Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (265148)	5/30/2008 7:51:27 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Its not like we are talking about the one perfect best example in the world, and saying the single best strawberry in the world was better in 2005 than the best strawberry now so quality has gotten worse. The issue is not something like that but the quality of what people can buy. The quality of the average strawberry purchased today in the USA is considerably lower than the average strawberry purchased in 1970, and this is entirely due to the fact that the widespread availability of cheap, but very nice looking strawberries from CA which travel well and rot slowly (no surprise when you bite into one), through a much larger fraction of the year, have basically driven higher quality strawberries out of the market. That is what I'm trying, with very little success, to educate you on. Low quality year around, vs high quality for short seasons. If you think that is an improvement, fine, but I don't. So indeed, if your metrics are availability, appearance, and cost, things are much better today. If your metric is actually the quality, they are much worse. This is true over a wide range of food products, but is most notable in fresh fruit. Technology definitely allows much better selection in the store for much more of the year, but this does not mean what you buy is better quality, unless you want to say that what you buy is better than buying nothing at the same time of the year. This is true. But it is also true that as a consequence, at certain times of the year when before you could get excellent quality, now you get noticeably poorer quality. I would not complain about the drop in quality in the off-season so much if those dynamics had not also clobbered the in-season quality, which they certainly have. For another example, you might want to consider the total fraction of USA calories served at McDonalds over time and see if you think that is an improvement in quality.

To: TimF who wrote (265148)	5/30/2008 8:04:30 PM
From: geode00	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Corn: 554 cal/day, soy: 257 cal/day, wheat: 768 cal/day, rice: 91 cal/day. Four crops which are 2/3rds of the calories Americans consume in one form or another including as vegetable oils and sweeteners. I am not sure if this includes the grains that go into feed lots or simply direct ingestion by humans. "With the rise of industrial agriculture, vast monocultures of a tiny group of plants, most of them cereal grains, have replaced the diversified farms that used to feed us...humankind has historically consumed some eighty thousand edible species, and that three thousand of these have been in widespread use, this represents a radical simplification of the human diet." Broccoli: 50% is a single variety. 99% of turkeys are a single variety as are the majority of chickens. "USDA figures show a decline in the nutrient content of the forty-three crops it has tracked since the 1950s. In one recent analysis, vitamin C declined by 20 percent, iron by 15 percent, riboflavin by 38%, calcium by 16%...you now have to eat three apples to get the same amount of iron as you would have gotten from a single 1940 apple.... The result is the nutritional equivalent of inflation, such that we have to eat more to get the same amount of various essential nutrients...the raw materials used in the manufacture or processed foods have declined in nutritional quality or that when we are eating whole foods, we're getting substantially less nutrition per calorie than we used to." --- In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan ============================== There isn't much diversity in 30 brands of crackers or 50 brands of cookies in the supermarket. The raw materials are the same, they are simply mixed together differently and marketed well.