This is the conclusion of the paper [1] that this article is based upon: "We suggest that any real declines are generally most easily explained by changes in cultivated varieties between 1950 and 1999, in which there may be trade-offs between yield and nutrient content."
What National Geographic says scientists say, "Scientists say that the root of the problem lies in modern agricultural processes that increase crop yields but disturb soil health. These include irrigation, fertilization, and harvesting methods that also disrupt essential interactions between plants and soil fungi, which reduces absorption of nutrients from the soil. These issues are occurring against the backdrop of climate change and rising levels of carbon dioxide, which are also lowering the nutrient contents of fruits, vegetables, and grains."
My anecdote from my garden is that my smaller cucumbers have way more taste, my smaller red bellpebbers are way more pebbery, potatoes have a richer taste, if this is just freshnes i dont know, but there for sure is a huge difference.
It was always the case that smaller vegetables are stronger in taste. I'm guessing that the larger ones took up more water, which diluted the taste, but without a difference of total nutrients.
I don't think that's you. When I come home and eat stuff from my parents garden, the differences in some cases are massive. Carrots for example taste 10x more intense, even one that was taken from soil weeks ago.
And I am comparing to bio carrots we buy in Switzerland, so can't go much higher than that when shopping (apart from farmers markets maybe but that depends what kind of farm).
Maybe its about transport and premature harvest, like bananas - if you ever taste some in exotic locations where they harvest them in the morning, its hard to ever enjoy bleak taste of those available in western world.
I've noticed this too with tomatoes. My parents grow tomatoes in their backyard during the summer. The amount of "meat" in the backyard grown tomatoes is noticeably a lot more than store-bought tomatoes. Stock-bought tomatoes are a lot more watery. and have less "meat" in them.
Similarly, I've started buying a lot more organic fruits and vegetables. The organic strawberries have way more taste than non-organic strawberries.
Same goes for zucchini and eggplant. People often bring their excess zucchini’s into the office as a trophy, and potentially prize to some lucky staff member, but they’re tasteless.
All kidding aside: please people read the full article, there's enough in there to at least partially support the claim quoted by the OP. Just not in that first paper.
I'm sure you'd agree that what they claim scientists say gives absolutely no mention to the conclusion of the first paper they chose to reference. How do you interpret this? Let's check out the 2nd paper [1]. It seems in many ways even worse than the first.
It not only also offers significant weighting to breeds, but ultimately even rejects the idea of a temporal decline in nutritional value! "Based on the available limited data, and due to variations in sampling, analytical techniques and likely differences in growing location and season, no definitive temporal trends could be established."
Basically the observed differences could be easily explained by other simple factors than a mysterious decline, including breed selection. Grow less nutritious crops, get less nutritious food.
Well. I too am occasionally guilty of doing this. As a geek who knows how search is supposed to work, it's hard for me to drop the assumption that the highest hit is the most relevant. Even though I know it's not.
Because this article isn’t a review of a single paper?
They’ve used a single paper to write a broader article. You can find other papers that justify the other claims that the article makes.
Being a popular article as opposed to an article in a scientific journal means references are not also necessary, although I suspect if you reached out to the author they would provide you with a list of references they used.
Also, the idea that the media used to be better is even more laughable. In fact, popular science media, with all its flaws, is better than its ever been. The reality is popular science is just hard to do.
So there's like 4 or 5 different studies cited in that article. The one you're talking about, unless you found the rest of the article and it says something completely different, doesn't reach any conclusions about the cause. It just says that the researchers think the easiest explanation is different cultivars.
That probably has something to do with it. However, plants don't make nutrients out of thin air. They cited samples that found the nutrient content in the soil at "regenerative" farms was much higher than other organic farms. It seems crazy to me to think that soil quality wouldn't be one of the main causes, on top of all the practices to get higher yield out of a smaller area. Which was discussed in the article.
To be fair, NG doesn't claim that the paper calls it changes in cultivated varieties, it says "Scientists say..."
That's still modern media in a nutshell though. Who are these "scientists" and also "experts" referenced in the next paragraph? They don't go into that but in true NG fashion they have some pretty pictures.
That said, from what I understand producers changed varieties to get veggies that are easier to grow, feed, and ship using using industrial ag processes. And those processes do require more irrigation and -- especially -- fertilization. Sorry I don't have any sources for that right now; I went to school for journalism.
