Posted by PaulHoule 10/25/2024
My relatives, corn farmers in Iowa, have been preaching no-till for three generations now. I asked my uncle why it's not been universally adopted after all this time.
He said it's partly lack of awareness, which was astounding to me. I learned about the loss of our soil and the importance of no-till in the classroom in middle school in an urban area, of all places! The evangelism is occurring, but maybe it's just not reaching the right ears, or it's reaching deaf ears.
The other factor, he said, was that you'll suffer lower yields for a few years after you stop tilling, while the soil builds up a proper layer of decomposing matter on top. Or at least, farmers are afraid that could happen. And it's not a risk worth taking in their view.
There is a role here for government incentives to accelerate the transition. I think they already exist, but they should step it up, since we have been moving so slowly. The government is quite accustomed to tweaking the economics of farming to stabilize such an important part of our society.
He revisited his analysis in 1947 in "A Second Look" in which he responded to critics, and doubled-down:
"The soil which the gardener or farmer works is made up of tiny crystalline fragments. The action of soil acids, principally those released through the decay of organic matter, unlocks the minerals required for healthy plant growth. [ ... ] the continuous use of commercial fertilizers is a mistake. [ ... ] The "bank account" theory of soil is bankrtup. It holds that whatever we take from the soil in the growing of crops must be put back - usually in the form of prepared fertilizers. What the soil needs, on the contrary, is the gentle chemistry described above. If man cannot learn this, he will pay and pay, ultimately to his ruin".
1943. 1947. This is not new stuff. By the time "A Second Look" was published, there were 340,000 copies of "Plowman's Folly" in print.
Anecdotal, but can confirm, I observed lower yields (sometimes minimal, in the range of 5-10%) for a year or two after starting to till. But it's so much worth in the long run. Granted, I'm talking about the market-garden size yield. Could be different in multi-hectare yields, but I can see the difference on my scale. After the initial one or two years I can see increased yields with lowered herbicide use and less frequent weeding activity.
I was sceptical at first - it sounds too good to be true and runs against the conventional wisdom I followed. But I started experimenting with a few vegetable patches and I was happy with the results. Then I expanded over time, still amazed with the outcomes.
It's more of a hobby operation, so I'm not worried about optimizing yields. To me the biggest factor is that gardening became super enjoyable. I guess it's because efforts-to-results ratio got so much better. I got many compliments from strangers about my garden (including incredibly oversized pumpkins), which made me proud.
Not sure how it fits into a hacker's ethos, but there you have it.
I run a biodiverse fruit orchard.
Maybe it has more the fact that humans are risk averse. We just don't want to make financial sacrificed in the short term to get longer term rewards. Many of us want to do good, but we also don't want our 401ks and subsidies to go down.
Edit: NVM, it was pointed out elsewhere that the needed equipment is different
When we as a civilization making decisions ending up where we are now (depleted soil and what else not looming). It does make one wonder if the current financial incentives is NOT aligned with the incentives of living beings on the planet? How can we make it so?
Where and when did that misalignment happened?
This is an economics problem not a knowledge problem.
> Living soil consumes rock minerals making them available to plants.
Industrial ag treats soil like it's a tank of fertility, and guess who sells the refills? Biologists know that healthy soil is a factory, making new fertility out of rock/air/rain/sun.
Direct from soil microbiologist Dr Elaine Ingham: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag
Modern agriculture uses fertilizer for extra nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K).
Plants also need a few trace minerals from soil but it’s a tiny fraction of their mass Iron, Calcium, etc and can also be added back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_flour
PS: There’s some really destructive agricultural like sod that’s literally shipping soil, but the premium pays to replace the soil.
i don't know how much iron crops need compared to what is in most soils. I know farmes are adding sulfar and other mineral.
I thought it was a huge issue because natural nitrogen fixation was slow and unreliable, and that's why Haber-Bosch was such a big deal.
If you look at a regenerative certification program like [1] you’ll see that you’re allowed to apply synthetic fertilizer but it has to be no more than the rate removed by harvested crops. This means, hopefully, that you aren’t losing much to erosion, runoff, or volatization, and that good soil structure is keeping them available.
