The Australian Garlic Producers has a vested interest and is not independent. It was created to to promote Australian Grown garlic products (including the ones it makes/manufacturers itself), to increase their market share in Australia. It also provides support to its members.
I am not sure what your comment means or who it is directed to.
Your link has claims by Australian garlic growers that Chinese garlic is many bad things but it doesn’t show any evidence. I had a look at a dozen or so web sites that have pages on the topic. They have a strong similarity to each other and to this link, in fact many seem to be copied from each other as they use the same wording. They all make the same claims, they are all made by people in industries that benefit from you buying their product and doing things their way and none of them tell us who observed all these things about Chinese garlic, when or how.
If you want me to accept that Chinese garlic has all these bad aspects you need to come up with more than vague assertions by a commercial competitor.
Obviously you are passionate about organic food and farmers’markets, and I hoped to learn how to identify ‘fresh’ food that isn’t ‘fresh’.
The stream started out with a good robust discussion, but has in my opinion degenerated into a squabble. You make a lot of claims, but have not provide any independent reliable scientific research to support your claims. When challenged, you seem to resort to personal attack making comments such as:
Perhaps I have misunderstood and these were not directed at the other contributors, but is reads that way.
These sort of comments distract and detract from your input. I look forward to a return to a more factual discussion and hearing which independent scientific sources you base your opinions on.
They are used traditionally in agriculture in parts of the world. Strychnine has been used for a long time to remove rodents in India going back thousands of years and was also used in “medicine” but is not something I would be inclined to take
The toxic 1080 compounds have been used again by indigenous people where the plants that concentrate the poison grow, one such plant getting it’s name from it’s usage Ratsbane “In 1957 Peters isolated and tentatively identified as monofluoro-oleic acid, the toxic principal of seeds from Dichapetalum toxicarium “ratsbane” a west African plant, seeds of which had long been used to poison rats and as a chemical warfare material by natives of this region”.
Completely organic poisons made by nature (and not grown with the use of synthetic additives so also meeting the meaning of organic as used in “Organic farming” nowadays) and used in agriculture and warfare for a very long time.
Another organic pesticide that is also toxic to humans is Rotenone which is permitted for the spraying of organic produce.
So it’s fair to say they are traditional, but saying ‘Organic pesticides can be much more harmful for the environment and the health of the workers’ is a bit disingenuous given they are also used in non-organic agriculture/general usage.
Maybe more accurate wording could be, “Pesticides approved for Organic agriculture can be much more harmful to environmental and human health than pesticides that are regulated for Organic agriculture.”
I feel like both statements convey the same, if not very similar, meaning. Maybe the original statement seems vague to the lay person who hasn’t studied the industry. I don’t know. Either way, as an environmentalist and environmental scientist, I do not condone the practices of the Organic industry.
I admire many of the concepts in organic farming. I find the idea of treating cultivation as a whole particularly attractive, that one should look at the broader picture of what it will take to get a decent crop rather than defaulting to throwing more chemicals at the problem. If you treat your soil well so that it maintains a good level of organic matter your crop will be improved by beneficial microbes making more soil nutrients available. Growing cultivars chosen for flavour, harvested at the peak of ripeness and eaten then will give you taste experiences unobtainable elsewhere.
However some take it to extremes and it becomes a religion with far too many non-rational and unproven practices - rituals in fact. Once you get into biodynamics and moon planting, both popular with organic growers, it becomes downright mystical. This leads to many foolish ideas but the naturalistic fallacy is a stand out. Under this misapprehension everything “natural” (whatever that means) is good and everything synthetic is bad, we have seen this from quite a few contributors here in the last month, I am not sure any of them have come to grips with it yet.
The use of Pyrethrins in growing a nice example of the fallacy. The good news is these compounds are reasonably safe insecticides that break down fairly quickly. The bad news is they will both kill your bees and other beneficial insects if mishandled. According to the organic industry if your pyrethrin is extracted from a chrysanthemum it’s good, if synthesised not. Given they are the same class of compounds that behave the same way why is that?
‘mystical’ is putting it politely… it impossible to have a rational conversation with many of the people who believe this kind of stuff! And there are plenty of even weirder and irrational ideas out here too. Fortunately not all organic growers go in for this sort of nonsense.
One aspect of perishable retail that ‘we’ here seem to overlook is the deliberate sale in our major supermarkets of food close or just over the end of its useful life.
You would realise of course that each supermarket manager is driven by corporate profit margin measures and that the internal price “paid” by the supermarket to the distribution centres slides increasingly lower based on the age of the food.
It is easy to see that the canny manager would increase his bonus by selecting the lowest cost inventory from his distribution centre and gamble that he could clear that stock before he is obliged to send it to waste. Combined with poor handling by staff and poor or marginal refrigeration (more cost cutting) one can understand how “fresh” vegetables and meats only survive a day or three in the refrigerator at home.
