The Right Way for People to Eat: Eating Through the Community

Here is the first part (its not a complete draft) of my "What's the right way for people to eat?":

It’s definitely hard to say what the one right way to eat is, but in order to consider what the right way to eat is it’s important to understand what you want to get out of eating first. I believe that the right way to eat will leave a person healthy and happy and the only way to truly achieve that is to eat food from your community. This means more though than just buying locally, this means planting, growing, killing and cooking your food in and with your community. Eating food from your own community means cutting out the processed food that many of the money oriented food producing companies are making, and in turn cutting out some of the most unhealthy things people eat today. It also means more fresh food, which is a way to introduce more healthy food into your diet. If you are producing and cooking your own food, the food is coming from your community, which means short travels to get it, and less money because you and your community are working for it and cutting out the cost of shipment and most importantly the money tapped onto the cost of food by the companies you are buying it from. And lastly, community based food programs are more ethical. Without the need for mass production animals raised for meat will not have to live in the gruesome conditions, and many don’t necessarily need to be raised by the community, hunting becomes one of the methods for gathering food. Along with the better treatment for the animals comes better treatment for people, community based programs allow for a shorter chain of people working to produce and distribute the food, and all the participants are doing it for the own good, cutting out many of the worker issues. Through community based food programs not only is their healthier food, more accessibility and better ethics but there is an improved quality of life in the community.
Health
World Health Organization defines health as, “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” Which means that being healthy is not only about eating right, keeping proper nutrients in your body and exercising to keep your body physically fit, but also about keeping your mind and your human relations in good state. Working in a community based food system supports eating right, exercising and staying active and working and relating to your community, all of which do the job to keep you healthy.
Nutrition and Preservatives
Eating raw food may not be better than eating cooked food but it is more nutritional. This is because by heating the food the chemical make up of it changes and many of the vitamins and amino acids that the food has when it is fresh are broken down (living-foods.com). But whether or not your eat raw food doesn’t always depend on whether or not your food is being produced locally, you could be eating only local food but still cooking it all. What is does affect though is the fact that processed food is processed in all different kinds of way and heating is one of them. Like heating food to preserve it, there are other ways food is preserved and even some of those ways also use heating. Frozen food is persevered by taking the fresh food, dropping it into boiling water (to kill off microbes) and then freezing it. Canned food is preserved by first taking the food and heating it and then placed in a can and sealed (often in metal cans, which can contaminate the food). Pasteurizing, smoking and sterilizing are three other ways food is processed with heat. Other ways food is processed is through methods of salting, pickling, drying and irradiating (exposing the food to radiation) the food (informedeating.org).
To completely stop food processing would be impossible and unhealthy, people have been processing food as a way to preserve since the prehistoric ages and advanced greatly in the 19th and 20th century to serve military needs (wikipedia.org). Processing food is the only way to preserve it so it will not rot during off seasons of certain foods. And community base food programs would have to preserve their food because they wouldn’t be buying produce from other places that have the food they do not.
What community-based food programs do eliminate is the use of chemicals in process and preserved the food. Although it is not true that all chemicals are unhealthy and harmful to the human body and environment, many of them are. And one introducing chemicals into the body is unhealthy. Taking steroids is know to be bad for the body, but much of the beef in your supermarket was once a cow that was injected with steroids to make it grow bigger and faster. Humans have evolved over the last 200,000 years eating plants and fungi they collected and animals they hunted in the nearby area (wikipedia.org) until recently when food became another major and global industry. As humans evolved eating such things, they did not evolve to consume such chemicals that are being added in great quantities to the food you can find in the supermarket today. Excess salt causes hypertension (high blood pressure and arterial disease), saturated fats cause heart disease and obesity, excess sugar causes dental caries and diabetes and all the chemical additives cause cancer (informedeating.org). If you are producing and eating locally, you are processing your own food and therefore controlling the substances that preserve the food and can potentially destroy life.
Physical Health
The physical health aspect of community based food systems is simple, by working to produce the food yourself you are maintaining an active physical routine that will keep you in shape. Human evolved eating that food they had hunted and gathered and in doing so were able to get an equivalent amount of exercise many people do by going to the gym to stare at a wall and run on a moving piece of floor. If people are working to produce their own food they have to be working to grow and gather their own plants, raise their own animals and/or hunt there own animals, which all requires more energy and burns more calories than walking to a local supermarket or ordering from Fresh Direct. In America adults are encouraged to exercise for 30 minutes a day (fitness.gov), if just that is sufficient for keeping people in shape people working to produce their own food easily meet that standard.
Mental Health
Like physical health, mental health is also something that becomes very simple in a community-based food system. By working with the land and with the community, people achieve personal happiness and positive social interaction. In a story about a man who works with chronically ill people in an organic garden he says, “I personally believe that a huge benefit comes from a renewed relationship with nature. It starts with an ‘I won't poison you, you won't poison me’ attitude, and ends with ‘I'll nurture and respect you, you nurture and respect me’” (lookwayup.com/free/organic.htm), which goes to show that through growing food people become in touch with themselves and the earth, finding some personal satisfaction. The social aspect is also apparent in that people in the community are working together to feed themselves and each other; by working within a community people are able to experience companionship with and support from other members of the community. And with such personal and communal benefits, people working in community-based food systems are able to achieve a better state of mental health.