Nella Vita di Apples

We’ve all heard that an apple a day keeps the doctor away. Simple, true, effective. But it seems that the world is so much more complicated than that. I read this interesting article in the New York Times about how today’s obsession with eating only healthy, “good” foods may be manifesting as eating disorders in our kids. This really saddens me, but I can understand all the guilt that is now placed on the foods we eat. The battle lines used to be very clear, say cookie vs. apple. Choose to eat the apple, and congratulations, you’ve made the right choice, good job. But now, an apple is no longer an apple. Sure you’ve chosen the apple, but what kind of apple did you choose? Was it an organic, pesticide free apple? Was it a locally grown? Was it a genetically modified apple? Was it just a freaking apple?

Not that I’m any sort of authority, or that my opinion particularly counts, but I’ll give it anyway. On organics, I understand that chemically drenched apples are not good, and I think that it is a good goal to try to eat organic when possible, but honestly, I’m not going to lose any sleep over allowing a non organic apple to pass my lips. I think the goodness and nutrition from the actual apple, outweigh any of the bad things that may also enter my body. Also, this is not Snow White; eating so called poison apples are not going to result in me dropping dead. Sure you could argue that over my lifetime eating non organic foods could kill me, but I am much more likely to die from other things before that actually happens, and the truth is that I can’t weigh potential negative outcomes of every decision I make; I would lose my sanity and probably kill myself, thus having a shorter life regardless of eating non organic foods.

Another issue is where the food comes from. In the ideal world, I would eat organic locally grown apples, but let’s be honest, the world is not ideal and there are other factors to consider (ie availability, cost and convenience, but I won’t go into those here). If the choice was either a locally grown apple or an organic one from afar, I would choose the local one. I would rather have an apple drenched in pesticides than one drenched in oil, so to say. I like knowing that I am supporting the local economy, preserving local farmland, and reducing transportation related pollution and oil dependency. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any good statistic that looks at pollution generated from pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, etc versus pollution generated in the transportation of food (if anyone has any for or against please share). Another reason to favor local is fact that it may have better nutrition because it was picked when it was ripe perhaps only a day or two ago, as opposed to being picked early and then packaged and sitting for days while being shipped across the country (or world). Good article from Time found here. That being said I also sleep soundly knowing my tummy is full of the digesting apples of far away lands.

What about genetically modified (GM) food? This is something that has been going on for thousand of years, but only in the last twenty years or so has genetic engineering become a very exact science as opposed to methods like cross pollination. In general, I think discovering and creating ways for plants to be stronger and have the ability to survive in previously unfavorable environments is a good thing. Unfortunately, I think some GM foods were modified for the wrong reasons. “Roundup Ready”, or crops that were modified to be able to survive otherwise fatal sprayings of pesticides does seem wrong. But what about “Golden Rice” which has been modified to contain higher levels of Vitamin A or peanuts without their allergens or bananas that have human vaccines to diseases like Hepatitis B in them. Clearly there is a lot of good that can come from this, but like most new advances they need to be done cautiously and carefully. Doing some research on this it turns out that there really aren’t any GM apples, so we can forget them anyway for this discussion.

Does the fact that I don’t exclusively eat organic apples mean that I hate my body and want to get cancer? Does the fact that I don’t always eat local make me a bad citizen who is addicted to oil? I really don’t think so. I take pride in my flexibility and ability to balance conflicting ideas and competing issues. Because at the end of the day the decision I make is to moderate. Some times I’ll eat organic, sometimes I’ll eat local, and sometimes I don’t, and that is ok. And I think that is what we need to be teaching kids. The decision that should be made is the decision to eat apples over cookies. Of course, in keeping with moderation there is nothing wrong with eating a few cookies here and there!