[1] https://s3.amazonaws.com/media.regenified.com/wp-content/upl...
Most small-scale regenerative ag farms are bringing in a lot of outside material to add those minerals back in.
My farmland hasn't been farmed for 50 years. If I clear an area and put a veggie bed in, I get 1 year of great yield, 1 year of "okay" yield, and then it becomes impossible to grow anything due to nutrient deficiencies.
Composting the food waste, and use composting toilets to create a "circular economy".
That is apparently how it was done in the old days...
See also, Paul Wheaton criticism of The Humanure Handbook ("No, do fear your poop! Fear it!!"). Timecode link, but I recommend the whole video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vZPTPIHO8w&t=4980s
It's about unknown unknowns, right? But we could map out where those may be.
I guess chemical toxicity, drugs with long half-lives that affect soil organisms, and antibiotics that promote resistance.
(yeah yeah they are all chemicals.)
For the chemical toxicity, it's chemicals that are harmful to plants but allowed for human consumption, or chemicals in sufficient quantity to disrupt soil balance. Doesn't seem like a real concern?
With metabolic disruption to soil organisms, yes, there may be real danger there. That smells like previous environmental mistakes.
Antibiotics, yeah, some danger. Livestock is exposed, and resistance-conferring genes might jump directly to human pathogens.
It's worth studying. There are requirements for both sewage processing and fertilising soil, so the value of a solution would be high.
Like many things, poop doesn't easily scale....
Remember all those post WWII photos showing how fertilizing with phosphorous resulted in incredible crop yields?
Guess what element China (which has some of the world's largest reserves) has quit exporting?
I think selenium would run out long before phosphorus.
The crust contains selenium at 0.05-0.09 ppm, but most plants require around 0.1-1 ppm. It's also one of the hardest nutrients to remediate because you can't just dump a bunch of selenium on the surface when 5-10 ppm starts to become toxic to lots of other organisms.
Selenium is one chemical element that, like nickel and cobalt, has been needed by all living beings already some billions of years ago, but nowadays there are many living beings which have lost their dependency of selenium, which has been a beneficial trait for them, due to the scarcity of selenium.
The terrestrial plants, because of their environment which frequently lacks many minerals, have lost their dependencies of several chemical elements, e.g. of cobalt, of sodium, for most of them also of nickel, which is optional even in those which can use it, and apparently also of selenium.
If you have seen any source which says that it has been discovered that some plant needs selenium, please indicate it.
As I have said, many plants happen to contain selenium only because they are not selective enough in their sulfur intake, not because they need selenium for anything, unlike the animals, which would die without selenium.
Selenium, along with taurine, is one of the supplements which genuinely drove my physicians vehemently crazy, so I doubled up, and ensured that they were the focal point of my daily regimen.
Selenium is commonly recommended by doctors in New Zealand.
Psychiatrist's parting shot was, "they're all bio-active!"
Micronutrients are no fad, because guess what, they used to come in our fruits, vegetables, and meats.
One issue with phosphate ore is contamination with undesirable elements, like cadmium and also uranium and its decay products, like radium. The waste stream from sulfuric acid treatment of the ores is radon-emitting gypsum.
Sulfuric acid itself may become limiting once we're off fossil fuels, since almost all of it is currently produced by oxidation of sulfur extracted in the desulfurization of oil and gas.
Regenerative practices would probably initially look like a reduced high side profit, and reduced land yield intensity but at significantly reduced input costs on chemicals and pesticides. The labour costs might be higher or lower depending. Then over time, yield to use would show for area in production actual profits were better but still to a lower high point. More certainty as long as e.g. massive disease or pest risk didn't strike.
And as long as organics have a higher premium price at lower yield, when the soil can pass the certification tests for residues there's a new profit highpoint.
That's my sense but perhaps there are better takes on it.
The profit per unit area can become very high.
Not in my experience.
The promises of many permaculture proponents, are close to a scam.
