From the article: This is a hopeful development, even though it might take a generation or so for widespread and efficient use. The Kernza® perennial wheatgrass in the article has grains only 20%...
From the article:
Perennial grains don’t require yearly planting, harvesting and replanting. Instead, they are planted once every few years.
Researchers say their root systems, which can reach several feet down, can access water deeper in the ground. That helps them better withstand short-term drought. And when heavy rain hits, the larger root structures can absorb excess water that would otherwise run off and erode the soil. Those deeper roots also sequester more carbon, reducing pollution in the atmosphere.
This is a hopeful development, even though it might take a generation or so for widespread and efficient use. The Kernza® perennial wheatgrass in the article has grains only 20% of the size of standard wheat grains, so the ratio of chaff to edible grain is much higher, and the properties aren't quite a 1:1 substitute.
Even so, the benefits are substantial - less fossil fuels used for cultivation; minimized tilling, which preserves topsoil, sequesters carbon, and minimizes nutrient runoff; lower water, fertilizer and herbicide use; higher biodiversity and animal/bird habitat in undisturbed fields; and grazing for integrated livestock. It's not a drop-in replacement for current industrially farmed grains, though.
I had the pleasure of taking a course this summer with the head of a local school's regenerative agriculture program, who's also a farmer, and she was a fountain of knowledge about this stuff. The bottom line is that the upfront cost is higher both in labor and material, but regenerative practices can produce 80 - 90% of conventional yields after a few years, have far lower input costs over time, and can be maintained indefinitely.
The carbon sequestration argument seemed odd to me because don’t they till the soil when they replant in 5 years? Is it actually being sequestered or do they collect the detritus for hay, compost,...
The carbon sequestration argument seemed odd to me because don’t they till the soil when they replant in 5 years? Is it actually being sequestered or do they collect the detritus for hay, compost, etc? If it’s the latter that’s not really “sequestration” since it’s still entering the carbon cycle.
Though reducing carbon emissions from not having to replant and replenish soil would still probably be a help.
Before any soil prep takes place, above-ground portions of the crop may be harvested (e.g., for straw) or utilized in some other way. Where I live, farmers commonly put sheep on a field for a week...
Before any soil prep takes place, above-ground portions of the crop may be harvested (e.g., for straw) or utilized in some other way. Where I live, farmers commonly put sheep on a field for a week or two. The sheep eat the grass down to stubble and redeposit most of it as manure all over the field.
Any underground portion of the crops will stay in place. For cereal crops, the roots are likely the bulk of the plant's biomass.
The soil is usually prepared via plowing, discing, or tilling (or some combination depending on the state of the soil). Whatever's left in or on the field — roots, stubble, manure, whatever the farmer has spread on the field, etc. — gets incorporated. Some of this carbon will be lost through natural processes, like microbial activity. Bare, soft soil is also suspectable to erosion, so until the new crop grows in, some carbon will be lost that way. But on the whole, you're going to be adding more carbon than you remove, even if you do annual cereal cropping.
The deeper plant roots help with carbon sequestration - surface mowing or tilling doesn't pull all of the plant parts out and expose them to air. The plant matter at depth also encourages more...
The deeper plant roots help with carbon sequestration - surface mowing or tilling doesn't pull all of the plant parts out and expose them to air. The plant matter at depth also encourages more bacterial, nematode, mycorrhizal, and fungal growth, which transforms the soil's water holding capacity, improves soil nutrient uptake, and stores still more carbon underground.
The sequestered carbon will mostly remain in the soil, or in the creatures that eat it. Sure, it's still part of the cycle, but in more of a 'natural creek' way as opposed to 'stormwater drain'...
The sequestered carbon will mostly remain in the soil, or in the creatures that eat it. Sure, it's still part of the cycle, but in more of a 'natural creek' way as opposed to 'stormwater drain' way.
Amortizing the carbon release means a consistent low level, rather than continual spikes.
