I'm not clear on the importance of this claim, even if it were to pan out. We aren't seeing vitamin deficiencies in this country beyond those people who don't actually eat vegetables.
When you hear people talk about food being bad for you, they aren't talking about vitamin deficiencies, they're talking about moral deficiencies. The difference is that moral deficiencies happen whether there is any externally visible impact at all.
Boo boo on Big Ag, rah rah organic. But put a crate full of cheap Big Ag tomatoes in a room with a handful of people suffering from scurvy and, bam, no more scurvy.
Scurvy. You know, that vitamin C deficiency that you've only heard of in pirate movies. Americans routinely suffered from it as recently as the 1950s -- infants, especially, since all-natural healthy mother's milk from a mother with insufficient vitamin C in her diet means you're on a one-way ticket to scurvyville. That bad, unnatural, killing-you-softy bottled formula has vitamin C added to it. The green revolution, improved transportation/refrigeration/processing of tomatoes in cheap pasta sauces and ketchup, and whatnot largely eliminated borderline vitamin C deficiency in mothers. Wham, infantile scurvy essentially vanishes from the US.
Scurvy is still quite common in the Third World and epidemic in refugee populations but, hey, at least they're not being given Evil Unnatural Frankenfood tomatoes which were probably poisoned by Monsanto.