Basically, the claim is establish a working ecological system - and then it runs by itself, while producing lots of yield. Permanent Culture.
But in reality, wild nature takes over quite quickly, if you don't do anything. A fruit tree does usually not have benefits by making big red apples for example. Small ones are good enough for wild reproduction. But we want as many apples as possible, which means pruning, etc.
And a vegetable garden ... they like care, but if you don't tend to them, they will remain tiny and soon displaced by weeds.
So what I have seen in my experiments in my garden and on other permaculture farms - is that the result looks nice, but it is a lot of work and low yield. Some ideas like fruit forests are a nice additionm but all in all I doubt permaculture can feed the world. (I have not seen one permaculture farm, that could feed itself)
This is something I have to regularly say to colleagues and contemporaries in the software and electronics space.
I am sure it comes up in many fields. So many things are done inefficiently and with disregard to the future for the sake of short term profitability.
In this case though it may doom us all rather than just create more work for someone a few years later.
We need to talk more about the need for the consumption habits to change if we want regenerative ag to take over. We won't be able to farm the amount of corn and soybean we farm today, but that would mean consumers will have to consume less stuff that is a corn derivative, or even better, consume less. There's no reason we should be selling a single bag of Doritos across the country, let alone for $2.
I definitely appreciate having corn tortillas and corn chips and cornbread to diversify what is almost entirely otherwise wheat and potatoes and rice, in terms of my starches.
I need to get my calories somewhere. Don't really see what's wrong with some corn chips when I need a quick snack on the go because my last meal was five hours ago.
And heck, plenty (most?) of the fresh food I eat comes from across the country, if not from other countries entirely. But corn chips, having most of their water removed, are far more environmentally friendly to transport due to being so lightweight.
it sucks as a cereal, nutritionally speaking, iirc, based on what I've read earlier. i could be wrong, but don't have time to check it now.
may check out millets and other alternative cereals instead of, or in addition to corn, wheat and rice.
some of them are nutritionally or agriculturally superior.
In many parts of the Earth, e.g. in Europe, maize a.k.a. corn and wheat are much cheaper energy sources than anything else and wheat and corn are about as cheap.
Wheat may be preferable to corn only because it has a double amount of proteins, so it can also be used to provide a big part of the daily intake in proteins, if it is supplemented with at least another source of proteins that is rich in lysine. However, wheat is more suspicious from the point of view of its health effects, so when the absolute minimum cost for the daily food is not the target, corn might be the best energy source in food.
The bulk of the food that is needed daily is required for providing energy and corn can do that at a minimal cost and it can be cooked into tasty food.
The rest of the food must provide proteins, essential fatty acids, vitamins and minerals, but much less amounts are needed for that.
So corn is perfect nutritionally for its right purpose. Obviously it cannot be the only kind of food that is eaten.
Except for energy (i.e. starch), most cereals do not contain anything in sufficient amounts to be an adequate source of it. Wheat is an exception by having a useful amount of protein, which is however harder to digest than most other proteins and the undigested fragments may have undesirable effects. Only oats has a higher protein content than wheat, but oats is much more expensive, so it is not really competitive from this point of view.
Therefore it makes no sense to claim that corn is worse nutritionally than other cereals, because it is better than most (except possibly rice, which cannot be cultivated in the places where corn is grown) at the only thing for which cereals are really good: providing energy.
Whether you pasted LLM content or your own, so much is wrong about what you said (in such a confident tone), including logical, English usage, and scientific / factual errors, that I do not want to argue more, except to leave you with this link to peruse, and another sentence or two below:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41957679
That link was of a reply by me to another comment(er) in this same overall thread.
Make sure to see my own reply to my own comment, at the link below the link given, and in particular, the Wikipedia links given there, about the nutritional value of various food items discussed here.
Now, that sentence or two that I mentioned above:
Factual error: near the top of your comment, you say that wheat has about twice the protein of corn (maize).
Wheat actually has more than three times the protein of maize - as a ratio. It also has a lot of other nutritional value.
See the relevant Wikipedia articles that I linked.