Much how letting trees rot in the woods technically lets the carbon reenter the atmosphere. But it's also housing a giant additional lifecycle of creatures that will also sequester carbon for their (and their devourer's) lifetimes.
They can probably get the size to a more acceptable level in a few years, wheat is one of the easy to breed plants. Wheat itself doesn’t have to be annual, it blooms every year and then dies but...
They can probably get the size to a more acceptable level in a few years, wheat is one of the easy to breed plants.
Wheat itself doesn’t have to be annual, it blooms every year and then dies but in the wild the root system stays and comes back. If this perennial wheat also blooms every year, increasing the yield will be easy.
Doesn't traditional wheat get completely ripped up during the harvesting process? If these are perennials, and the goal is to presumably not do that, do you need a more specialized kind of combine...
Doesn't traditional wheat get completely ripped up during the harvesting process? If these are perennials, and the goal is to presumably not do that, do you need a more specialized kind of combine to harvest them so that they aren't destroyed?
I hope that they’re experimenting with crop rotation and companion planting, as well. I personally believe that folks should be focused on seasonal and local food consumption as much as possible,...
I hope that they’re experimenting with crop rotation and companion planting, as well. I personally believe that folks should be focused on seasonal and local food consumption as much as possible, and that as s society we should be looking to put food as close to US consumers as possible. No more food deserts, no more bringing out of season foods in from abroad, no more monoculture plants, and heavier regulation of the food industry and proper funding of the inspectors.
Mine is a U.S. American-centric take and view, I should clarify.
Edit to add: after reading the article fully, I can say that I’ve never heard of Kernza. One wheat variety I’m familiar with is einkorn, which is a hardy plant that can thrive in some truly heinous soil and weather conditions (prefers drained soil but can handle conditions that modern wheat wouldn’t tolerate), but it is fairly low yield (20-40 bushels per acre as opposed to modern wheat’s 60-80, putting the yield in pounds at about 1600-1700 per acre) and doesn’t break apart easily during threshing so it’s harder to mill. Kernza seems to have a very low yield at 200-600 pounds per acre, though.
I think that the key difference is that Kernza is engineered to be a perennial and probably develops its gluten structure much better than einkorn dough, which tends to be sticky and inelastic. The breads they showed looked fairly fluffy in comparison.
I'm all about this as long as it's more of a "eat more local foods" thing and not a "eat only local foods" thing. The latter sounds a lot better in theory than it ends up being in practice. Most...
I'm all about this as long as it's more of a "eat more local foods" thing and not a "eat only local foods" thing. The latter sounds a lot better in theory than it ends up being in practice. Most of the global poor, for example, eat only local foods -- meaning the staple carbohydrate, maybe a few relishes, and not much else. And indeed that's how it's been for almost all humans since we first domesticated maize and wheat (or it domesticated us, depending on your point of view).
Even the more agricultural native American tribes on the eastern American seaboard, who were way ahead of most others with the trinity of beans/corn/squash thing, ended up eating pretty much just that, fish, and perhaps some foraged additions. It's just extremely difficult to grow a lot of different crops in the same place at scale. Like, what is Canada to do, you know? The growing season is maybe 6 months, and you're not growing citrus or rice.
You can fix some of that with refrigeration, canning, and just modern processing in general, but even so eating only local would be a massive downgrade in quality of life for almost all people.
Yeah, it simply can’t be “eat local only” and I never did say that it was, though some people sure seem to have made the assumption that when I said “as much as possible” that I meant strictly eat...
Yeah, it simply can’t be “eat local only” and I never did say that it was, though some people sure seem to have made the assumption that when I said “as much as possible” that I meant strictly eat from like I guess the same neighborhood or something? I meant from within the same region, then the same continent, then the same hemisphere, which is actually what most of North America does. That’s on me for not being precise in my language. The real focus in my mind is eliminating food deserts and limiting ultra processed foods in the average diet.
I also made no distinction between farming plants versus farming animals, so again on me for not being clear.
