First, do no harm

Insights Newsletter
9 June, 2017

You won’t normally find this column defending nanny-state initiatives around healthy eating.
 
Personal responsibility matters, and the simple fact that somebody chooses food you would not choose for yourself hardly means they are irrational, or that force-feeding them things they do not like would make them better off.
 
But in the grand scheme of things, Christchurch’s Healthy Eating strategy is not nearly as bad as it could have been. And that is something to celebrate in a crazy world.
 
Christchurch will be making it easy for residents to find fruit trees. It sounds a bit daft, but there are a lot of abandoned fruit gardens in the Red Zone. And going out fruit picking on a Sunday afternoon can be lovely.
 
Encouraging schools to have community gardens can similarly be nice. It isn’t free. And we don’t know what courses better nutritional education in the schools might push aside.
 
Councillor Aaron Keown’s warning that “If you don’t know five times five you won’t die, but if you don’t know what you are eating you will” seems a bit hasty given New Zealand’s declining numeracy scores in the international league tables. But better nutrition education in some schools could well be part of a solution.
 
And it makes for a nice contrast with the utterly absurd recommendations that also came recently from Auckland University’s public health researchers.

In a piece published in the International Journal of Public Health, the team showed that people living in more deprived communities actually have an easier time walking to the local supermarket in New Zealand.

The walk to the local supermarket, or fruit and veg shop, is half as long if you live in the poorest communities as compared to the richest neighbourhoods.
 
Sounds like cause for celebration, right?
 
Well, they sure didn’t put it that way. Instead, they talked a lot about food swamps and the need to make it really hard to put in fast food restaurants near “high risk” communities. And about how retailers are targeting deprived communities with unhealthy options – playing down that supermarkets wind up in the same places.
 
So in a world where really crazy policies are not far from the table, Christchurch’s rather less ridiculous one may be cause for minor celebration – in a world that’s far from perfect. 

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