And in an absolute sense, it makes even more of a difference, because maize is below 3.5 grams, and wheat is above 12.5 grams in protein. So wheat has 9 grams more protein per 100 grams, than corn / maize. That makes a hell of a lot of difference to poor people, or others, who cannot afford or do not want to eat meat, for religious, cultural, ethical or other reasons.
And there are an increasing number of people in the west or in "developed" countries who are becoming vegetarian for ethical or climate reasons.
The founder of Y Combinator, and of this site, Hacker News, Paul Graham, also became vegetarian some time ago.
When asked why, by someone, he replied, "I was grossed out by factory farming".
See his reply here, 17 years ago, via this search:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=58051
"It wasn't a deliberate choice. I just got grossed out by factory farming."
Factual error, or almost: in your last paragraph, you say that corn is an excellent source of energy.
Much less than wheat:
Corn / maize: less than 17 grams carbs per 100 grams.
Wheat: more than 71 grams carbs per 100 grams.
Again, see the same relevant, linked, Wikipedia articles about maize and wheat for proof.
My calculator tells me that 71/17 is over 4x.
Fat content in both is so low as to not matter.
And carbohydrates have 4 calories per gram, while fats have 9 calories per gram.
So should we all just eat fats only, for energy?
Of course not. There is much more to nutrition than just energy or protein or fat or whatever.
No factual error here. The wheat flour from which I make bread has 13% proteins, while the cornflour that I use has 6.4% proteins.
It is likely that unlike me, you do not cook your own food, which is why you are not aware about the content of nutrients in food ingredients.
The protein content in other parts of plants does not matter. Only the content in the products that you can buy and use for cooking matters. The 6.4% protein content for cornflour is pretty much the same in all brands of cornflour that I have seen in Europe. The wheat flour that I use is the one with the highest protein content. Most other brands have a lower protein content, down to 10% of protein.
> Corn / maize: less than 17 grams carbs per 100 grams
This must be a hallucination. Cornflour almost always has around 75 grams of starch per 100 grams. Wheat flour has a slightly lower starch content, the value written by you, 71 g per 100 g is indeed correct and typical.
The energy content of the cornflour I use is 3410 kcal/100 g and of the wheat flour is 3530 kcal/100 g. Nevertheless, the slightly higher value for wheat flour is misleading, because the gluten is never digested completely and even for the part of the gluten that is digested, the body spends more energy for amino-acid processing than for starch processing, so the net energy intake is actually slightly lower for wheat flour.
It is possible to eat only fat for energy. It is also possible to eat only carbohydrates for energy. This does not mean that the extremes are the best choices.
So you should better check your facts, because the values are so far from correct as to qualify for "hallucinations" (i.e. "more than three times" vs. 13/6.4 and 17 g vs. 75 g).
>It is likely that unlike me, you do not cook your own food, which is why you are not aware about the content of nutrients in food ingredients.
Such a pompous, uninformed, creepy, incredibly illogical and retarded statement you made, to say that, because a person does not cook their own food, they are not aware about the content of nutrients in food ingredients.
Going that same "logic" implies that many people in your friends circle, your relatives, your village or city, your country, and the whole world, are not aware about the content of nutrients in food ingredients. Because a lot of people worldwide, do not cook, you know. Maybe due to being too busy, having others who can do it for them, being partially disabled, or being enough well-off that they do not need to cook, sometimes, or ever. But they have the ability to read ingredient information on packages.
Is that not blindingly of obvious to you?
And further, I do know how to cook, and do cook my own food - sometimes, not always, because I am in that well-off category above. So I don't need to cook all the time.
And I enjoy doing it.
>Going that same "logic"
Going by that same "logic"
>your friends circle
your friends' circle
>Is that not blindingly of obvious to you?
Is that not blindingly obvious to you?
did you see what I did there? :)
Vague ad hominem accusations are useless.
The only factual error is what you have written "it sucks as a cereal, nutritionally speaking".
Anyway, I did that (replied) already, once.
See my other reply to you, here:
Please, if all you've got is a vague recollection of stuff you read ages ago just don't comment at all. You're just adding noise
>if all you've got is a vague recollection of stuff you read ages ago
I didnt say "vague", you added that. Kindly don't.