I mean you did say "no more bringing out of season foods in from abroad," which takes a lot of modern staple foods (e.g. bananas) completely off the table for basically everyone in Canada and the...
though some people sure seem to have made the assumption that when I said “as much as possible” that I meant strictly eat from like I guess the same neighborhood or something?
I mean you did say "no more bringing out of season foods in from abroad," which takes a lot of modern staple foods (e.g. bananas) completely off the table for basically everyone in Canada and the US. :)
But in general, yes, I'm sympathetic to your aims.
Honestly, no, not really. Not from other hemispheres. Maybe some of the beef and seafood we get from Australia, Iceland, a few other places... but that's mostly frozen raw so I don't think it counts.
Honestly, no, not really. Not from other hemispheres. Maybe some of the beef and seafood we get from Australia, Iceland, a few other places... but that's mostly frozen raw so I don't think it counts.
The latter part of that will cause more food deserts. The fundamental issue is cost, and crop imports are what drives costs down. There's a reason farmer's markets are considered a rich people...
No more food deserts, no more bringing out of season foods in from abroad, no more monoculture plants, and heavier regulation of the food industry and proper funding of the inspectors.
The latter part of that will cause more food deserts. The fundamental issue is cost, and crop imports are what drives costs down.
There's a reason farmer's markets are considered a rich people thing. Like, I sometimes go to the local farmer's market, and I recently bought some carrots from a local farmer and they were $7/lb. I don't really care, but it's not going to make food more accessible.
I promise you, whatever you think, de-regulating an industry is never the answer. Especially the agricultural industry, especially in a country with almost no guardrails like America. I never go...
I promise you, whatever you think, de-regulating an industry is never the answer. Especially the agricultural industry, especially in a country with almost no guardrails like America.
I never go to farmer’s markets anymore, simply because trust fund kids made low yield farming into an aesthetic thing in the 90’s and most farmer’s markets have been bullshit ever since.
Where did de-regulation come from? My point is that the goals are at opposing ends. Regulation can increase quality but it will increase costs. That’s okay, as someone that buys $7/lb carrots I...
Where did de-regulation come from? My point is that the goals are at opposing ends.
Regulation can increase quality but it will increase costs. That’s okay, as someone that buys $7/lb carrots I don’t mind paying more for quality.
But it’s the opposite of increasing access to food - it’s reducing access to food. It’s essentially saying that the solution to people not being able to afford fresh produce and only being able to buy processed food is to ban processed food.
I’m not sure we’re talking about the same things here. I genuinely can’t see how inspecting the food would reduce availability, you’re going to have to defend that statement with more than just...
I’m not sure we’re talking about the same things here. I genuinely can’t see how inspecting the food would reduce availability, you’re going to have to defend that statement with more than just the assumption that it increases costs. Food inspection is a service cost borne by the tax payer. We save zero dollars when we don’t inspect the food, it just gets shifted to other government projects.
Regulation isn’t just inspections. The infamous (although, it’s really over-exaggetated) chlorinated chicken, for example. If you were to require chicken be in chlorinated, that would mean an...
Regulation isn’t just inspections. The infamous (although, it’s really over-exaggetated) chlorinated chicken, for example. If you were to require chicken be in chlorinated, that would mean an increase in the price of chicken full stop.
Moreover, I assume you included the “local if possible” stipulation. That one is just impossible. The reality is that there’s too many humans for us to eat locally. It isn’t even a modern problem, Rome famously relied on grain imports from Egypt, and the moment anything disrupted it people starved immediately.
The only way for most Americans to get their calories from local sources is for there to be a lot less Americans.
I don’t even think it’s possible if you expect to have a modern standard of living. Agriculture has massively increasing returns to scale. You get much higher yields by centralizing production...
The only way for most Americans to get their calories from local sources is for there to be a lot less Americans.
I don’t even think it’s possible if you expect to have a modern standard of living. Agriculture has massively increasing returns to scale. You get much higher yields by centralizing production versus having to ship raw materials and food around everywhere. (You also get more ecological damage and water use, so there’s an ideal size where the two forces are in balance, but that equilibrium point is still going to be super heavily centralized.)
