I agree on the 'watery' bit - a lot of supermarket fresh produce is chosen to be hard, watery, robust, but tasteless - to prolong its shelf life and to be more robust in longer food chains. That's coming out in another book, Supermarkets and CSR, 2019, Routledge. Re sugary, don't many foods also contain more sugar - the nasty simple high GCI processed sugars that is - they may well contain less natural complex low GCI sugars. High GCI sugars cause insulin spikes and tend to promote Type 2 diabetes.
All in all we should perhaps try and go back to organic local fresh produce - of course that's scarcely possible for those on low incomes who were recently shown to have to spend some 75% of their disposable income on food to eat healthily, after rent and utliities payments were taken into account (as againt a mere 3% on such a diet for the top decile).
Don't you just love it when one of the most basic goods of all, a healthy diet, is so highly dependent on your ability to pay for it, and when the health burden of a poor diet falls so much on those least able to bear the burden of dietary ill health, and least insured for it.
Oh and then we have the issue of hidden water international transfers in food, usually away from dry areas, from the actual water content of Middle Eastern citrus fruits, and less well known, the water content of avocados from the Petorca region of Chile, where the area is already water stressed, and big avocado corporations are making sure they get any water before the locals do - to the hidden water used up in the production of e.g. US wheat - drawn from non renewable aquifers, but transpired into the air by the wheat plants.
Now enjoy your avocado sandwich with lemon juice, and hope the rains continue......
Dr Hillary J. Shaw
www.fooddeserts.org
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From: Judith Watson <
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To: hillshaw <
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Sent: Fri, Sep 7, 2018 9:02 pm
Subject: RE: Declining mineral levels in food
Hi
The argument about loss of nutrients has been made a lot recently; it's linked of course to soil depletion. It could be really important but I have one concern: if food really contains much less of all sorts of nutrients weight for weight - including sugars
in some accounts - , then what does it contain? Obviously, water. And that is our everyday experience, that supermarket fruit and vegetables are watery and tasteless. We know that they are picked unripe for shipping then ripened in warehouses or we are expected
to ripen them at home. An avocado, you may have noticed, goes from rock hard to rotten in about two seconds. But then you could eat more of the fruit and veg without getting fat, because you are only consuming water.
Thanks very much for the link.
Judith
Global warming may cause shortage of zinc in foods
This appears to be a less-well publicised problem of the food industry already - that more intensve agrucultural methods may produce more food more quickly, but that such food has lower concentrations of trace elements. It is mentioned
on pp.15-16 of the book, The Consuming Geographies of Food: Diet, food deserts and obesity. where a table shows declinign levels of magnesium, calcium and iron in a range of cheeses, also beef bacon and turkey, Some vitamin levels have also fallen.
If global warming also promotes a greater disease burden, as insect vectors proliferate and heatwaves and disease, and maybe climate conflicts, weaken people, this may predispose people to be yet more susceptible to many diseases.
Dr Hillary J. Shaw
Visiting Fellow - Centre for Urban Research on Austerity
Department of Politics and Public Policy
De Montfort University
LE1 9BH
www.fooddeserts.org
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