Virtually all modern media exists to push a narrative, usually a Right Wing(tm) or Left Wing(tm) narrative. I'm not convinced you can get to the truth by "triangulating" since this assumes at least one party is actually saying something valid.
Blanket cynicism is really easy to manipulate: you don't have to do a good job yourself, you just have to convince the cynic that the other guy is just as bad, which is easy.
"Both Sides" cynicism feels centrist but it actually kills centrism because it turns centrism into a losing media strategy.
Listening to both sides is important to avoid selective information bias, but refusing to pick a winner or, worse, always picking the midpoint is a terrible policy that is responsible for enabling the current degradation in the public discourse.
Intensive agriculture has been focusing too much on short-term yields, and too little on long-term soil performance.
Plants need nutrients which they normally retrieve from the soil. Natural soil is rich in organic matter and minerals, a product of microorganisms consuming biomass and excrement. Note that it forms a cycle!
Nutritious soil -> Growth -> Death -> Decomposition -> Soil enhancement.
Plants are just the visible part of the cycle. The other part consists of microorganisms.
The use of pesticides, monocultures, and an absence of organic waste material and natural decomposition, effectively kills the microorganisms in the soil. This is what intensive agriculture does. Now, the soil is devoid of nutrients that plants need to grow. So farmers have to use fertilizer to substitute the required organic building blocks.
The problem with this, is that fertilizer just provides the most common organic building blocks. This is enough to grow, but not in the most healthy and fruitful way possible. It's comparable to humans living on a diet of water and rice. They'll survive, but their health will suffer from a lack of nutrients.
Now that intensive agriculture has literally killed the soil, there is no easy way back, and we are dependent on fertilizer to produce food of inferior quality.
Luckily, alternative ways of agriculture are picking up popularity. See for example, biodynamic farming: https://www.biodynamics.com/
"Intensive agriculture has been focusing too much on short-term yields, and too little on long-term soil performance."
I think a lot of this pressure is from there being too many people. I have seen the estimates of how many people earth can support, yet I have never seen numbers for how many people the earth can sustainably support, especially in our modern lifestyle of excess.
This is an ecofascist adjacent argument, and is not based on reality. Not much land is needed to feed people, most of it is being used to produce meat and dairy, which is a waste.
> I think a lot of this pressure is from there being too many people.
Would this still be a problem if we didn’t use most of our agricultural land to grow crops to feed to the animals we eat? It’s very inefficient to feed plants to cows and then eat the cow.
The pressure is here from us doing bad things. We're killing the soil, bugs, forests, wildlife, sea, mainly by purchasing the wrong things in the supermarket. [1]
We could use just 25% of our current agriculture land and still feed the population. There is nothing in the beef & dairy, which we could not get from other sources (preferably plant-based).
The problem are agriculture subsidies. We're heavily subsidizing production of beef, mutton & dairy, which needs 75% of our agricultural lands, instead of focusing on less resource-intensive sources of protein & fats [2].
If enough people switched (and there are some positive indicators that it's already happening), maybe we could save the earth before it's too late [3].
"Humans and Big Ag Livestock Now Account for 96 Percent of Mammal Biomass ... a study ... found that, while humans account for 0.01 percent of the planet’s biomass, our activity has reduced the biomass of wild marine and terrestrial mammals by six times and the biomass of plant matter by half." [6]
100 years ago humans&cattle was just 2% of the biomass. Now it's 98%.
If all people on earth eat as much meat as an average american, we would need 5+ earths. If as much as average european, then 4+ earths would be needed. There is not enough space to support this lifestyle any longer, people. [6]
This article mentions that regenerative agriculture as the solution. There is a lot of concern now about the potential for a global food shortage at the end of this year because of rising fertilizer prices (leading to less planting). Regenerative agriculture can help solve this as well by focusing on restoring the biome of the soil, thereby harnessing nitrogen from the air and minerals from the soil.
I agree and if anyone is curious I am part of a project to bring open source farming robots for regenerative agriculture to everyone. We’re working on building a monthly crowd funding following to sustainably fund the project while staying completely open source. We have a good prototype vehicle now and are working on a good solid kit design we can ship in the next year or two, and will work with our user community to design tools for soil prep, planting seeds and transplants, weeding, and harvesting all in a regenerative organic process. And anyone can start a business selling their own variant of the design. We believe this will drive down costs in the same way that 3D printers dropped in price by 100x when patents expired and an open community formed around the many new designs. More details in our latest update here:
What would you think about a farmer who doesn't know tech giving opinions on what the Tech sector should do? Farming is extremely hard and competitive, for mostly razor-thin margins and very high risks.