Whilst there has been some discussion about what chemicals etc are allowed in organic farming, it doesn’t necessarily mean they have been used. The advantage at farmers markets is that you can generally talk to the grower, and they can (hopefully truthfully) tell you what treatments their produce may have received. At the supermarket the grower is anonymous, and you can’t be so sure about what the produce may have been treated with on its way to the supermarket shelf.
I grow most of my veg in aquaponics, which uses much less water than growing in the ground, typically about 90% less in my experience, and many of the chemicals allowed in organic chemistry absolutely can’t be used in aquaponics, as it would quickly kill the fish. Yet aquaponics grown vegetables can’t be certified organic, because they are not grown in the ground, even though the soil ecosystem is very similar to that found in AP grow beds, which in my systems are mostly river gravel.
It is interesting to follow this along somewhat. I have a friend who is a very good grower, he makes a living out of it and produces excellent fruit and veg with very few external inputs. He uses some of the biodynamic preparations.
For those who are not familiar there are several preparations that are used in the system, one of the most important is BD500, that is Bio Dynamic 500. What are 1 to 499? They don’t exist, apparently the author (Rudolph Steiner) didn’t feel the need to number from 1. BD 500 is the one made from the dung of a lactating cow buried in the horn of some other cow (who no longer needs it) on a root day. Don’t ask what else you do on a root day. There are a few other conditions to this process just as interesting that I can’t bring to mind. When the dung has fermented for a while you dilute it through a ‘flow stone’ that swirls the water around in circles. It is significant that these stones are all built to swirl one way but I forget whether it is clock or anti-clockwise.
I asked my mate how BD500 works, he didn’t really know. We speculated that it might inoculate soil with beneficial microbes. I doubted that his soil was deficient in that regard, I said maybe it did some good at the start but I could not figure why you would need to keep doing it if your soil was healthy. I asked why the bugs cared if they were swirled one way or the other, he didn’t know. I asked why he used it. He said “because it works”.
From the results he is getting something clearly works. What have his results got to do with biodynamics? Would his talent and hard work give him results as good without BD500? Nobody knows because he will never do the experiment of running some plots with, and others without, BD500 and comparing the results over time. Such is faith.
Correlation does not imply causation.
Nonetheless rituals get a very firm hold on the human psyche.
That is correct. The removal/reduction of oxygen slows the metabolic processes within the fruit/vegetables (and reduces ethylene production which causes ripening), extending its shelf life or to delay ripening. The packaging used is called modified/controlled atmosphere packaging (MAP). It is used for fresh foods to prolong the life of product, both when handled by the retailer and also after its purchase by the customer.
There are only a limited number of fresh food items in a supermarket which use MAP. These have in the past been limited to salad mixes and in some fresh meat products. It use in fresh meat products can reduce the likelihood of harmful microbes/pathogens increasing to such a number which may impact on the health of the person consuming the meat product.
Some supermarkets use MAPs more than others. An example is Aldi where a greater proportion of its fresh fruit and vegetable range food to reduce wastage (which reduces costs passed onto customers as a resulted of wasted food) and also to allow better long distance transportation. More recently Coles and Woolworths have increased its MAP range to include some fruits such as apples and banana, but this has caused some backlash from some customers. The backlash has been from increased plastic packaging and not the MAP. Coles and Woolworths has retreated in relation to the use of such plastic packaging in their fresh fruit and vegetable products. Aldi has made no such commitments.
MAP does not alter the quality of the contents…all it does is delay the ripening processes. In some respects it is similar to freezing (lowering temperature to stop metabolic processes within the food) or canning (which removes oxygen and uses heat to stop similar processes). Noting that canning can change quality due to high temperatures used in the canning process.
MAP use is important especially for those products which are highly perishable and may not survive the few days from harvest to being available on the retailer’s shelves. MAP is also important where other storage methods are not suitable for the food (freezing or heating - both would turn leafy greens for example, in a green slush). This is why individual leafy salad green leaf mixes are often packed in MAP as it will extend their shelf life/freshness from a day or two to up to around 10 days. The packaging also prevents bruising as well as the contents are loose and the bag is slightly inflated, to prevent crushing.
As @ianmhughes2 outlines, nitrogen gas is common in the atmosphere. Significantly Increasing the nitrogen (or carbon dioxide levels) in effect starves the fruit/vegetable/meat of oxygen. Like most living things, they require oxygen to grow. A fruit /vegetable will stop growing until the atmosphere returns to normal conditions,namely when the package is opened.
It is also worth noting that any sealed packaged foods (e.g. breakfast cereals) also are packaged with MAP. The MAP could be different levels of atmospheric gases (CO2 or nitrogen) or very low humidity. MAP is used for these products as their processing is more likely to result in rapid degradation/spoiling of the product, if they are contaminated with microbes which cause the degradation/spoiling. Many of these microbes are naturally present in the air we breath and can easily come in contact with food after its processing preparation. The MAP ensures any microbes in the product can’t grow and the packaging also forms a barrier to microbes entering the food (and prevents increase in humidity which the microbes also need).