And I said "earlier", not "ages ago". That "earlier" could span a wide range of times ago. How did you manage to make the jump from my "earlier" to your wrong interpretation, "ages ago? That is sloppy / inaccurate thinking / writing.
In fact, it sounds more like misrepresentation than misinformation, which is even worse. Don't do it.
(Howdja like my wordplay up there? ;)
Dude (as in dude on a dude ranch, meaning a rank newbie), take a piece of advice: don't try to punch above your level, or, in other words, don't bring a knife to a gun fight.
Your arguments are pathetic and fake.
And, as a knockout blow: I noticed that you avoided replying to my above point about my use of "earlier" vs. your absurdly wrong (or intentionally fake) interpretation of it as "ages ago". That was either stupid or cowardly of you.
End of this subthread for me. I don't waste my time arguing with fakes and cowards. Rant on, if you like, into /dev/null.
You are wrong. Sorry. I can't even imagine where you could have read that.
I would rebut you with actual facts, but since you haven't given any information to rebut, there's nothing for me to say except that you've been misinformed.
Do you really need information from me to rebut, when you can so easily look up relevant words like corn (maize), wheat, rice, millets, and balanced diet, to name just a few of the words / terms I talked about, in Google or other search engines, and particularly in Wikipedia?
The Wikipedia articles for many such common human food items often includes a table of nutrient names and corresponding percentages for that food item, such as for the percentage of carbohydrates, proteins, fats, vitamins and minerals, by needed daily value (DV), with a citation to the USDA article on the same subject.
Those are hard facts, not my opinions.
Check them out, then come back and talk.
That is the one of the most important points in my argument above, about why corn sucks nutritionally.
Of course, I did not mean that it is totally useless. Obviously it has some nutrients, just like any other food item has. Maybe I should have mentioned that earlier, in my first comment in this subthread.
I did not mention balanced diet, because I kind of thought that all educated people would know what that means and what it's constituents are - such as carbohydrates, proteins, fats, vitamins, minerals,
Just compare the nutrition from corn (maize) with the nutrition from some of the other food items I mentioned, in said Wikipedia articles.
Here you go, I'm pasting some relevant links below:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maize
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorghum
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millet
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_millet
And there are some more millets. Google them.
Also, for vegetarians (who don't eat meat in any form, land or sea based), which is hundreds of millions of people in the world, due to culture or religion or lower income), legumes are equally important, along with cereals, to give the proper balance of essential amino acids needed to make the needed protein for our bodies.
Google "essential amino acids" and "complete protein" topics.
And I have only scratched the surface of the subject of nutrition. I am by no means an expert. I am just a beginner, who has an interest in the subject, for my own personal use, and to share any info I pick up, with friends.
You're welcome :) ;).
It’s not weird to say we should grow less commodity corn because it is resource intensive and broadly subsidized.
Most of that is markup. The raw materials are on the order of cents.
Look at CPUs, for a fabricator the cost of the silicon alone is a constant cost which is dwarfed by capital investment and yield cost.
Then there are other costs like labour, administration and shipping.
1. most farmers are stubborn and OLD
2. most of the industrial equipment is not meant for regenerative practices meaning many farmers simply can't afford to switch technologies
3. regenerative farming takes time & there simply isn't enough expertise out there
4. agricultural land shrinks every year. EVERY year. new farms are harder and harder to start & we really cannot afford to dip our food supply
5. Economically, the government has a very strong interest in keeping food cheap. Hungry people have a tendency to overthrow governments. farming has extremely thin margins.
6. There is a lot of funding in the form of grants and programs to encourage growth, but it means most farmers need to become grant writers. Large scale farms now have professional grant writers, smaller farms where the regenerative practices might have the most impact are having a difficult time accessing these programs.
7. Carharts are fashionable and really expensive. My dad found my first carhart on the side of the road with treadmarks across it and I got made fun of for it. Give me back my carharts.
