish? Are we worried that in TOMATOLAND that a 90% drop in essential amino acids of our favored cuisine will cause problems in population health? Because I'm pretty sure if a damned tomato comes up 90% short on beta carotene, that said food eater has TWO WHOLE YEARS to eat NON TOMATO FOODS such as CARROTS or FORTIFIED FOODS WHICH IS MOST FOODS which will easily replenish their vitamin A levels.

[diob]

In many cases, we know the quality is substandard but don't have a choice either, depending on monopolies in the area.

[rafaelmn]

This is a bad analogy because food is dual purpose - nutrition and enjoying the taste.

Music is just about subjective enjoyment - you will not get cancer if the piano was not in tune - and if you can't tell the difference then it is irrelevant to your experience.

[AnthonyMouse]

Have a look at the research as to the effect of music on mood and mental health.

[rafaelmn]

I wonder how fragile you must be to have a breakdown because a piano was out of tune, at a degree where it's not perceptible to anyone but experts.

[1propionyl]

Not to mention that food and music both have a third (set of) purpose(s)/value(s): culture.

[deanCommie]

There is a second-order effect to this too, which connects to the original article.

If the piano is slightly out of tune, and the orchestra is slightly worse, people stop appreciating it (not realizing how much better it COULD be), and the art dies out, not because it's moved past it's time, or the culture moved on, or people don't want it, but because THEY DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT THEY CAN HAVE.

That is 100% the case with Tomatoes. Most people I know (including myself) think tomatoes are bland boring filler. Annoying to cut. Barely add any flavour. Need salt + fat (cheese, bacon, etc) to really bring out their flavour.

And then one day we have a farmer's market heirloom tomato, and it's like our world gets shattered.

"I COULD be eating tomatoes like this on the regular? And I'm not? Whatever happened as a society to get me to this point was a crime, and needs to be undone."

But most people never even get to experience that, I think.