I’ve mentioned elsewhere but I was being imprecise with my “locally” because I think maybe think that “local” is presumed to be means hyper local, within a short drive or something. I meant local...
I’ve mentioned elsewhere but I was being imprecise with my “locally” because I think maybe think that “local” is presumed to be means hyper local, within a short drive or something. I meant local as in regional, then continental, then hemispherical.
I’d also presume that if we put a new cost burden onto food processor (who are not, mind you, farmers themselves usually) that we’d offer tax breaks and incentives to help offset those costs like we do now.
TBH it's gonna take the utter collapse of trade entirely to eliminate the import/export of out of season foods. They probably should be taxed accordingly (added cents per mile travelled?), but IMO...
TBH it's gonna take the utter collapse of trade entirely to eliminate the import/export of out of season foods.
They probably should be taxed accordingly (added cents per mile travelled?), but IMO trying to eliminate it is just going to push people even harder into the processed garbage food isles.
We should also probably be making a distinction between levels of processed and ultra processed. All food is processed. Did you pull it out of the ground and wipe the dirt off? You processed that....
We should also probably be making a distinction between levels of processed and ultra processed. All food is processed. Did you pull it out of the ground and wipe the dirt off? You processed that. Did you pull it out of the ground, cook it into a dish? That’s more processed than simply pulling it out of the ground or eating it dirty, but it’s still not ultra processed. Did you pull it out of the ground, break it down to its constituent chemicals, and use those chemicals to flavor or color or give structure where the original qualities are completely lost in the new product? Now that is ultra processed.
The primary problem with ultra processed foods is not that they’re processed, it’s the nutritional profile of what they produce. Many of them have extremely high saturated fat, extremely high sodium, extremely high simple carbohydrates that are easily broken down and generate food desire due to how quickly the human gut processes them, and they lack good nutrients because most of them aren’t fortified.
It’s important to understand food processing isn’t necessarily inherently on its face bad. It’s when you make a product that is there to be consumed strictly to drive the desire to consume more of that product that we start encountering real problems.
Hence my qualifier of 'garbage food' If it exists in the center of the grocery store (the dry goods isles specifically), and isn't a base ingredient for cooking, the higher probability it is...
Hence my qualifier of 'garbage food'
If it exists in the center of the grocery store (the dry goods isles specifically), and isn't a base ingredient for cooking, the higher probability it is mostly garbage.
How do you do that though? I guess you could tarrif the hell out of out of season foods, but it doesn't seem like a political strategy that's likely to gain many votes. The practical platform...
How do you do that though? I guess you could tarrif the hell out of out of season foods, but it doesn't seem like a political strategy that's likely to gain many votes. The practical platform you'd be running on would be something like "vote for me, I'll make bananas more expensive". It doesn't seem like something with a lot of political support behind it.
“Vote for me, I’ll make sure domestic farmers are supplying the majority your food at fair prices with proper inspection, I guess.” Unfortunately, as ever people are going to have to learn to do...
“Vote for me, I’ll make sure domestic farmers are supplying the majority your food at fair prices with proper inspection, I guess.”
Unfortunately, as ever people are going to have to learn to do without getting everything they want at all times in order for this to become an actual thing. And the rich simply aren’t going to do that. I’m saying what needs to happen not what’s going to happen.
Yeah. One of the problems with living in a democracy unfortunately. People do not generally vote for bitter pills that improve their lives in the future. They mostly vote like children, for things...
Yeah. One of the problems with living in a democracy unfortunately. People do not generally vote for bitter pills that improve their lives in the future. They mostly vote like children, for things that they see benefiting them right now.
Its the root cause of why so many long term issues get kicked down the road forever.