Here are some of the things that are really helping with these problems though:
1. most farmers are really stubborn and will push through problems because its just work
2. Agritourism is bringing in a lot of renewed interested in farming & money.
3. Food chain issues (looking at you boarshead & mcdonalds) is bring a renewed interest in buying local.
4. Regenerative farming simply makes better food. Seriously, I cannot eat grocery store pork or chicken. The meat looks and tastes different.
5. Ignoring no-till techniques, there are techniques that can be started at a low cost for small scale farms. Chicken tractors, rotational grazing, soil health programs, etc. My family has been doing chicken tractors for chickens and turkey for personal consumption. Its been pretty easy for 1-2 person to raise 1500+lbs of meat with only about an hour of work a day. The only labor intensive day is harvesting and we've really gotten it streamlined. Its also eliminated the need for fertilizing or aerating the area they are run in.
6. I've noticed its really bonding family farms together and bringing in younger farmers in with a sense of ownership and purpose
They're stamped "IRR" on the inside... but that's more subtle than tread marks XD I usually order several sizes of what I'm interested in and send most of them back.
I'd go further. Governments and society want to overproduce food for resiliency. Markets aim for efficiency, so you need some amount of subsidies for production.
> Food chain issues (looking at you boarshead & mcdonalds) is bring a renewed interest in buying local
Buying local doesn't really solve this.
of course we can.
for corn, circa 40% is used to feed livestock and 35% for ethanol production. there is very little human consumption.
for wheat, in the US and Europe, only around 35% is used to feed humans.
we really should do much more regenerative agriculture so people eat better food down the chain.
Good luck with getting Americans to pay more for and/or eat less meat.
We’re practically addicted to eating meat in some form at every meal. Not to mention the weird group of folks that have tied eating meat to masculinity.
I was shocked how cheap meat is in the US. I was at Costco looking at some briskets and pork belly.
Here in Switzerland for good quality meat you're going to pay between 30-50 CHF/kg for pork and up to 120 CHF/kg for beef.
That seems like something a tech community who is looking for a problem to throw AI/LLMs at... really ought to be able to help out with.
What's the cause of this? Nutritional deficiency? Economics? Or something else?
Fire codes requiring two stairways have the unintended effect of making 4 bedroom apartments impossible to build and so in turn push anyone who wants just a little more space to single family houses. Those same fire codes have prevented a lot of deaths, and I've never seen a property study on if we can really get rid of them (everyone proposing it points to other countries without those code having lower fire deaths - but they are comparing overall rates including old buildings and lots of different construction styles - so I'm not sure if it something we can safely get rid of in the US context)
If we don't also build great mass transit traffic will get worse - sprawl is a solution to heavy traffic (not a great solution but it is one).
Most places in the US with high density are friendly to specific life styles. They have great bar scenes, theater, live music, arts (and others), but there are lots of other things they do poorly. Importantly the parts with high density are very unfriendly to families and so a lot of people who live in high density in their early 20s feel forced to move to the suburbs in their 30s as they settle down - better schools, parks and other things you want to do with a family become important (these are things that other countries do well in high density but not the US)
On the transit and lifestyle aspects - I think those actually come naturally if you allow the density. And I say that is someone who was an organizer for transit for a decade in Seattle. It would have happened on its own, and probably better, if we did the development first.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/360507198_Are_No-Ti...
-cotton
-Tobacco
Even in land producing corn...the soil loses enough that several tones need to be added per acre. They use to rotate between beans and corn to keep that expenditure down....as beans replaces nitrogen taken from soil by corn...
my bias, worked Uncles farms during childhood each summer.
Regenerative farming practices require not doing what the US ecoomic landscape forced agriculture to become. Corporations were given too much power, allowing them to erode cooperations with with good, varied yield by buying up farms one at a time until the coop as a whole didn't have good, varied yield anymore, and going "oh poor babies let us buy your entire coop, you can keep farming but we, instead of the market, will pay you", and the law went "this is fine, there is no problem here", and it continues to say that to this day.
