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I slice an organic heirloom tomato onto my club sandwich and anemoia engulfs me. My grandpa fed seven kids by opening a tiny grocery store that delivered to the West End mansions, no doubt in an old Model T pulled round to the servants’ entrance. I grew up hearing about the freshest produce and the best meat and the candy bars he used to sneak to the kids when my grandmother looked away. Anemoia, then: nostalgia for a time I never knew. This reddish green, sweet-sharp tomato tastes as luscious, rich, and healthy as all tomatoes would have a century ago. Yet it cost, all by itself, what five of the Styrofoam tomatoes at the grocery store would cost.
Something is deeply wrong with a society that trashes its own food supply.
Yes, I know the noble rationale. Big Ag was trying to feed the world. And rather than figure out how communities could cultivate healthier ground in healthier ways, how more people could grow their own produce, how people could be educated about nutrition, and how poverty could be alleviated…farmers were helped to grow bigger, prettier, disease-resistant crops. Engineered resilience would bring greater yields, and abundant supply would lower prices for people all over the world. Consumers would eat more fruits and veg and grains, and they, too, would become disease resistant.
Nobody mentioned that we would be eating more because we were still craving the kind of taste we barely remembered, and we were still in need of the vitamins and minerals that had been leached from these big juicy hollow tomatoes and this gluteny, mineral-stripped wheat. Nor did anyone mention that many of us, especially me, would deflect to quick, oily, sugary, salty processed crap instead of reaching for a second tomato.
For years, I blamed the soil. Greedy Big Ag had sucked the nutrients from it. Giant machines rolled in, forcing themselves on the earth like an invading army. There was no more patient crop rotation; no thought for the minerals below the surface. Just reaping, scraping yield from the earth year after year, relentless as scavengers. Study after study showed that our food was nowhere near as good for us anymore, and the “nutrient collapse” since the 1970s was easy to document, with declines in iron, vitamins, zinc, magnesium, copper, protein, calcium, phosphorus, riboflavin, Vitamin C….
Except then I read the results from the world’s longest-running scientific study. Fields in Hertfordshire, England, have been sampled and analyzed for 180 years. The archive now holds more than 300,000 samples of soil, crops, and fertilizers. And when the soil samples are compared, they have not lost micronutrients.
Granted, the modern soils are not ideal. Their structure has been jumbled by tillage, and the refusal to rotate crops has reduced bacteria, fungi, and other beneficial microbes. But I cannot continue blaming the soil (or rather, the humans tilling it) for nutrient collapse.
At first, that seemed like good news; I was glad to be corrected. Then I read on and realized that one can be wrong and still be right. Our food has lost much of its goodness. And Big Ag is still to blame.
Take wheat, reduced to a few profitable, high-yielding varieties and grown with seeds genetically tweaked to grow more grain and less stalk. For this Green Revolution coup, with its promise to alleviate hunger, agronomist Norman Borlaug received the Nobel Peace Prize. The new wheat plants did produce more grain—by pumping more carbohydrates in that direction and ignoring the stalks. This diluted the other grain components, and average concentrations of zinc, copper, iron, and magnesium dropped sharply.
All over the world, wheat crops have undergone similar shifts, sending carbs up and protein and mineral content down. The introduction of higher-yield varieties is one reason, but it coincided with a rise in carbon dioxide in the environment (also the fault of humans), and carbon dioxide stimulates photosynthesis and plant growth. (Lush jungles preceded us, thriving before humans could, and who knows, they may return when we leave.)
In the early 2000s, mathematician Irakli Loladze warned that rising carbon dioxide would exacerbate “the already acute problem of micronutrient malnutrition” by ramping up carbs and pushing aside proteins and vitamins. Also, a higher concentration of carbon makes plants more water efficient, so they suck up less water. Which, again, sounds like good news—except that by pulling in less water, the plants draw fewer micronutrients from the soil.
The decrease sounds trifling—about 5 percent—until you remember that two billion people have micronutrient deficiencies. And cannot afford fancy supplements.
Monsanto, now Bayer, and its compatriots never quite address this loss of nutrition and quality (not to mention taste). Instead, they emphasize the resilience of the crops and their increased yields, arguing that they are making food more affordable and feeding more people. But what they are fed has the taste and texture of the papier-mâché fruit in my great-aunt’s Thanksgiving centerpiece.
Those with enough discretionary cash to purchase heirloom buttercrunch lettuce and crush organic raspberries for a coulis know the difference. The food my grandpa delivered to his customers’ service entrances tasted the same as the food in the shopping carts of the lower and middle classes. Today, taste sensations once commonplace have become luxuries.
Big Ag’s defenders see discussions of lost nutrient density as “another overwrought claim in the quiver of contemporary anti-ag sentiments.” Remember, they say, because the produce is bigger and juicier and prettier and cheaper, people eat more of it, so they wind up getting more nutrients from the less-nutritious modern produce. Maybe, too, because there is less taste, we keep eating, unsated. Bigger, more, better—the American consumer mantra, gone global.
World hunger has indeed decreased, but so has its real cause: poverty. Take that poverty and add climate disasters (famine, flooding, wildfires) and disrupted access to food, and you have starvation. Making food cheaper by increasing the quantity sounds idealistic, even altruistic. But if we have to buy and eat more food that tastes less appealing, are we ahead?
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
