Voice of Real Australia is a regular newsletter from Australian Community Media, which has journalists in every state and territory. Today's is written by Good Fruit and Vegetables editor Ashley Walmsley.
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In the 2022 superhero film, Dr Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the hero, Dr Strange, travels to various alternate universes.
He arrives in one with a colleague who expresses how hungry she is before simply taking some food from a street vendor.
"Food's free in most universes actually. It's weird that you guys (meaning those in our universe) have to pay for it," she says.
It's a utopian thought that one of the basic needs of humanity, food, should be free.
That's not the world we live in though, and it costs money, plenty of money, to produce food in the first place. But should that be a barrier to establishing healthy eating habits?
Apparently it is.
According to the Fruit and Vegetable Consortium's (FVC) report, Shifting the dial on vegetable consumption - Rebuilding healthy families in a COVID-19 affected and disrupted Australia, price is a deterrent to the purchase of vegetables.
The report says 91 per cent of Australians are not eating the recommended five serves of vegetables each day and 72 per cent of consumers say affordability is impacting their vegetable consumption.
According to FVC managing director Justine Coates, if Australians ate an extra cup of vegetables a day we could wipe more than $200 million off our ballooning health budget.
Part of the suggested solution is a national behaviour change strategy.
That's going to be tough.
Apart from legislating the forced consumption of vegetables (just imagine how that would go down), how on earth do you get people to eat more veggies?
At a thought leadership event held in Melbourne after the release of the FVC report, a comment from an audience member particularly stood out with his blunt and forthright observations that veggies, for all their goodness and colour, are up against sugar, oil and salt.
"We are at war - this is going to take decades. If we don't have the secret sauce to pull this together, it won't work," he said.
"The reason a piece of chocolate is more attractive than a piece of broccoli is because of the dopamine hit to the brain. And you'll never compete."
His recommendation was to use fibre as the selling point.
That's still a tough sell though, trying to entice people to chow down with the incentive of increased fibre. It's the sort of thing cereal makers angle toward the elderly with bowel trouble.
So what to do? Perhaps it's time to copy what all the big brands do - add a dose of celebrity.
And a big celebrity; not just a chef from a Friday night lifestyle show or a former athlete whose career peaked a decade ago - aim big.
Maybe it's not about Dr Strange (played by actor Benedict Cumberbatch) conjuring up a spell to eat more vegetables but actually being seen to eat a cucumber himself (Benedict Cucumberbatch?) and extol the virtues of doing so.
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