The link is broken, looks like a piece of the URL is missing. Try this: https://apnews.com/article/climate-change-grain-wheat-perennial-kernza-8c4cef1aa6c8c682ba7144bc4e4c49bf
The link is broken, looks like a piece of the URL is missing. Try this:
From the article:
This is a hopeful development, even though it might take a generation or so for widespread and efficient use. The Kernza® perennial wheatgrass in the article has grains only 20% of the size of standard wheat grains, so the ratio of chaff to edible grain is much higher, and the properties aren't quite a 1:1 substitute.
Even so, the benefits are substantial - less fossil fuels used for cultivation; minimized tilling, which preserves topsoil, sequesters carbon, and minimizes nutrient runoff; lower water, fertilizer and herbicide use; higher biodiversity and animal/bird habitat in undisturbed fields; and grazing for integrated livestock. It's not a drop-in replacement for current industrially farmed grains, though.
I had the pleasure of taking a course this summer with the head of a local school's regenerative agriculture program, who's also a farmer, and she was a fountain of knowledge about this stuff. The bottom line is that the upfront cost is higher both in labor and material, but regenerative practices can produce 80 - 90% of conventional yields after a few years, have far lower input costs over time, and can be maintained indefinitely.
The carbon sequestration argument seemed odd to me because don’t they till the soil when they replant in 5 years? Is it actually being sequestered or do they collect the detritus for hay, compost, etc? If it’s the latter that’s not really “sequestration” since it’s still entering the carbon cycle.
Though reducing carbon emissions from not having to replant and replenish soil would still probably be a help.
Before any soil prep takes place, above-ground portions of the crop may be harvested (e.g., for straw) or utilized in some other way. Where I live, farmers commonly put sheep on a field for a week or two. The sheep eat the grass down to stubble and redeposit most of it as manure all over the field.
Any underground portion of the crops will stay in place. For cereal crops, the roots are likely the bulk of the plant's biomass.
The soil is usually prepared via plowing, discing, or tilling (or some combination depending on the state of the soil). Whatever's left in or on the field — roots, stubble, manure, whatever the farmer has spread on the field, etc. — gets incorporated. Some of this carbon will be lost through natural processes, like microbial activity. Bare, soft soil is also suspectable to erosion, so until the new crop grows in, some carbon will be lost that way. But on the whole, you're going to be adding more carbon than you remove, even if you do annual cereal cropping.
The deeper plant roots help with carbon sequestration - surface mowing or tilling doesn't pull all of the plant parts out and expose them to air. The plant matter at depth also encourages more bacterial, nematode, mycorrhizal, and fungal growth, which transforms the soil's water holding capacity, improves soil nutrient uptake, and stores still more carbon underground.
It's quite a virtuous circle.
The sequestered carbon will mostly remain in the soil, or in the creatures that eat it. Sure, it's still part of the cycle, but in more of a 'natural creek' way as opposed to 'stormwater drain' way.
Amortizing the carbon release means a consistent low level, rather than continual spikes.
Much how letting trees rot in the woods technically lets the carbon reenter the atmosphere. But it's also housing a giant additional lifecycle of creatures that will also sequester carbon for their (and their devourer's) lifetimes.
Life begets death begets life.
They can probably get the size to a more acceptable level in a few years, wheat is one of the easy to breed plants.
Wheat itself doesn’t have to be annual, it blooms every year and then dies but in the wild the root system stays and comes back. If this perennial wheat also blooms every year, increasing the yield will be easy.
Doesn't traditional wheat get completely ripped up during the harvesting process? If these are perennials, and the goal is to presumably not do that, do you need a more specialized kind of combine to harvest them so that they aren't destroyed?
I hope that they’re experimenting with crop rotation and companion planting, as well. I personally believe that folks should be focused on seasonal and local food consumption as much as possible, and that as s society we should be looking to put food as close to US consumers as possible. No more food deserts, no more bringing out of season foods in from abroad, no more monoculture plants, and heavier regulation of the food industry and proper funding of the inspectors.
Mine is a U.S. American-centric take and view, I should clarify.