One of the biggest problems is weeds. If you use these naive methods you'll end up with weed infections and then you have to either dump a lot of herbicides to recover the land or blunt tumble, basically entombing all the topsoil.
Somehow journalists and people from the city know better than people risking their family's worth every year and working 12 hours a day on this. Every day. And even on weekends and holidays. You have no idea how hard it is.
I'm pretty sure farming is as efficient as it is now because farmers listened to technicians who weren't working in the fields all day, and were helped to break out of local maxima. Also - you don't think farmers' kids go to college and end up studying and writing about regenerative agriculture? Are you yourself a farmer's kid who went to college and became a techie?
You sound like you don't know a lot of farmers then. Most farmers these days inherited their farms, and run it mostly the same way their parents did, with a little input from local AG programs. For the most part, farmers are some of the most conservative, stick with what worked in the past people I've ever met.
Joel Salatin talks a lot of shit about the typical farmer too, and with good reason. The difference there is that he's way more profitable than your average farmer on a per acre basis. He's documented everything he does at Polyface, and others have duplicated his success, yet hyper conservative farmers are still trying to farm the same broke ass way and complaining they can't make a living.
Fertilizer prices are rising in part because ammonia production is a rather energy intensive process and the price of natural gas used to produce ammonia is way up due to war time shortages. Ammonia, of course, is the primary source material for nitrogen based fertilizers.
The production of fertilizers such as ammonium nitrate and urea require ammonia. Ammonia is synthesized on large scales with the Haber-Bosch process. This process requires hydrogen, which is obtained by steam reforming of methane in natural gas.
When natural gas prices exploded in Europe, many fertilizer factories had to stop production:
Supply chain issues, logistics problems, and high demand lead to rising prices which lead the largest exporter of phosphate fertilizer, China, to halt exports to protect domestic supply. Russia is the biggest exporter of potassium fertilizer.
I would suggest that fertilizer prices are higher due to cost increases to manufacture them but also because grain prices are higher. There seems to be a relationship between the 2 which is independent of actual costs to manufacture the inputs. As grain prices increase input costs increase, likewise with the inverse, grain prices decrease input prices decrease. Supply and demand for sure but there seems to be market forces outside of simply supply vs demand.
They are also more abundant than they used to be and that's a valid tradeoff to consider. Would it be worth it to only have access to seasonal produce local to your region for that produce testing better? Make do with pickles and potatoes instead of fresh fruit and vegetables in late fall through early spring? If not, shelf life, productivity and greenhouse feasibility are relevant metrics in addition to taste and vitamins. Old ways of gardening are still available, but most people will end up using these as a supplement rather than replacement to supermarket food that is at least always there in sufficient amounts.
If my food isn't nutritious I either wither away or am forced to eat more food, which comes with more calories. So, no: it seems like it is better to make do with seasonal foods than to live in a world where I can technically experience a tomato but... is it really a tomato if it just tastes like a tomato but otherwise confers none of the value of a tomato? (If you are saying the alternative is NO food, then sure; but I think the problem is that it is difficult to even get reasonable fruits and vegetables that are in season even if you live in a place where they can be grown as no one bothers to grow them anymore.)
In much of the world, "seasonal produce" in winter means essentially nothing fresh: everything had to be preserved from the earlier harvest, and the available methods of preservation were far more destructive (dry, pickle, etc) than today's frozen or canned options, never mind a cool chain than can effortlessly bring you a tropical banana for Christmas in Canada.
> Why not work towards abundant food that is as nutritious as possible?
Because we don't have a silver bullet. We have suggestions. But the world is increasing separating into cheap, low-nutrition food and expensive, nutritious food.
This comment is perfectly alienated from nature. Yes, significant seasonal and regional variation in diet is a worthwhile tradeoff for eating much more nutritious, tastier, cheaper, and more environmentally sustainable food than we have now. No, it does not mean we would have to eat like feudal peasants.
I have read zoos have started having to source fruit not raised for human consumption has the sugar levels are now getting too high. In some cases 30% more sugar content if I tember correct.