Note one business opportunity for the regenerative sector could be organic healthy soil production. There's a demand for high-quality soil and this could make the second half of the year productive. This could go well with a mushroom production system integrated with composting.
[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2014/june/double-croppi... [2] https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/conservation-basics/conservation-b...
Depends on how you define modern industrial agricilture I guess.
From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_cropping
“However, only 5% of global rainfed cropland is under multiple cropping, while 40% of global irrigated cropland is under multiple cropping.”
Most farmland is rainfed. Only about ~20% is irrigated globally.
That means less than ~10% of all farmland globally is double-cropped.
The closest alternative I have seen is Joel Salatin's approach which does not use chemicals and has minimal tillage... But is extremely labor intensive and is not profitable at commodity prices.
Pick your poison.
You’re going to have to be more specific than “chemicals” unless you’re asserting that humans had fusion cells.
The fake lie answers that they will give might include zero calorie sweeteners because people hate the idea that you can "have your cake and eat it too" (no meta-pun intended).
Substances which are artificially synthesized or heavily processed which are added to food. For the purpose of this definition, ingredients which have a long history of use such as salt, alcohol, fermented foods, smoking, etc. are excluded.
Of course the purpose of this definition is to serve as a generalization in order to facilitate discussion. I'm certain that there are exceptions where modern additives are probably fairly obviously harmless such as vitamin/mineral fortification. Likewise there are traditional ingredients that we now know can be harmful such as alcohol, excessive salt, smoke, etc.
Now the food is causing long-term issues in some people, but the American medical system introduces a lot of friction towards chronic medical issues. These issues are underreported, therefore there isn’t a lot of money available to reaearch them. And the time between cause and effect is, well, decades before we have clinical diagnostics to allow us to say “you specifically need to eat less salt”.
Now we can slap regulations on the companies involved in food production to revise the levels of sodium in food. I’m not sure we know what the optimal levels are. But it will probably cost them millions of dollars factoring in food waste, changes to established shipping / storage guidelines, possibly even force them to change companies to deliver product faster or pull their product from certain retailers who find it no longer profitable to receive shipments given the low volume they can sell before the product is unsafe to sell.
But it’s only really possible to have the discussion of what the right solution is if the specific objection is stated. If someone is concerned about GMOs, the driving issue may be more related to where they can be grown, size of the product, crop vulnerability to disease, avoiding excessive use of herbicides or pesticides, adapting to ecological changes, and so forth.
Sure in like-minded folks, chemicals may be understood to mean artificial sweeteners, pesticides, GMOs, HFCS, etc. but it’s unclear which they’re objecting to or even what agricultural sub-industry they’re criticizing.
Heck even high amounts of sodium in the American diet is criticized, but strip it out entirely and you’ve got a different set of problems now.
Most likely each change was done for a reason that improved either the cost-effectiveness or the appeal of food, or solved issues relating to storage, availability, changing ecologically factors, vulnerability to plant disease, malnutrition, etc.
It’s just not constructive to say something that’s so generic that it evaluates to “food could have healthier ingredients” or even “food could have more natural ingredients”. It’s just handwaving a bunch of supply chain issues as if people are just choosing to be arseholes.
It’s like taking potshots at tech for centralizing personal information into databases that keep getting compromised for identity theft. Yeah, there are issues with that paradigm, but that’s not to say that solving the issue is as simple as decentralizing all information storage - that introduces another set of issues (eg are end users really going to have sufficient cybersecurity chops to not lose their data themselves instead of a third-party).
It’s easy to complain about the solution when you aren’t familiar with the constraints that keep it from being perfect.
There's a clear context here. You're rejecting context and screaming, "chemicals!"
Purposely misinterpreting what people say is the worst way to argue.
1. https://jameskennedymonash.wordpress.com/2013/12/12/ingredie...
You’ve got tap water, which can have chlorine or chloramine added to it. Yes, the water that you drink can be chlorinated. They do this because it kills off microbes that might be living in the pipes between the water distribution center and your faucet, because right now we believe that ingesting trace amounts of chlorine is better than contracting bacterial disease from your drinking water.
Then you have water that’s run through your filter, which might cut down on some larger particles.