Edit to add: after reading the article fully, I can say that I’ve never heard of Kernza. One wheat variety I’m familiar with is einkorn, which is a hardy plant that can thrive in some truly heinous soil and weather conditions (prefers drained soil but can handle conditions that modern wheat wouldn’t tolerate), but it is fairly low yield (20-40 bushels per acre as opposed to modern wheat’s 60-80, putting the yield in pounds at about 1600-1700 per acre) and doesn’t break apart easily during threshing so it’s harder to mill. Kernza seems to have a very low yield at 200-600 pounds per acre, though.
I think that the key difference is that Kernza is engineered to be a perennial and probably develops its gluten structure much better than einkorn dough, which tends to be sticky and inelastic. The breads they showed looked fairly fluffy in comparison.
I'm all about this as long as it's more of a "eat more local foods" thing and not a "eat only local foods" thing. The latter sounds a lot better in theory than it ends up being in practice. Most of the global poor, for example, eat only local foods -- meaning the staple carbohydrate, maybe a few relishes, and not much else. And indeed that's how it's been for almost all humans since we first domesticated maize and wheat (or it domesticated us, depending on your point of view).
Even the more agricultural native American tribes on the eastern American seaboard, who were way ahead of most others with the trinity of beans/corn/squash thing, ended up eating pretty much just that, fish, and perhaps some foraged additions. It's just extremely difficult to grow a lot of different crops in the same place at scale. Like, what is Canada to do, you know? The growing season is maybe 6 months, and you're not growing citrus or rice.
You can fix some of that with refrigeration, canning, and just modern processing in general, but even so eating only local would be a massive downgrade in quality of life for almost all people.
I like lemons.
Yeah, it simply can’t be “eat local only” and I never did say that it was, though some people sure seem to have made the assumption that when I said “as much as possible” that I meant strictly eat from like I guess the same neighborhood or something? I meant from within the same region, then the same continent, then the same hemisphere, which is actually what most of North America does. That’s on me for not being precise in my language. The real focus in my mind is eliminating food deserts and limiting ultra processed foods in the average diet.
I also made no distinction between farming plants versus farming animals, so again on me for not being clear.
I mean you did say "no more bringing out of season foods in from abroad," which takes a lot of modern staple foods (e.g. bananas) completely off the table for basically everyone in Canada and the US. :)
But in general, yes, I'm sympathetic to your aims.
I guess to me “abroad” means “not my half of the planet”…
Is a lot of raw food imported across hemispheres? I'm not sure I've ever seen anything imported from another hemisphere other than specialty goods.
Honestly, no, not really. Not from other hemispheres. Maybe some of the beef and seafood we get from Australia, Iceland, a few other places... but that's mostly frozen raw so I don't think it counts.
The latter part of that will cause more food deserts. The fundamental issue is cost, and crop imports are what drives costs down.
There's a reason farmer's markets are considered a rich people thing. Like, I sometimes go to the local farmer's market, and I recently bought some carrots from a local farmer and they were $7/lb. I don't really care, but it's not going to make food more accessible.
I promise you, whatever you think, de-regulating an industry is never the answer. Especially the agricultural industry, especially in a country with almost no guardrails like America.
I never go to farmer’s markets anymore, simply because trust fund kids made low yield farming into an aesthetic thing in the 90’s and most farmer’s markets have been bullshit ever since.
Where did de-regulation come from? My point is that the goals are at opposing ends.
Regulation can increase quality but it will increase costs. That’s okay, as someone that buys $7/lb carrots I don’t mind paying more for quality.
But it’s the opposite of increasing access to food - it’s reducing access to food. It’s essentially saying that the solution to people not being able to afford fresh produce and only being able to buy processed food is to ban processed food.
Amazing, now they can eat nothing.
I’m not sure we’re talking about the same things here. I genuinely can’t see how inspecting the food would reduce availability, you’re going to have to defend that statement with more than just the assumption that it increases costs. Food inspection is a service cost borne by the tax payer. We save zero dollars when we don’t inspect the food, it just gets shifted to other government projects.
