Okay, Chelsea, I'm not giving you the choice now. As I was going through the mask, I realized, I realized which one I want to cover. And it's gonna be this one. It's From the Guardian, written by Miranda Lipton on March 28th, 2024. Vegetables are losing their nutrients. Can the decline be reversed? In 2004, Donald Davis and fellow scientists at the University of Texas made an alarming discovery.
43 foods, mostly vegetables, showed a market decrease in nutrients between the mid and late 20th century. According to that research, the calcium in green beans dropped from 65 to 37 milligrams. Vitamin A levels plummeted by almost half an asparagus. Broccoli stocks had less iron. Nutrient loss has continued since that study. More recent research has documented the declining nutrient value in some staple crops due to the rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.
A 2018 study that tested rice found that higher CO2 levels reduced its protein, iron, and zinc content. The climate crisis has only accelerated concerns about crops nutritional value. That's prompted the emergence of a process called biofortification, a strategy to replenish lost nutrients for those that foods never had in the first place. Biofortification encompasses multiple technologies.
One involves genetically modifying a crop to increase its nutritional contents, which allows for the rapid introduction of new traits. Another, agronomic biofortification, utilizes nutrient-rich fertilizers or soil amendments to concentrate particular minerals and plants. Lastly, selective plant breeding can produce new varieties, though it can take a decade or more to yield a single variety.
Biofortification is an alternative to fortification, which has been part of the US industrial food system since the 1920s, when the nation began boosting table salt with iodine to reduce conditions related to mineral deficiency, such as goiter. Biofortification puts nutrients directly into the seed, as opposed to fortification, which adds nutrients into the food once it's grown.
On the global stage, international stakeholders, such as the World Health Organization and the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, CGIAR, have deemed the development of nutrient-enhanced biofortification crops as one of their leading goals in achieving food security.
Pratik Unial, program leader at the International Food Policy Research Institute, explained that because of climate change, iron and zinc have been dipping by 30% to 40% due to excessive rainfall, cold, and physical damage. Harvest Plus is an organization under IFPRI, and it provides global leadership on biofortification, evidence, and technology.
It is currently working with governments in more than 30 countries, and its biofortified varieties have been planted by more than 100 million farmers across the world, predominantly in developing countries. By 2030, the organization estimates 1 billion people will be benefiting from biofortified food. Quote, we're about 20 years into a 40-year program, said Jenny Walton, head of commercialization and scaling at Harvest Plus.
While malnutrition demonstrates the urgent need to increase the nutrient density of crops globally, Benjamin Cohen, a professor of environmental studies at Lafayette College, points to biofortification as a band-aid rather than a solution to the problem. Quote, my concerns are about funders, based on my policy makers choosing to invest in biofortification instead of supporting more enduring smallholder models of farming that could be more efficient and resilient than large-scale systems.
Promoting biofortification suggests solving a problem that should not exist if not for large-scale, capital-intensive agriculture. It's likely that those same agricultural processes would only be further entrenched with biofortification. Harvest Plus sees plant breeding as the most insustainable way of biofortifying. It relies on existing plant genes.
The organization works exclusively with staple crops and is developing them to contain a higher amount of vitamin A, iron, and zinc, three micronutrients identified by the World Health Organization to be the most efficient in diets globally. That approach means that in places such as Pakistan, where diets are wheat-heavy, fortifying that grain, could make population levels change. Harvest Plus has already released 400 varieties of staple crops, none of them are patented.
I think that's far enough into that article. It's interesting they take the spin of, oh, don't worry, we're fixing the problem, but they do clearly identify this as a climate change issue. And that's a big problem. Yeah. I mean, the longer this podcast goes on, the more I realize we're just fucked by all life. Oh, we're so fucked. Yeah. All means possible. In any way, you could possibly even not even think that we might not be fucked. We're fucked.
Yeah, and it's funny that you say that, because I outright avoid the actual terrible news articles, because I find them too doomy. So now it's vegetables. Yeah. We're fucked by. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense when you actually think about it, unfortunately. And I think I've heard about this before, that it like they're losing their, I can't remember what sense I heard this. Yeah, I had heard it too.
I had always thought that it was more so due to diminished soils and the fact that we're using oil as a fertilizer, more or less, in that you're not getting all the nutrients that it needs. But apparently it's more climate change. And it's funny because I've heard the argument from people who don't really care about climate change, that the world's actually getting greener.
This is clearly showing that even if it's getting greener or things are growing more, it doesn't mean that it's good for humans. Maybe those people just need to know what the billionaires are doing. Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps not. That's my two cents anyway. Okay. But yeah, not only are all our foods filling us with plastic, the plastic clearly is just replacing that the minerals that should be in there kicking them out. Yes. So hopefully our body can just make it out.
And with that belt of doomy gloominess, just stay with us. There's things to live for, including an episode on Friday. So we'll see you then. Bye.