Then you have reverse osmosis, which removes smaller particles, and usually includes a carbon filter. This can actually be harmful over long periods of time because the reverse osmosis process removes the trace magnesium etc that you usually get from water and lead to mineral deficiencies.
Then you have distilled water, which has been vaporized and condensed. Same risk applies as reverse osmosis water.
And then you have deionized water, which has gone through an extra filtration step. Not usually intended for drinking, and same risk of mineral deficiencies with long-term consumption applies.
Now, in the context of “remove everything artificial”, deionized water is probably the closest to being pure H2O. On the other hand, you need to additives to avoid health issues from drinking that.
On the other end of the scale, tap water sounds horrible-it’s chlorinated!
And I suppose if you keep going, you get to a point where you find the nearest natural lakebed composed of non-saltwater and just stick a straw into it. That’s probably the most “natural” source of freshwater, with absolutely zero additives, save for local pollution. There’s probably plenty of fecal matter from the local wildlife, but that’s natural, right? Note: Please do not try this at home or anywhere else.
So that’s…six varieties of water, each with their own profile of additives or “chemicals”. And in practice the water you get in your food is probably just going to be a mix from the municipal water supply, runoff, local wells, moist fertilizer, etc.
So before we even get to the chemicals in the food, we have to worry about the chemicals being put into the food to grow it. Oh, plus the chemical composition of the soil…hopefully there’s no heavy metals nearby, some plants are particularly greedy about snatching them up.
So it’s a really complex problem. We can’t just say “no chemicals in food”. It’s just not that simple.
Also, chemistry? As a subject? Incredibly pedantic. The exception is the rule for practically everything.
There are formulations of medications that are selecting for this one shape of the particular molecule which has otherwise identical composition. And that may determine insurance coverage.
If you don’t want to have pedantic discussions, organic chemistry is not going to be a pleasant topic for you.
Odds are none or very few of the people on hacker news are farmers or chemists deeply involved with the agricultural industry, but I imagine this would come across about as favorably as a hacker news perspective on farmers complaining about the way apps on their phone work. Or complaining that computer nerds have ruined John Deere tractors by making them impossible to repair.
Ie it’s going to totally lack any sense of nuance about the business, politics, and logistical constraints involving the existing solutions.
Trust in scientists have plummeted in the last few years because of very good reasons (vaccine mandates, for one). Trust is hard to build back up, so if you want the trust back, you will have to do the decades long hard work of building it back up instead of complaining about it. It's not coming back just because you complain about it.
Also, there is no need to stop using the word just because it can be used in arguments to make unfalsifiable claims. Talk about the claims instead; it's silly to talk about the word.
You seem to come from a perspective that we should consider these chemicals to be safe unless proven otherwise. That is an extremely naive perspective.
Whatever you’re talking about has been ingested by millions or billions of people, so I don’t think it’s “naive” to assume a certain degree of safety for…whatever you’re talking about in American food.
Yeah, America’s health profile is different than other countries and we have a high rate of obesity, but only to a certain extent. We don’t have a whole lot of people who walk into McDonald’s and then drop dead after having the fries.
There’s a degree of reasonableness between “we should assume nothing is wrong” and “we should throw our food economy into chaos by outlawing ‘chemicals’ until we can have a two-generation double-blind randomly controlled study of every single one to prove safety.”
And this would probably have to include herbicides and pesticides which might get taken up or broken down by the plants, or which trace amounts might still exist on the product if it isn’t properly prepared, etc.
It’s a dead-end proposal because you can’t shut down food production to that degree without, you know, starving people and causing the collapse of modern society. Which, I’m just spitballing here, is probably going to have worse acute effects than all those “chemicals” put together.
So clearly you need to prioritize what you think is causing harm, and I suspect that’s exactly what relevant research is doing.
Reminds me of a particularly sassy medical paper:
> Advocates of evidence based medicine have criticised the adoption of interventions evaluated by using only observational data. We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute.
https://www.bmj.com/content/327/7429/1459
If you mean ultra processed food then, yes.