Hmm, it seems that adding nutrients to the soil to increase the nutritional value of the food produced from that soil is not much different from adding nutrients to the food after the fact, except that a goodly portion of the nutrients that go into the soil do not return to the food chain where we can get at them.

Nutrition is nutrition, and whether it is "organic" or local produce doesn't seem to count for much. When I go to someplace like Whole Foods, I find processed items labeled "organic" there with nutrition labels that don't vary significantly from the same generically labeled food items at the large grocery stores that cost me 1/3 as much. A box of Total cereal still delivers the same 100%+ nutrition per serving whether they label it organic or not. As for food additives for things like preservation or presentation, all I can say is these things have been around for a good long time, and people seem to be living much longer now on the average than they were when such additives were not being used at all. If there's all this toxic buildup in our food chain, how is it negatively affecting the general population? What I've seen in the past twenty years is more and more people overweight and out of shape, and subsequently more and more people coming down with diabetes, heart disease, etc. Maybe the best thing we can do for ourselves these days is to push away from the table a little sooner, and cut back on the 200+ channels of tv we glue into every night.

I think long before the issue of diminished nutrition becomes a factor is living a debilitating lifestyle. If you can get away from eating junk to eating real food, then that will go a lot farther towards improving your health than will upgrading from the apples sold at Walmart to the apples sold at the Farmer's market. There's a scaling factor, or law of diminishing returns, in that argument somewhere.