Guest Post 4 of 4 – Overcoming The Hurdles Of Cities Better Feeding Themselves

Change is tough, whether it is learning to bake whole wheat sourdough bread instead of buying white bread or trying to improve school lunch programs.

This is the last of a series of guest posts I wrote for Michael Dahl’s DissidentPotato.com blog about whole food health for cities. The subject is how cities could surmount the problems standing in the way of better feeding themselves. This post lays out my thoughts about how some of the objections and problems that would inevitably come up might be countered and overcome.

The bottom line, in my opinion, is that this will be a grass-roots battle. Residents, city government officials and school board officials will all need to be convinced that better diet and better supply of affordable real food is necessary. These things tend to happen one person at a time and ordinary people tend to be easier to convince than the bureaucracy. The bureaucrats will come around when enough voters are putting pressure on them to change.

Improving the food situation, in cities and everywhere else, is going to be a tough sell. Private businesses that make their profits from junk food will not stop selling junk until it becomes obvious there is more profit to be made from selling healthy food. Publicly elected or appointed officials will not change policies until it is obvious that more people are willing to vote for healthy food than for junk food. Ordinary folks will not change the way they vote, with their wallets or at the polls, until they are convinced it is in their best interests and will save them money. But the change will have to start with ordinary people.

Please click here to read the entire guest post.