You can't win - so compromise

ALSO KNOWN AS THE MIDDLE WAY

I'm sure a lot of us feel like Bart Simpson every time we go food shopping or think about what to eat. We are bombarded with advertising aimed at making us eat all the wrong things, products that are not good for us but delicious and at the same time we are preached at by the health gurus who tell us no, no, no. Indeed I noticed the latter trend today when I was idly browsing the books in K-Mart and in Target - neither of them what could be called high-class book shops. The cooking sections in both - which were relatively large in relation to the size of the book section - had at least half of their shelf space dedicated to diets and various food faddy things. Which is not to say that there was not a substantial selection of books on baking cakes and other sweet things as well.

I remember as a young person thinking that ignorance was bliss. If you didn't know what might happen if you did something bad, then you were a lot happier, and on the world scale, if you didn't know what awful things were going on in the rest of the world then you were also a lot happier. What you don't know you don't know you are missing. But of course, the more you know (about anything) the more you want to know - or the more the powers that be think you want to know. Which leads to information overload and a deadening of sensibilities - witness the current debate on same sex marriage. I'm sure we all just wish that that would go away.

But I digress. My food shopping is much more careful and time-consuming these days, because of what I now know about a whole range of ethical and health issues. In days gone by it was just all about price and availability. Today the supermarket is a minefield. For every item there is choice. So how do you choose? Do you go for price, classy packaging ( I suspect a lot of us are rather more influenced by this than we care to admit), where it comes from, what it contains, how big or small it is, the company who makes it, the advertisements we have seen, the current fads, ... ? The print on the ingredients and nutrition information is tiny. Good - it is there - it never used to be. Bad - it's difficult to read and also to interpret sometimes. And we have lots more things to help us choose as well - heart foundation ticks, that new star rating, Australian logos, enticing descriptions of what lies within. I actually enjoy all this really, but I'm retired and I have time. Time-strapped working mothers (and fathers), or even singles do not.

But the dilemmas begin even before you get to the supermarket. The first one being should you be shopping in a supermarket? Shouldn't you be supporting small business and farmer's markets? Aren't supermarkets evil and is this supermarket more evil than that one? Then there's the whole dilemma of how what we eat is affecting the future of the planet - the various evils of agriculture, the disregard of animals - both by the very fact of eating them and also by the way we raise them for this purpose. How far does your food travel to get to you? How is it manufactured? How much energy and other resources are used in its manufacture? And on and on it goes. And you will always find that there are two sides to the question.

This morning I read an interesting article in The New Scientist by Bob Holmes entitled Food for Thought, which is how this post came about. You won't be able to read the article online but you can go to his website where he has a whole lot of articles around the topic of what we should eat and why. I think he must be a New Scientist journalist with a speciality in food matters. Anyway the article was all about the issues associated with eating healthily and with saving the planet (and its people) at the same time. He investigated all manner of things and every time he found an argument for and an argument against.

For example - something I sometimes think about is becoming vegetarian (not vegan, which is just too too hard). There are all sorts of reasons for becoming a vegetarian from animal welfare to saving methane emissions from herds of cattle, not to mention various health risks that come from eating too much meat. But factory farming, while cruel is more efficient and less damaging to the planet - just to demonstrate the difficulty of these things. If you are careful you can get all the nutrients you need from dairy foods and vegetables. But as Bob Holmes says:

"If I were to do what many vegetarians do and switch to a cheese-heavy diet, some studies suggest all the extra saturated fat could leave me worse off. It turns out that vegetarianism may not be the best option. After all, meat is a great protein source and full of iron and vitamin B12 - nutrients that are often in short supply, especially for the world's poor. Plus, more than a quarter of Earth's surface - and 70% of its agricultural land is grazing land, most of it too steep, rocky or arid to grow crops."

And so it goes on. Another example is research on the environmental impact of different foods. The result of the research is that you can reduce your greenhouse emissions by 90% whilst at same time meeting the UK recommended nutrient intake and calories, by eating just seven foods - pasta, peas, fried onions, brassicas, sesame seeds, dry wholegrain breakfast cereal and confectionery. But who would want to do that besides it not being particularly healthy?

And did I mention the whole waste dilemma? This, of course deserves a whole post of its own - but just one statistic - "1/3 of all the food produced on the planet each year gets wasted" - and in the UK almost 75% of that is wasted by households. Alarming isn't it?

Organic? It takes up more space, so "if we all go organic, that would mean less land left over for forests, meadows and other natural habitats." Besides it has been shown that organic foods do not necessarily have more nutrients and pesticides on commercial crops are pretty much regulated in the west so as not to cause harm. Organic costs more - but yes it can improve the soil and there may be lower emissions. And it's certainly fun to grow your own - if you have the space.

The conclusion, of course, is that you have to compromise somewhere. A little bit of meat, but not too much, eat what's in season and grown locally, don't waste food, eat less. And if you try hard but not ridiculously hard it seems you could reduce your carbon emissions by some 40% by doing all of these things.

Balance is the thing. The middle way (that's the Chinese character for the middle way). And don't let all those people who say that compromise is a feeble and evil thing get to you. It seems to me that if there was more compromise and less extremism the world would be in a far better place than it is now. What is wrong with listening to the other person's point of view. Sure there are a few values on which one shouldn't compromise - probably summarised in the Ten Commandments, though to be honest I can't really remember what they all are. But mostly those values are really blindingly obvious - 'Thou shalt not kill' for a start. The minefield of what we should eat is much less obvious - as are most things in life. There's always another side to the question - or put another, more optimistic, way - every cloud has a silver lining.

So compromise and balance. It's not always easy, indeed it's precarious and difficult but it really is worth a try. Something beautiful could come out of it.

In our house we do already try to have at least one vegetarian meal a week and I do try not to buy food from overseas that can be produced here. And where possible I buy free-range - not organic though. We are lucky that Australia can produce just about anything we could possible want - even quinoa. But I know I don't do everything I could. But then life is a constant learning experience isn't it? And we learn something new about food every single day.

“Instead of either/or, I discovered a whole world of and.”

Gloria Steinem