MAP (and packaging) also protects the health of consumers at large as it reduces the likelihood of spoiled foods being consumed.
The supermarkets also only sell a limited number of fresh fruit and vegetable products which have had extended storage periods. These are principally include apples (when out of season as outlined in an earlier post), potatoes, onions, garlic, sweet potato and other fresh food products which historically have had long storage lives and have been stored between growing seasons.
There are very few fruits and vegetables which have storage life greater than a few weeks. This website gives the maximum storage times under ideal conditions:
It is also worth noting that due to the vast ranging climatic conditions which prevail in Australia, from northern wet hot and humid summers/dry winters to southern hot and dry summers to cool and moist winters, as well as almost everything in between, Australia is fortunate enough to grow many fruits and vegetables which are staples, almost all year round. The local growing seasons move either north or south depending on the season at hand. Many other countries are not as fortunate as Australia and rely on fresh fruit and vegetable imports as they are unable to grow their staples over long growing seasons , to meet the local demand for the products. Some fresh fruit and vegetable products can only be imported as they do not have the climatic conditions to grow such produce (e.g. are temperate/coll climates and can’t grow banana or have hot humid climates which can’t grow stone fruit).
As Australians, we need to appreciate that we are lucky in relation to the range and growing seasons of many of the fruits and vegetables we enjoy, so that we don’t have to consume a significant quantity of foods which have been processed for long term storage (e.g. frozen) or imported.
Australia does import some fresh fruit and vegetable products, providing they have no significant biosecurity issues, to satisfy the consumer’s demand for out of season produce which can’t be grown in Australia (this could be due to light sensitive plant species). An example is stonefruit from the northern hemisphere in our winter months or asparagus from other countries (in both the northern and southern hemisphere). If one chooses not to purchase imported out of season fruit and vegetables it is their choice, but evidence suggests that many do otherwise wholesalers would not import such products to meet the consumer demand.
Gordon your comment about covering productive land in houses is so true. I live in Thornlands QLD and strawberries were the main crop with other salad vegies secondary. When I look at houses east of the Cleveland main drag I remember the farms that were there 40 years ago. I remember the ducks that walked their young from the breading lakes in Thornlands to the larger lakes in December, the koalas that grunted every night, the possums and the birds. Now we have feral cats. It can take up to a week to get “fresh food” to the supermarkets.
Why is it that the quality of so called fresh fruit in supermarkets seems to be on a downward spiral?
Apples are soft and floury, bananas are either grey or green and practically inedible, strawberries are tasteless, oranges are sometimes green and peaches and nectarines are usually so hard, they could be used as ammunition.
One or more of these factors will explain all you describe.
Cultivars that are selected for looks and durability instead of flavour.
Fruit picked unripe to permit rough transport. Some fruits ripen well after picking some do not.
Stored too long.
Handled badly.
Oranges being the colour orange is not a sign of ripeness or quality, sometimes they will go from green to orange and back to green on the tree, forget looks just taste them.
If you want all your fruit to be fresh and to taste and look great all year round forget it, it’s impossible. There has to be some compromises at some times.
If you want fruit to be fresh and to taste and look great in its season grow selected cultivars that suit your soil and climate yourself.
All good points @syncretic, but aren’t dwellers sans garden areas entitled to hope for a bit more than ordinary in any particular season when the particular fruit / veg is in?
But reality is that when a season is ‘in’ in Australia, it is probably out in the US or EU, so it is still grown as you ably described for the export market.
Possible solution, patronise local farmers markets or roadside stands if they are in one’s area, The small garden marketeers are likely to be outside the export industry, however the flip side is they might all start with the same seeds and hybrid varieties as matters of practicality.
… might realistically be the only way unless you can identify a garden marketeer who supplies ‘good’.
Ideally yes. And in some cases they get it where none of the limitations I mentioned apply.
On the one hand there are cases when vendors absolutely do the wrong thing like selling last year apples that resemble shiny globes of cardboard. They look OK and it is tempting to get a few bucks for them, too many are tempted.
On the other there are some things you will never get from the supermarket no matter the season or where you live, or how responsible the vendor, such as peaches ripened on the tree or truly fresh asparagus. The supply chain simply cannot support those things and keep the price anywhere near reasonable. Expecting the impossible is pointless.
Personally I do not care what growers / selling brigade apply to their produce, whether it is bromide, chlorine, cyanide or else. Just label it! Lets us consumers know, what has been applied/ used on that particular food! Then I read the label and it will be MY choice to buy or not to buy.
Currently we are not allowed to know whether the oats have been desiccated, or tea irradiated, and so on. Law should be introduced that all the manipulations with food be labelled as such.