I believe it. Some of these new apple varieties are delicious. But that's probably because they're bred to be sweeter, and presumably less healthy. Still better than eating processed junk food, but not as healthy as their less-tasty predecessors!
This sparks an interest of mine. I want to grow my own garden of fruits and vegetables. I can grab seeds from my local hardware store. But are these genetically the best I can buy? Is there not a genetic strain of seeds that I can buy somewhere else, perhaps online, that produce both the most nutritious and delicious?
Thank you. I think this gets me in the right direction. "heirloom seeds" seems to be what I am looking for. Some online testify that they find heirlooms taste better. I'll have to do some more research and try them myself to see if its true.
There isn't really a best seed. There are simply tradeoffs. That probably sounds familiar :-)
Disease resistance, water tolerance, soil conditions, climate, daylight, tolerance to heat and cold, pest resistance, taste, yield, time to grow, harvest period, storage period.
There are usually an incredible number of varieties for any given plant. It takes quite a few years to start to find ones that work the best for you. It's also doubly tricky as your conditions will change each year.
I like to plant a wide variety of seeds as that makes it likely that something delicious will thrive.
I'd also say that typically home grown fresh vegetables are so much tastier than ship bought that you might worry less about iothan you think.
+1 for composting. There's something satisfying about putting down a deep, dark brown soil to grow some veges in. I don't grow a lot (peas and corn generally), but it's magnificent eating.
As a result of the composting, once my last winter crop of peas had died out, a bunch of mis-matched tomatoes began growing out of the same patch, so I left the trellis up and let the plants develop. Roma tomatoes, cherry tomatoes and regular tomatoes all growing haphazardly, totally unplanned. A most pleasant surprise that kept me in bruschetta for a few weeks :)
There's something soul satisfying about eating something from your own yard; must be a deep-seeded DNA/evolution thing, like the smell of a campfire.
Back to composting: it's amazing how small a volume of trash we throw out now that we're putting foodstuffs into compost.
If you're in California, check out California Rare Fruit Growers. If elsewhere in North America, check out North American Fruit Explorers. Both focus on rare varieties that are really good to grow but are not commercially available. I imagine there are similar groups in other parts of the world.
I think the latest research was showing that soil and mycorrhizae networks are very critical to the nutritional content of various plants. The sad thing is that same study (need to find it again) showed that applying conventional fertilizer actively reduced mycorrhizae and biological diversity in the soil. The scary thing is there's not much awareness of this in mainstream media. The only thing I've seen in mainstream media about this soil problem was from a hermit Indian guru type on a spotify podcast.
There's a no-dig movement in organic farming that is based on the notion that tilling or otherwise disturbing soil is a bad thing because it disturbs the fungal ecosystem. Interesting if you are growing some stuff at home because practicing this actually means doing less work. Once established, a no-dig bed requires very little maintenance. You basically just leave it alone. You top it up with some compost once a year or so and you grow whatever you want. Even weeds stand less of a chance because those are what show up when you disturb the soil. So, if you don't do that, there are less weeds to deal with.
Sadly, I only have a balcony and no back yard but I try to grow lots of herbs there. Very tasty addition to my food. I have lots of Cilantro growing right now and my rosemary bushes are waking up from the winter as well. And I've planted out some basil cuttings from a cheap super market plant that in a few months will turn into a nice little basil jungle.
Also that modern ag uses heavy equipment which compacts the soil, reducing its ability to breath. Basically suffocates it, and unless you run a plow to 3m depth this is unfixable in less than say 10K years.
Readit News
What National Geographic says scientists say, "Scientists say that the root of the problem lies in modern agricultural processes that increase crop yields but disturb soil health. These include irrigation, fertilization, and harvesting methods that also disrupt essential interactions between plants and soil fungi, which reduces absorption of nutrients from the soil. These issues are occurring against the backdrop of climate change and rising levels of carbon dioxide, which are also lowering the nutrient contents of fruits, vegetables, and grains."
Modern media in a nutshell.
[1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15637215/
And I am comparing to bio carrots we buy in Switzerland, so can't go much higher than that when shopping (apart from farmers markets maybe but that depends what kind of farm).
Maybe its about transport and premature harvest, like bananas - if you ever taste some in exotic locations where they harvest them in the morning, its hard to ever enjoy bleak taste of those available in western world.
