re: #233 Nyet

OK, I’m jumping into and out of this with a point:

I have grown my own food, a portion of it at least for close to 20 yrs. I learned most of what I know from my dad’s parents, who owned a greenhouse business when I was a kid, and had a one acre vegetable garden in back of their house. I have lots of books about the history of foods, how some things came to be and the environmental costs of some things. There are a lot of really good places online to find this info, if you don’t fall for unscientific bullshit artists (like that fucking Food Babe moron. The Farm Babe and Science Babe facebook pages are a better place to begin looking) We’ve lost many breeds/cultivars of various plants because of selective farming and monocrop farm practices as food became more industrialized.

EVERY SINGLE FRUIT AND VEGETABLE in markets today is nothing at all like the original. The possible exceptions to this would be some heirloom fruits, vegetables and grains, but those are costly unless you grow them yourself. The original banana that the Cavendish banana came from a breed that was bitter and full of seeds. There’s a list miles long of other things we eat daily that have the same story.

In order to properly label all this stuff to the demands of some consumers would cost more than the damned food in question. The GMO boogie man is insane, you can’t reason with these people about science and what goes into actual food production. Even the label “organic” is misleading because many people believe no chemicals are used in growing and production. Which is impossible. You cannot do large scale crop growing without the use of pesticides, fungicides and other chemistry. Not in a way that would compensate for the huge crop losses from disease and pests, and certainly not in a way that would keep the process in line cost wise. Organic foods are already stupid expensive unless you have lots of money, the cost would be just ridiculous if we went the full “pure” route. People have totally lost touch with where their food comes from and what goes into growing that food. Honestly, we should be less worried about fruits, vegetables and grains and more concerned with processed shit that’s nothing but fat and sugar, THAT is what’s killing us.