Healthy soil can be cultivated at scale, so if quality is the top priority that's not an issue. At least two major factors are at play:
- soil usually doesn't get time to recover and gets fertilized every year, nutrition can't build back up because of worsening chemical conditions due to monoculture and salts -> simply less nutrients are available to the plants with each cycle
- plants get bred to maximize yields, leading to first and foremost bigger plants, other factors (like nutritional value) are not priority #1
>Healthy soil can be cultivated at scale, so if quality is the top priority that's not an issue.
The larger issue is that consumers have no way of assessing the nutritional value of the items they're purchasing at the point of purchase. Cost is mediated on the basis of weight, which results in water-rich, nutrient poor, taste-poor produce. Saline injection into meat is another similar issue.
How do we make growing nutritional food profitable? Foods that can be sold on the basis of nutrient specific benefits, like Golden Rice or Vitamn D enriched milk can be marketed and sold on that basis, but comparing two beefsteak tomatoes grown in differing soils is not possible at present at the point of sale.
Typical food certification strategies, such as Organic, DOP, AOC, and other regional growth indicators don't seem to fit the bill. It's also unclear whether or not there is a market for inspections on the basis of nutritional value - from an organizational standpoint, it shouldn't be too difficult to have an inspector randomly audit crops and send samples to a lab to be HPLC or Mass Spec'd, but whether or not another certification mark changes buying patterns is unclear.
In Japan they have handheld machines that measure sugar content and acidity of fruits,[1] because fruits are used as gifts and you want to make sure it's a good one. How can we get fruit manufacturers to start sorting their fruit by sweetness?
They start around $1000 because it's a niche market. They appear to be infrared spectroscopy based which isn't too complicated, I was thinking about making an open source version. Should only be like $30 in parts. Would people buy this to test their produce before they buy?
[1] Called non destructive saccharimeters
Edit: actually it looks like they measure infrared polarization, not spectral absorption
Taste generally tracks with nutrition in non processed foods. If that could be validated, then we have a win win— and then needs new ways of marketing/branding higher taste options
I suspect that “if” will be more difficult than just measuring the vitamin and mineral content of random samples of the produce directly, but even if it isn’t, taste would rapidly be another flawed proxy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
(I’d argue that taste is already an example of Goodhart’s law, and that this is why fast food is popular despite being objectively bad).
What about a handheld scanner using smell to distinguish good from bad. As long as food isn't bred to smell certain ways that can't be distinguished from good, it should work fine.
>Healthy soil can be cultivated at scale, so if quality is the top priority that's not an issue.
Healthy soil can only be cultivated at scale with the aid of petrochemical byproduct fertilizers, which are not likely to be a long-term feature of our agricultural system.
The fertilizer that is derived from fossil fuels is ammonia (and nitrate made from ammonia by partial oxidation). More precisely, it's made from hydrogen derived from steam reforming of methane. But any source of hydrogen would do, including electrolysis with renewable electricity. There is nothing essential about fossil fuels for industrial agriculture.
It should also be noted that the total energy consumed in growing food in the US (ignoring sunlight absorbed by the plants) is less than the energy used to COOK food in the US. It's roughly 1% of the total energy used by the US.
The petrochemicals can be synthesised from CO2 and water with known methods. While nobody bothers with this right now, SpaceX basically has to make this economical as one sub-goal of their Mars colony, so I expect it in a decade or two, well before we run short of natural petroleum.
I’m more concerned with the long-term need to recover the potassium and phosphorus that washes into the ocean, which, despite still being theoretically solvable, is not currently economic enough to bother with even for the gold and uranium that’s also in the seawater.
- soil usually doesn't get time to recover and gets fertilized every year, nutrition can't build back up because of worsening chemical conditions due to monoculture and salts -> simply less nutrients are available to the plants with each cycle
- plants get bred to maximize yields, leading to first and foremost bigger plants, other factors (like nutritional value) are not priority #1
See https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-an....