Similarly, I've started buying a lot more organic fruits and vegetables. The organic strawberries have way more taste than non-organic strawberries.
All kidding aside: please people read the full article, there's enough in there to at least partially support the claim quoted by the OP. Just not in that first paper.
It not only also offers significant weighting to breeds, but ultimately even rejects the idea of a temporal decline in nutritional value! "Based on the available limited data, and due to variations in sampling, analytical techniques and likely differences in growing location and season, no definitive temporal trends could be established."
Basically the observed differences could be easily explained by other simple factors than a mysterious decline, including breed selection. Grow less nutritious crops, get less nutritious food.
[1] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8750575/
For future, I'll try to be more mindful.
They’ve used a single paper to write a broader article. You can find other papers that justify the other claims that the article makes.
Being a popular article as opposed to an article in a scientific journal means references are not also necessary, although I suspect if you reached out to the author they would provide you with a list of references they used.
Also, the idea that the media used to be better is even more laughable. In fact, popular science media, with all its flaws, is better than its ever been. The reality is popular science is just hard to do.
It’s really frustrating that this sort of lazy and dismissive middlebrow comment that misrepresents the article ends up stuck to the top.
That probably has something to do with it. However, plants don't make nutrients out of thin air. They cited samples that found the nutrient content in the soil at "regenerative" farms was much higher than other organic farms. It seems crazy to me to think that soil quality wouldn't be one of the main causes, on top of all the practices to get higher yield out of a smaller area. Which was discussed in the article.
That's still modern media in a nutshell though. Who are these "scientists" and also "experts" referenced in the next paragraph? They don't go into that but in true NG fashion they have some pretty pictures.
That said, from what I understand producers changed varieties to get veggies that are easier to grow, feed, and ship using using industrial ag processes. And those processes do require more irrigation and -- especially -- fertilization. Sorry I don't have any sources for that right now; I went to school for journalism.
> Mounting evidence from multiple scientific studies
It's not based on a single paper. The article may have been prompted by the publication of that paperm, but it is not limited to it.
Modern reading comprehension in a nutshell?
"Both Sides" cynicism feels centrist but it actually kills centrism because it turns centrism into a losing media strategy.
Listening to both sides is important to avoid selective information bias, but refusing to pick a winner or, worse, always picking the midpoint is a terrible policy that is responsible for enabling the current degradation in the public discourse.
Dead Comment
Plants need nutrients which they normally retrieve from the soil. Natural soil is rich in organic matter and minerals, a product of microorganisms consuming biomass and excrement. Note that it forms a cycle! Nutritious soil -> Growth -> Death -> Decomposition -> Soil enhancement. Plants are just the visible part of the cycle. The other part consists of microorganisms.
The use of pesticides, monocultures, and an absence of organic waste material and natural decomposition, effectively kills the microorganisms in the soil. This is what intensive agriculture does. Now, the soil is devoid of nutrients that plants need to grow. So farmers have to use fertilizer to substitute the required organic building blocks.
The problem with this, is that fertilizer just provides the most common organic building blocks. This is enough to grow, but not in the most healthy and fruitful way possible. It's comparable to humans living on a diet of water and rice. They'll survive, but their health will suffer from a lack of nutrients.
Now that intensive agriculture has literally killed the soil, there is no easy way back, and we are dependent on fertilizer to produce food of inferior quality.
Luckily, alternative ways of agriculture are picking up popularity. See for example, biodynamic farming: https://www.biodynamics.com/
I think a lot of this pressure is from there being too many people. I have seen the estimates of how many people earth can support, yet I have never seen numbers for how many people the earth can sustainably support, especially in our modern lifestyle of excess.
https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets
Would this still be a problem if we didn’t use most of our agricultural land to grow crops to feed to the animals we eat? It’s very inefficient to feed plants to cows and then eat the cow.
We could use just 25% of our current agriculture land and still feed the population. There is nothing in the beef & dairy, which we could not get from other sources (preferably plant-based).
The problem are agriculture subsidies. We're heavily subsidizing production of beef, mutton & dairy, which needs 75% of our agricultural lands, instead of focusing on less resource-intensive sources of protein & fats [2].
If enough people switched (and there are some positive indicators that it's already happening), maybe we could save the earth before it's too late [3].
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-kcal-poore [3] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...
