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You can get garden variety health advice from the daily newspaper, the "health" section of most book stores, and of course thousands of web sites. I'm hoping to present thought provoking and maybe change provoking thoughts about individual and community health. This blog is not just what to do about health, but how to think about it. I'm looking forward to an exchange of ideas with readers. July, 2010

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Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Perfect Health Promotion

The other day my wife and I decided to freeze peaches.  We like them a lot, and unlike apples, grapes, bananas, and many other fruit, fresh peaches are only available in Kentucky in July and August.  As we were washing, peeling, cutting, mixing and bagging the fruit, I wondered about the conflicts in what we were doing.

We live in a suburban area where people have backyard gardens, but there is not much in the way of commercial farming other than feed corn, soybeans, and other field crops.  There are farmers' markets scattered around the city, open various days each week.  Farmers come 20-30 or more miles to sell their produce at these events.  Is seems like a social good to support these farmers and their rural communities, to share the wealth of urban areas and build cultural bridges between the best of both worlds.  Paradoxically, it may actually be greener to buy produce from Wal-Mart.  Even though their produce is shipped from several states away, the high level of efficiency in their supply chain might be gentler on the earth's resources than production and delivery by a more local farmer.  What should I weigh more, local values or faceless efficiency?

Back to my story.  We drove about 60 miles r/t to buy locally grown peaches.  In Kentucky, it is rare that one can go to a conventional retail store to buy fruits and vegetables grown in the state, even in the summer.  What is sold in corporate grocery chains almost always is grown somewhere else in the U.S. or other countries.  This is true even though many fruits and vegetables are now grown, and could be grown in larger quantities, by Kentucky farmers.  Part of the reason for the void of local produce in stores again has to do with supply chains and infrastructure.  It is also true that it is more efficient for a grocery wholesale distributor to deal with one large farm rather than 250 small farms.  For historical and geographic reasons, Kentucky farms tend to be small family operations rather than the massive corporate farms common in other parts of the country.  Here is the point.  I wanted to buy local because I thought the fruit might be better, or at least fresher.  However, the downside was I used several gallons of gas to buy what was available at Kroger's, about 1.5 miles away.  There was a small nutritional advantage but a modestly high environmental cost.

If I wanted to be really green, I would mostly eat things I could raise in the backyard, and use more energy efficient ways to preserve and store food I couldn't eat when it was fresh.  I'm going to pay to freeze a quart of peaches I won't need until next February.  Perhaps my frozen peaches are a little bit healthier (Who knows?) than a can of peaches I could buy in the winter, but is it worth the cost?  On the other hand, fresh peaches don't come with a nutrition label: a worthy health promotion goal is to cut down on foods that come with a label.  Then again, there would be benefits to health and to the earth if we all raised food in home and community green spaces.  Are there counter-balancing health promotion benefits to using time for things other than gardening?  I think there are.

Personal and public health promotion is not a simple matter.  General advice doesn't apply to every individual.  Sometimes we make compromises when there are conflicting values.  Raising animals for food on factory farms is environmentally destructive and wasteful of resources.  However, raising cows organically on a small ranch, where animals are treated more like pets, would make meat much more expensive.  The values of boutique beef production must be balanced against higher grocery bills.  Being able to spend less family dollars for food means more money for other things which might also promote health.

There is no perfection in health promotion guidelines.  Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.  Next winter I'm going to enjoy those peaches, added sugar and all.

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