Regulation isn’t just inspections. The infamous (although, it’s really over-exaggetated) chlorinated chicken, for example. If you were to require chicken be in chlorinated, that would mean an increase in the price of chicken full stop.
Moreover, I assume you included the “local if possible” stipulation. That one is just impossible. The reality is that there’s too many humans for us to eat locally. It isn’t even a modern problem, Rome famously relied on grain imports from Egypt, and the moment anything disrupted it people starved immediately.
The only way for most Americans to get their calories from local sources is for there to be a lot less Americans.
I don’t even think it’s possible if you expect to have a modern standard of living. Agriculture has massively increasing returns to scale. You get much higher yields by centralizing production versus having to ship raw materials and food around everywhere. (You also get more ecological damage and water use, so there’s an ideal size where the two forces are in balance, but that equilibrium point is still going to be super heavily centralized.)
I’ve mentioned elsewhere but I was being imprecise with my “locally” because I think maybe think that “local” is presumed to be means hyper local, within a short drive or something. I meant local as in regional, then continental, then hemispherical.
I’d also presume that if we put a new cost burden onto food processor (who are not, mind you, farmers themselves usually) that we’d offer tax breaks and incentives to help offset those costs like we do now.
Edit: “is presumed” added
TBH it's gonna take the utter collapse of trade entirely to eliminate the import/export of out of season foods.
They probably should be taxed accordingly (added cents per mile travelled?), but IMO trying to eliminate it is just going to push people even harder into the processed garbage food isles.
We should also probably be making a distinction between levels of processed and ultra processed. All food is processed. Did you pull it out of the ground and wipe the dirt off? You processed that. Did you pull it out of the ground, cook it into a dish? That’s more processed than simply pulling it out of the ground or eating it dirty, but it’s still not ultra processed. Did you pull it out of the ground, break it down to its constituent chemicals, and use those chemicals to flavor or color or give structure where the original qualities are completely lost in the new product? Now that is ultra processed.
The primary problem with ultra processed foods is not that they’re processed, it’s the nutritional profile of what they produce. Many of them have extremely high saturated fat, extremely high sodium, extremely high simple carbohydrates that are easily broken down and generate food desire due to how quickly the human gut processes them, and they lack good nutrients because most of them aren’t fortified.
It’s important to understand food processing isn’t necessarily inherently on its face bad. It’s when you make a product that is there to be consumed strictly to drive the desire to consume more of that product that we start encountering real problems.
Hence my qualifier of 'garbage food'
If it exists in the center of the grocery store (the dry goods isles specifically), and isn't a base ingredient for cooking, the higher probability it is mostly garbage.
How do you do that though? I guess you could tarrif the hell out of out of season foods, but it doesn't seem like a political strategy that's likely to gain many votes. The practical platform you'd be running on would be something like "vote for me, I'll make bananas more expensive". It doesn't seem like something with a lot of political support behind it.
“Vote for me, I’ll make sure domestic farmers are supplying the majority your food at fair prices with proper inspection, I guess.”
Unfortunately, as ever people are going to have to learn to do without getting everything they want at all times in order for this to become an actual thing. And the rich simply aren’t going to do that. I’m saying what needs to happen not what’s going to happen.
Yeah. One of the problems with living in a democracy unfortunately. People do not generally vote for bitter pills that improve their lives in the future. They mostly vote like children, for things that they see benefiting them right now.
Its the root cause of why so many long term issues get kicked down the road forever.
Unfortunately we’re a civilization that was not taught to eat its vegetables both literally and figuratively.
Yea we basically need propaganda for genuine, no-downsides improvements at this point, let alone "policy vegetables."
The link is broken, looks like a piece of the URL is missing. Try this:
https://apnews.com/article/climate-change-grain-wheat-perennial-kernza-8c4cef1aa6c8c682ba7144bc4e4c49bf
Fixed.
Thank you!