The destruction of Earth & wildlife is horrendous. [4] [5] We
[4] https://xkcd.com/1338/ (compulsory) [5] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/21/human-ra...
"Humans and Big Ag Livestock Now Account for 96 Percent of Mammal Biomass ... a study ... found that, while humans account for 0.01 percent of the planet’s biomass, our activity has reduced the biomass of wild marine and terrestrial mammals by six times and the biomass of plant matter by half." [6]
100 years ago humans&cattle was just 2% of the biomass. Now it's 98%.
If all people on earth eat as much meat as an average american, we would need 5+ earths. If as much as average european, then 4+ earths would be needed. There is not enough space to support this lifestyle any longer, people. [6]
http://personal.psu.edu/afr3/blogs/siowfa12/2012/10/if-every...
---
By learning to switch to plant-based diet we would be healthier, leaner, and we would be guardians of our blue not, not its destroyers.
https://community.twistedfields.com/t/march-2022-update-simu...
One of the biggest problems is weeds. If you use these naive methods you'll end up with weed infections and then you have to either dump a lot of herbicides to recover the land or blunt tumble, basically entombing all the topsoil.
Somehow journalists and people from the city know better than people risking their family's worth every year and working 12 hours a day on this. Every day. And even on weekends and holidays. You have no idea how hard it is.
Joel Salatin talks a lot of shit about the typical farmer too, and with good reason. The difference there is that he's way more profitable than your average farmer on a per acre basis. He's documented everything he does at Polyface, and others have duplicated his success, yet hyper conservative farmers are still trying to farm the same broke ass way and complaining they can't make a living.
The production of fertilizers such as ammonium nitrate and urea require ammonia. Ammonia is synthesized on large scales with the Haber-Bosch process. This process requires hydrogen, which is obtained by steam reforming of methane in natural gas.
When natural gas prices exploded in Europe, many fertilizer factories had to stop production:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-15/soaring-e...
Supply chain issues, logistics problems, and high demand lead to rising prices which lead the largest exporter of phosphate fertilizer, China, to halt exports to protect domestic supply. Russia is the biggest exporter of potassium fertilizer.
Less nutrition doesn’t mean no nutrition. The vegetables are still plenty nutritious.
EDIT: And climate and environment friendly, to boot. Via regenerative agriculture.
Because we don't have a silver bullet. We have suggestions. But the world is increasing separating into cheap, low-nutrition food and expensive, nutritious food.
As to seasonality, I personally remember canned fruit being very tasty though that also had negative impacts on nutrition.
I have read zoos have started having to source fruit not raised for human consumption has the sugar levels are now getting too high. In some cases 30% more sugar content if I tember correct.
Dead Comment
https://www.seedsavers.org/
There isn't really a best seed. There are simply tradeoffs. That probably sounds familiar :-)
Disease resistance, water tolerance, soil conditions, climate, daylight, tolerance to heat and cold, pest resistance, taste, yield, time to grow, harvest period, storage period.
There are usually an incredible number of varieties for any given plant. It takes quite a few years to start to find ones that work the best for you. It's also doubly tricky as your conditions will change each year.
I like to plant a wide variety of seeds as that makes it likely that something delicious will thrive.
I'd also say that typically home grown fresh vegetables are so much tastier than ship bought that you might worry less about iothan you think.
(Probably a naive question, but I know very little about the topic, sorry)
Why not to make GMO crops without tradeoffs?
Anything you grow in your garden will likely be better out the gate. Doubly so if you compost.
As a result of the composting, once my last winter crop of peas had died out, a bunch of mis-matched tomatoes began growing out of the same patch, so I left the trellis up and let the plants develop. Roma tomatoes, cherry tomatoes and regular tomatoes all growing haphazardly, totally unplanned. A most pleasant surprise that kept me in bruschetta for a few weeks :)
There's something soul satisfying about eating something from your own yard; must be a deep-seeded DNA/evolution thing, like the smell of a campfire.
Back to composting: it's amazing how small a volume of trash we throw out now that we're putting foodstuffs into compost.
Sadly, I only have a balcony and no back yard but I try to grow lots of herbs there. Very tasty addition to my food. I have lots of Cilantro growing right now and my rosemary bushes are waking up from the winter as well. And I've planted out some basil cuttings from a cheap super market plant that in a few months will turn into a nice little basil jungle.