I have actual things about my school that I'm planning on blogging about in the near future, but I found two interesting/related articles today that I wanted to share!
The first is about how vegetables are becoming less nutritious because they're breed to be pretty and colorful rather than good for you. Which seems so horribly counter-intuitive, but actually kind of makes sense... I don't know a ton about agri-business, but I know walking down the grocery store I tend to trust things like color as an indication of how good a vegetable will be. The fact that this isn't the case is totally mindboggling, and makes me wonder how the problem of depleted nutrients in big-business crops could be fixed - after all, I don't think telling the average grocery store shopper to go for the ugly plants will change anyone's buying habits.
The second article is about planting heirloom-variety plants, and it says, "A century ago, there were 15,000 kinds of apples in America; now there are 1,500. Among the varieties that have disappeared for good are 96 percent of corn, 95 percent of cabbages, and 81 percent of tomatoes."
This made me rather sad. I mean, apples and corn and such are delicious, so surely more kinds of apples and corn would be even more delicious? The article also explained that the hybrid varieties now used can't reproduce on their own, which means new seeds have to be generated every year. Again, I don't know much about farming, but this seems really expensive and not-sustainable.
I'm really interested in all of the food-politics stuff I've been finding lately, but I never know what to do about it - it seems like so many huge problems in such an important and long-standing system, that I hardly know if I can even do anything about it at all.
However, I do totally plan on seeking out the local farmers' market to get some breakfast food. One can only survive on granola bars for so long.
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1 comment:
The horrible truth of reality-pretty can often mean not good for you. But I won't go into a long diatribe about why pretty is bad and ugly is the way to go(it is a funny thought, though).
Think of the foods that are inherently bad for you-snacks, candies, steak(ooohhhh), soda, alcohol and so on are all bad for and all share the common fact that they are pretty pretty.
What I would suggest is to find the plainest looking fruit and veggies you can as they are probably most likely to be good for you. I am, of course, not saying this as a professional or a now-it-all on the subject, but just a person sticking in their two cents.-Licorice Lain
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