The true age of supermarket food

[TylerDurden]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3704253/How-fresh-fish-TWO-YEARS-OLD-salad-fruit-bread-TOM-RAWSTORNE-reveals-old-food-supermarket-basket-really-is.html

[cherimoya_kid]

Yep.

[eveheart]

I've seen exposees on this practice for years! I don't blame the markets. I blame consumers who want non-local, out-of-season foods to be in abundant supply year 'round.

I have fruit trees, like most Californian coastal residents. Oranges come ripe in December, Figs in the late spring, peaches just finished in June, nectarines are getting ready any day now, and apples are green with patches of early rosiness. I can buy all but figs anytime, any season that I want, but I'd be an idiot to think that someone invented year-'round fruit. All we have is technology that knows how to pick rock-hard, underripe produce that won't get mushy in shipment plus a way of ripening them when I need them to be ready for market.

My husband's company built many "banana rooms" in the Los Angeles area - vast temperature- and humidity-controlled rooms to manage fruits that are picked hard, shipped, then ripened. They were all located on freight-rail tracks so the boxcars could deliver right to the facility. Bananas do grow in the L.A. climate, coming ripe in late August. Who would settle for a month of bananas per year, but never where they don't grow?

[dariorpl]

The way to solve this problem is, mainly, to get rid of all tariffs and import/export taxes and restrictions, and secondly to throw away the strict idea that local is always best. If organic, health-conscious considerations were applied to international food shipments, there would be no difference between a food item produced locally and one that's shipped from half way around the world. Except maybe for fresh wild fish and fresh leafy greens.

I'm not even saying all food products should be transported in this way, only those meant for consumers who want organic / healthier versions of the same food items. For those who don't care about their food possibly being X-rayed or otherwise irradiated for security or as a means of preservation, frozen or nearly frozen, and sprayed with all kinds of toxic chemicals for international transport, well then they won't care if similar things happen with local foods, and for them again it makes no difference if a food item is produced locally or not.

"Local is best" is mainly based on misguided protectionist sentiments. It used to be that everybody would regard cheese coming from France as being the best, olive oil coming from Italy as being the best, beef from Argentina as being the best, and so on. Global trade is a wonderful thing. It allows us to get the best out of what people in different regions of the world are able to produce due to their natural resources, capital, knowledge, experience and abilities. In this way you can also get a lot of seasonal fruits and vegetables all year round, because they're often in season somewhere in the world, so it's only a matter of transporting them from there to where you are when they're out of season in your area.

As for picking fruit when unripe and allowing it to ripen off the plant, I don't think there's anything inherently wrong or unnatural about that. I think it makes perfect sense. The artificial chemicals they are using only quicken the ripening process, they don't start it from scratch. If a fruit is picked so unripe that it will not be able to ripen naturally, then I don't think artificial chemicals can do anything to change that outcome. Generally fruit is picked at a point in time where the fruit has gotten all the nutrition it requires (and all it's going to get) from the mother plant, and is now just sitting there while it ripens. So it makes no difference as to the biology of the fruit whether it continues to ripen while attached to the mother plant, or if it's doing so in shipment or on your countertop.

There's a variety of organic bananas I buy that are picked (and sold) rock-hard, and are pure starch with no sweetness inside whatsoever, but within a couple of weeks they will begin to ripen, allowing you to select the perfect ripening point at which to eat them, based on your preference for starch vs sugar content.

[TylerDurden]

Protectionism, if applied properly, is way better. We should heavily tax food-imports. For one thing, this will encourage food self-sufficiency for all countries, thus preventing famines etc. Most people who want genuine local food would also prefer no chemicals being used whether as preservation-methods or anything else. Plus, not importing from abroad would save on petrol-usage etc. There is way too much wastage as it is, worldwide.

Restrictions can work. Due to French law, the big 5  wholly corrupt French producers of cheese were unable, a few years ago,  to lower the cheese-standards in France.They had wanted to sell pasteurised cheese under  a high-quality-label that is only used for raw cheese.

Also, the main reason why foreign foods/goods are often so much cheaper  from abroad than locally is because many foreigners abroad are being  forced to work at pitiful slave-wages to produce it. The inevitable result is that such  foreign foods/goods are  usually way inferior in some way(after all de-facto slaves do not have any incentive to create quality products). One reason why I try to avoid buying Chinese goods these days after some bad experiences. It makes far more sense to produce foods/goods locally as this creates more jobs for the locals - and one doesn't need slaves any more when automation will do instead.

[cherimoya_kid]

Fruit continues to receive nutrition from the plant until full ripeness. Sugars travel freely back and forth between fruit and plant, and probably some minerals, and perhaps even phytonutrients, etc..

[eveheart]

What's really scary is that agribusiness has developed cultivars of ripening fruits that will not ripen on the tree, but only ripen with exogenous applications of ethylene gas. "They" know that gas-ripened fruit doesn't contain the same biochemical components as tree-ripened fruit - agri-science studies this type of thing - yet the convenience-to-industry wins over food wholesomeness.

Ethylene gas, itself, is produced when a fruit is injured. (Picking before ripening is an injury!) When injured, the fruit "sacrifices" its quality and rushes into producing a viable seed. As CK points out, gas-ripening does not provide the fruit with nutrients required for a slow and leisurely natural ripening. Instead, the fallen fruit uses what nutrition it has within the fruit itself to reach maturity -  kinda like inducing labor, delivering a 6-month fetus, raising it in an incubator, and then smiling and saying that the kid developed just fine outside the womb, just so the mother doesn't have to risk stretch marks.

[TylerDurden]

http://www.in.gov/spd/files/July12.pdf (1st page)

[TylerDurden]

kinda like inducing labor, delivering a 6-month fetus, raising it in an incubator, and then smiling and saying that the kid developed just fine outside the womb, just so the mother doesn't have to risk stretch marks.

That sort of thing is becoming more and more common:-

https://www.tommys.org/our-organisation/why-we-exist/premature-birth-statistics

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-3606430/The-curse-premature-baby-born-early-earn-worse-health-later-life.html

Some are even proud of this:-   http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3694505/Mother-reveals-joy-10-healthy-babies-one-born-premature-having-one-nearly-killed-her.html