Health is complex. It's more than just eating homegrown food. We have to pay attention to all dimensions - sometimes perfectionism becomes its own kind of illness.

Over the years, as both a public health researcher and small-scale farmer, I've read countless self-help books on health and wellness. I’ve kept up with the academic literature on nutrition. Yet incorporating all that knowledge into daily life is another matter. We read about plastic in our food, hormones, traces of pesticides and herbicides. We're told our ancestors ate unprocessed food and so should we - but how far back do we go, and what's our variable of interest? Cancer prevention? Mental health? Alzheimer's? Diabetes? Cardiovascular disease? For ourselves, our family, or our whole community? How does capitalism factor into this picture? Is it ok that food is treated as a commodity?

I believe most traditional foodways were connected to entire ways of being - ways that were imperfect but often quite structured. If you came from a certain culture, you ate a certain way. These ways of eating were imperfect, even if organic. They sometimes meant incredible amounts of labor, especially for women. They sometimes meant seasonal hunger and uncertainty.

Today, a large portion of the world's urban population subsists on ultra-processed food, and that’s also a massive problem for the health of both people and planet.

So how do we approach health on our urban homestead? When homesteaders romanticise past ways of eating, we're at least partially drawn to an image of connectedness. We want that feeling, and we want our choices to align with our values.

I think we do this imperfectly, experimentally, and with curiosity - trying to apply what scientists have learned about health and disease while working with current realities. Good food isn't available to all, and focusing all one's energy on personal or family health won't lead to peace of mind or a healthy body.

In most food environments, eating a perfectly unprocessed, organic diet requires enormous focus, huge expense, and perhaps some neuroticism. To improve our health, we need to think about our community's health, not just our own. The stress of trying to eat perfectly can become more harmful than the imperfect food we're trying to avoid.

We can take small steps every day, and bring as many people along for the ride as we can. If we’re connected to our neighbours and friends, if we’re connected to the rituals of love and home, then our experience of life is one of growth and abundance. This growth and abundance is resilient— it brings little bits of wellbeing to everyone around us as well. We don’t need to use food as a demonstration of our identity or as an attempt to avoid our inevitable decline and death. We can just do the best we can with what we know.

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