4 ms·
Less of a worry than artificial sweeteners and the like, but I think still a concern is that almost all the fruits and vegetables we eat today are "engineered".
by jjeaff 4y ago
Less of a worry than artificial sweeteners and the like, but I think still a concern is that almost all the fruits and vegetables we eat today are "engineered". When I buy a box of blackberries, they are perfectly black, sweet, juicy and delicious. Modern breeds of apples like Cosmic Crisp are juicy orbs of sugar. Neither of these are natural. They have been selectively cultivated for generations and I wonder how the nutritional value compares to their natural, wild counterparts. Even today's brussel sprout has been cultivated to remove much of the sulfur that made it bitter in the past. Heck, pretty much all the vegetables in the grocery store today are completely engineered by humans. Broccoli and Brussel sprouts are human "engineered" from the same ancestor. Not even considering the pesticides, herbicides, and GMOs, I worry that we are going to have no options except for these delicious flavor and sugar bombs that may not contain enough nutrients to keep us healthy.
I hope I am wrong and we have actually managed to out maneuver mother nature by creating more delicious versions of cultivar that are still healthy. I just have this nagging feeling when eating a delicious, juicy fist sized strawberry out of season that it's a bit too good to be true.
- wpietri 4y agoA totally valid question. It seems like a race between our evolutionary adaptation to our changing diet and our ability to change our diet to be a hyperstimulus to our tastes. Based on no evidence at all, I figure simple plant breeding was much more limited in rate of change so it's reasonable to suspect that our bodies kept up, or at least weren't very far behind. But with modern tech, who knows!