I’ve been whirlwind traveling and speaking the last month and have neglected this blog for too long.  Hope I haven’t lost everyone.  I’m not a social media person—still don’t have a smart phone—so I’m not addicted to this like some, which keeps me from stressing about it but also makes it hard to build momentum.  At any rate, I wanted to share a kind of new theme in my interviews.

                  I do a lot of guest podcasts, too, and a common question is “what’s the hurdle?”  Asked another way, it’s “what is keeping good food and farming from becoming more widely adopted?”  The most common cultural perception in this space is that farmers don’t care about their land or animals.  They just want to make a fast buck without regard to soil or earthworms.  The overriding assumption, in my view, is a “blame the farmer” mentality. 

                  But farmers have always grown for the market.  If people want something, farmers grow it.  True, the 6 commodities under the crop insurance (subsidy) program from the USduh receive concessionary incentives that skew the market price.  That’s corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, rice, and sugarcane.  Ask yourself if artificially propping those up is necessary.  It ain’t. 

                  But back to the point of this:  if we could ever figure out how to get people off the couch, Netflix, and beer in the fridge, we’d have a different world.  Apathy is akin to convenience, of course, and nothing is as routine as routine.  And nothing is more routine than food.   

                  Everybody knows Coke is terrible for you, but they keep drinking it.  Why?  Apathy.  People  for the most part just don’t really care about their health.  How else can you explain McDonald’s and Chik-fil-A are still building outlets?  Inability to change thinking or activity paralyzes progress.  

                  When media or podcasters pose the question to me “what’s keeping your kind of thinking from being more widely adopted?” they more often than not have bogeymen in their mind:  big corporations, Bill Gates, government subsidies, evil farmers.  Often they’re taken aback because I won’t pile on these nefarious bogeymen.

                  No, the real problem is apathy.  That the World Economic Forum can say “you won’t own anything and you’ll like it” and not be pilloried indicates a profound apathy within the global populace.  Where is the fire in the belly?  Why don’t we get indignant about things?  Have we lost our capacity for righteous anger?  For saying “I’m not going to take it anymore?”

                  I have some ideas, but I’m not ready to divulge them.  First I want to seek some counsel out there among my well-studied and eclectic readers.

                  Which all leads me to ask: why are people so apathetic about the obvious dysfunctional and harmful trends we see?