Comment by crdrost | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crdrost | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I think you don’t give yourself enough credit by calling it a “romantic ideal of purity;” it really does make a difference.

A little pesticide is fine for cosmetic value: people buy more of the prettier fruits and veggies, great. But when you start to apply modern engineering to it, you get extremely powerful pesticides which are able to do something much more dangerous.

The most talked-about example of what I am talking about is to consider that McDonald’s has uniform french fries throughout the US. They are able to do this because the potatoes that make the french fries are genetically identical; there is exactly one McDonald’s French Fry Potato plant.

As a consequence we are freezing the evolution of part of our food supply while the pests continue to evolve to be better and better at eating those bits. The absolute precondition to do this is that human engineering clears out the pests with advanced pesticides, so that the plants don’t need evolution to stand on their own. And that is really dangerous as it pits human wits against the laws of nature for the long-term.

This is also another reason why that label of “organic” is somewhat wrong. It labels whether something happened in the production of some produce. That is very helpful, say, in response to the OP’s article about avoiding a particular pesticide for health reasons. But it doesn’t say anything about doing the historical deeds of farming where you take your best performers and plant them again for the future: and, worse, there’s a “security vulnerability” here where I can deliver a bunch of organic produce but not support evolution. I can just plant the same crop, look for signs of pests, douse only those fields with advanced pesticides, and the other fields get delivered “organic” even though their survival had only to do with random chance in how they were cultivated, not whether they were tougher in the presence of (weakened) pests.

Thanks for coming here and arguing for Integrated Farming... are there any certifications we can look for that indicate this? (I am under the understanding that anyone can call something "integrated" and it's all on the honor system.)

Farming has the issue of mass scale, as any other human activity. Farmers have been artificially selecting species for thousands of years, but perhaps not at the scale and speed we witness today.

I have no doubts that normalization and lack of diversity are a problem. It is being observed today, for example, in the decreasing quality of tomatoes, that have lost flavour in favour of appearance.

But normalization of food production often goes in hand with normalization of feeding habits, and that is a whole different problem. For example, potato producers know that washing potatoes decreases shelf life, but they still do it because otherwise consumers wouldn't buy them.

Modern convenience has a lot to do with this, and I think that the solution lies with consumer habits as well. I am all in favour of a more conscientious approach in the consumer-side, but this should be done without resorting to simplifications and emotional responses. It will also take some time.

On the other hand, convenience is a rather early feature of our lives, so I hope adapting to new ways of producing and consuming could be at least half as quick.

In the end, I hope we will be able to use land efficiently, respecting biodiversity and allowing for a reasonable amount of natural harm, without sacrificing quality and, more importantly, food security.

As for Integrated Farming, the Wikipedia article is not as thorough as the Organic Farming article, perhaps because IF is still not a thing in the US.[1]

Integrated Farming is an extension of Integrated Pest Management, Soil management and Efficient Water Usage practices, along with other schemes. It was largely subsidized in the EU for farmers wanting to adapt their methods. From 2020 onwards, it will become the standard for EU farming practices and subsidies will stop, as far as I know.

Integrated Farming is certified by local agencies, in the same way organic farming is: checking farming logs, pesticide invoices, warehouses, equipments and such. A local agent visits my farm every year.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_farming

> McDonald’s French Fry Potato plant

I'd love to see any info you have on that, because I'm not seeing anything at all. My Google Fu may be weak, but all I find is that McDonalds continues to deny using GMO potatoes.

Also, anecdotally, McDonalds french fries are far from all identical.

I'm also not sure where the GP is going with this first point. I myself have cloned potatoes with nothing but old Russets and a shovel, and do not consider it nefarious.

Yeah, if you want to search more on it, the technique is called vegetative propagation, it is a procedure by which potatoes are cloned rather than bred. It happens to be really easy for potatoes. Searching for "mcdonalds genetically" is bound to be saturated with GMO articles.

The lack of identicality of the fries themselves turns out to be a part of McDonald’s’ broader engineering, as a matter of fact. (You could have expected this—this is the same company whose chicken nuggets come in well-defined named shapes—but it’s not terribly well talked about.) If all the fries at McDonald’s were uniformly long they would have bad stacking properties and would give you too much in your fry cup when filled, etc., so any new potato brand that they accept, or any change to their procedures for cooking their fries, must pass a bunch of stringent tests including having a certain distribution between shorter and longer fries.

In this case there is a page on McDonalds.com which specifies the only four monocultures which they exclusively farm to make McDonalds fries.

>it is a procedure by which potatoes are cloned rather than bred.

I might be wrong, but this is how many edible crops are propagated. Apples for instance are generally clones, because the alternative is getting a new kind of apple every time.

I agree, it seems common. Tomatoes (at least the good ones) and bananas also come to mind.

>The most talked-about example of what I am talking about is to consider that McDonald’s has uniform french fries throughout the US.

Granted I haven't been to Mcdonalds in a while, but from what I remember this is 100% not the case. You get fries of all different sizes.

These are no square potatoes Sir.

You take out the eyes of a potato and stick it in the ground and you've also created a genetically identical clone. I'd bet most potato varieties are farmed this way and have been for a long time.

All of the bananas you eat are also genetically identical, since all banana trees grown for U.S. markets are clippings from the same original cavendish tree. Bananas is a real concern though for U.S. markets and there is currently a blight spreading, but the good news is there are hundreds of types of bananas, most of them more flavorful. The hard part is shipping them to the U.S. without bruising.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com