>> the fruits and tomatoes used to taste better, too <<
While I enjoyed your humorous post, I feel a need to respond to the above statement, because there is good reason to believe that it might really be true. First of all, modern farm mass-production has changed the way we grow things A LOT (example : cows are now fed 100% on monocultured corn after weaning, not because its a good idea but only because they have to get rid of the waste products from farm subsidy programs - 25 years ago most cows were grass-fed, when farm subsidies weren't so onerous. see "The Omnivore's Dilemma" (2006) for more details.)
The practice of modern fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides have
caused plants to grow lazy : they don't have to fight to produce
Salvestrols, which are anti-oxidants that help the plants to fight off
fungus and disease. And guess what? If you buy factory-farmed
inorganic produce, it is nutritionally deficient of salvestrols. Many
researchers think that Salvestrols (among them is one called
Resveratrol : http://en.wikipedia.org/
And secondly, one of the predictions from the climate change crowd is that fruits and vegetables will grow faster, and therefore, they will have less nutritional value per unit volume. Apparently, the part of the plant that takes up nutrition from the soil cannot work faster.
- Don Gillies
San Diego, CA, USA