From article “Side note on frozen produce: The post above is about fresh produce only. A potentially appealing alternative may be buying frozen produce, which on average has equal or higher nutritional content than fresh. This is because frozen produce is picked at peak ripeness then frozen shortly after, locking in most of the nutrients at the expense of appearance/texture/flavor.”
> That means it had been a year since the apples he bought were actually picked<p>I've been saying for a while that instead of focusing on "best by" dates, food suppliers should be forced to put on the harvest or manufactured date.<p>"Fresh" Apples being sold after a year is nothing compared to how old some of the food you by in the freezer, or boxed section.<p>Manufacturers and store owners are the ones that benefit the most from keeping food on the shelves longer.<p>> If you walk into a booth and that vendor is selling over 5 types of produce, there's no way they all ripened at the same time. They may not even all be grown by them.<p>I noticed this also when i was buying a "farmers box" that promised to deliver fresh produce from a local farm. Upon closer inspection almost all of the organic farmers market type produce delivery services buy from other suppliers and sell as if they grew them themselves.
> vendor is selling over 5 types of produce, there's no way they all ripened at the same time. They may not even all be grown by them.<p>I’d like to know how authors make this conclusion. For my weak but real experience <i>in the field</i>:<p>1. Plants don’t fruits everything at once. Some pumpkins fruits spans during months<p>2. Wise farmers grow several time separated batches, precisely to space the harvests. Especially useful for not-fruits plants like leek and salads<p>3. Plant several species that don’t grow at the same time. Fresh tomatoes 8 month a year is real<p>4. Outdoor growing is not a lab and there’s chance a side of you field receive more/less sun, wind, moisture… so won’t grow at the same rate. Some farmers don’t harvest all at the same time but just what’s ripe at the time.<p>5. Probably even easier in a greenhouse, the most environment you control, the most precise can be the harvest date/range of your controlled batches.
This article could use an awful lot more links to the cited research. Reading this as a skeptic, I don't know whether the claims are accurate or not, but the fact that (nearly) none of his claims are supported by citations to authoritative sources is not promising.
> If you walk into a booth and that vendor is selling over 5 types of produce, there's no way they all ripened at the same time. They may not even all be grown by them. Once, he actually saw a vendor at Boston farmers’ market selling carrots from Target! He could tell from the packaging because he used to work for them.<p>I don't think this is true. In California and New York City, vendors at farmers markets can only sell what they grew themselves, unless they get an exemption for a specific product and prominently label the product as grown by a third party, specifying the third party (usually things like cranberries grown by one vendor in the fall). Very occasionally you'll see foods like apples in plastic bags with supermarket labeling, but that's because the farmer packages and sells the produce directly to the supermarket.
My one addition to this is that I wonder if this is part of the obesity crisis.<p>If food is less nutritious, then logically we should eat more of it to get the nutrition we need.<p>Excess calorie consumption could at least partially be a byproduct of our biological drive to acquire the lacking raw vitamins and minerals we need from the foods that we eat.<p>This is undoubtedly exacerbated by eating processed foods, sure, but I'm willing to bet this lack of a fundamentally nutritious foodscape almost certainly contributes to the Pavlovian habit of overeating and resultant societal obesity.
This is really important in my opinion.<p>I've been growing most of my own produce for several years and I make sure all trace elements are present and available. It's a ton of work and makes no financial sense (it's not really cheaper when all is said and done) but at age 53 I feel a lot better than I did at age 38.<p>I wish I could share this more widely but I think a lot of the worlds problems might be from lack of trace elements. Just a theory but eating produce picked the same day with proper mineral balances as a regular diet is astounding.
> If you walk into a booth and that vendor is selling over 5 types of produce, there's no way they all ripened at the same time.<p>This makes me think this person simply has no idea how growing food works at all.
A lot of people who eat this produce and don't take any supplements are healthy and doing fine. If the nutrient levels have really fallen so much, then, how come malnutrition isn't an epidemic?
I thought it was a little weird that they start off talking about "calcium, magnesium, and iron" and then immediately switch to talking about how vitamin C degrades over time in produce. OK sure, vitamin C can enhance iron absorption, but it doesn't do that for calcium or magnesium and, being atomic elements, they assuredly do not disappear from food in storage.<p>When an article conflates things like this without calling it out, I become suspicious of the rest of the claims.
Vitamin C sufficiency is very important to humanity, and freshly picked produce very expensive. Vitamin C seems to be largely unique among nutrients in how fragile it is, being destroyed with any significant storage or cooking.<p>Supplementation with ascorbic acid in shelf-stable tablet form seems like a reasonable compromise.
This article seems to lack common sense. Yes, the amount of Vitamin C will reduce the longer you store a vegetable or fruit in a fridge, but the amount of calcium and iron does not change. Nor does the the density of other minerals.<p>Why is the author nominating Walmart as the winner based just on their speed to market? What about the other factors like soil degradation etc., which reflect the amount of iron and other minerals?
It’s unfortunate that the company (teakorigin) raised so much capital ($5mil?) without publishing a peer reviewed paper, scientific report or data set available for download by the public.<p>It is an interesting research idea, but there are major methodological challenges that would be better be addressed by a scientific inquiry than an entrepreneurial startup-y approach. For example, time of year, sampling, seasonality, handling, selection, etc.<p>My guess is that this is a retailer-oriented venture in search of a host, but the margins on this stuff are razor thin and grocers are more interested in optimizing the reduction of shrink.<p>Why would Target or Whole Foods buy into an app that tells shoppers to throw away more produce that looks and tastes totally fine or buy it across the street?
"It's a well-documented phenomenon that nutrient levels in produce have been declining for decades. ... There are several reasons for this, but most of them are due to modern agricultural practices. These reasons include: ... higher CO2 levels in atmosphere diluting nutrient content in plants, ... "<p>The author then links to an X post with a chart that shows relative carbon and nitrient levels and that says that "exposure to high levels of CO2 reduces the nutritional value of plants". It's not clear to me from the chart that spinach raised in high CO2 levels would contain less nutrients per kilogram than regular spinach. The chart only show proportions of the nutrients to carbon. Does the amount of carbon per kilogram of edible spinach stay the same or go down as CO2 increases? It's not clear.
Many negative comments here, but the notion that food might be less nutritious is certainly interesting and worth exploring, even if this article isn’t the end all be all. As mentioned in there, apples are sold up to a year old, and I know the same is done with potatoes. We have global issues with soil quality and depth, produce is selected for transport instead of taste (which is why grocery store tomatoes are gross but garden tomatoes are amazing) and other practices like breeding chicken that grow twice as fast as they used to.
This article smells like a fine bullshit. It's based on one diagram and a meta-analysis of papers.<p>However, the diagram has these nice annotation: "Asterisks indicate numbers could not be independently verified". And there are asterisks on all the historic data except for 1948.<p>The only reliable reference is from "35. Firman, B. Ash and Mineral Cation Content of Vegetables. Soil Sci. Soc. Am. Proc. 1948,13, 380–384."
if you're concerned about getting enough micronutrients, I did create a tool that helps me discover the foods that are highest in any particular vitamin or mineral or combination thereof and normalizes the data to 200 calorie servings for ease of comparison. it uses a weighted formula that you define with sliders on the left: <a href="https://kale.world/c" rel="nofollow">https://kale.world/c</a>
worth actually reading:<p>- farmers markets are hit or miss (anyone should know this by now)<p>- walmart came ahead of whole foods for produce quality (whoah)<p>alas we cannot go back to 1914 so we have to make due with what is out there now or grow our own<p>keep this in context...declining-quality produce in 2024 is still better for you than pizza