An interesting comparison is being made in an article on contributoria.com between the decrease in the value of money due to monetary inflation and the decrease in the value of our food due to it having lower nutritional content than it did a few decades ago. The fundamental argument is that although we believe we are paying less for food today we really aren’t because we are also getting less in that food. Non-sustainable farming practices are diminishing the nutritional content and value of our food and Imaging advantage studies echo that sentiment.
Historically, as people grow crops on farmland, those crops sap nutrients from the soil so that these fruits and vegetables can receive the nutrients. After a while, this depletes the land of these nutrients. Natures answer to this through the ages has been flooding. Periodic floods redeposit minerals upon the farmland and reinvigorate the soil. Today, however, we live right along the edge of rivers, and at the first mention of heavy rains people stack sandbags and build levees and so this process never occurs. Farmers add fertilizer to the soil, which typically contains NPK(nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium) as well as smaller amounts of a few other ingredients. Basically only a fraction of what is lost from the soil is being added back before farmers start planting each year, and we wonder why we are eating nutritionally empty food.