Biod, the point of Tom's post was that "our food system amounts to an ongoing environmental disaster," and that the mayor of London was attempting to do something about it.  Because of your strong libetarian ethic, you chose to concentrate on a relatively minor aspect of the program, but promoting locally produced organic food in order to reduce the destruction caused by pesticides and oil consumption/burning is the main thrust of the program.

Re the relative health of poor people, I think it's been conclusively shown that their poor health is mainly due to the stress that being poor causes.  However, it's ludicrous to imply, as you have, even if unintentionally, that all else being equal, people who eat healthier food won't be healthier.

Re access to fruits and vegetables in the slums:  When I lived in the slums in Oakland, CA, there was no place to buy fresh fruit or vegetables.  You are correct that many people living there didn't care about this, but many of us did.  No one ever polled the people who live there to determine what they wanted.  When those of us who wanted access to healthy food tried to get the city to encourage the opening of places that sell fruits and vegetables, we were told that many companies wouldn't open stores in our neighborhood because of the crime rate.  We were never told that no one wanted fruits and vegetables in our neighborhoods.

Jeff Hoffman

I think it's relevant to ask how desire and preferences are constructed.

In the late 1990s I lived in a beautiful working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn called Crown Heights. The area is mostly West Indian and African-American, with a relatively small concentration of Lubivich Jews, and a small but growing concentration of white pioneer types. (You may remember a series of horrible incidents in the late 1980s involving tension between Lubivichers and West Indians.) The housing stock is mostly brownstones, with horrible high-rise some projects thrown in (including one that sits atop the site for the old Brooklyn Dodgers home, Ebbots Field). There was a significant presence of drug dealers, particularly on some blocks (not mine). They generally kept a sort of tense peace on the blocks they controlled, since they didn't want to bring unnecessary trouble on their enterprises--interacting with cops being one cost of doing business for the trade. Most people were working class folk--city workers, etc.-- most of whom had bought their brownstones during the "fire" years of the '70s (when rents throughout "undesirable" sections of NYC were so low that landlords were torching their building to collect insurance, a trend from which alas, NYC's wonderful community garden program sprouted.)
At any rate, on the stoop of our brownstone apartment my girlfriend and I--with the landlords's blessing--kept a few pots of herbs (basil, oregano, parsley, etc.) After a few months we had befriended several neighbors, including a rambunctious crew of kids aged, say, 8-13, who were constantly playing on the sidewalks, jump-roping, playing chase, and generally proving Jane Jacobs' dictum that city streets are eminently safe places for kids, so long as there is vibrant street life and plenty of adult eyes on the street.

One lovely summer afternoon I was out picking some basil for dinner. A line Brooklyn brownstones sparkling in the sun against that perfect blue NY sky is a landscape that rivals many "natural" ones, in my view. The gaggle of kids was playing right in front of my stoop. "What are you doing?," the ring leader of the crew demanded to know. "I'm picking my dinner," I replied. "You're gonna eat that?" came the incredulous reply. Several disgusted "oohs" emanated from my audience; a consensus formed that "eating plants" is a vile idea.

The long and the short of it is that I convinced the ring leader to try a basil leaf, promising him "it makes your breath smell good." He like it; the other kids tried it and they liked it, too; and we all decided that "eating plants" wasn't such a bad idea, after all.

Now let's ponder this. These kids' grandparents (in some cases, parents) either hailed from the U.S. south or the West Indies; in either case, they were just one or two generations off the land. In that short time, the idea of where food came from had become so obfuscated, so replaced by visions of the supermarket and packaging and Twinkies and what have you, that they found the idea of "eating plants" exotic and undesirable. Alas, when they tried it, they liked it.

There's a stubborn liberal idea that poverty ennobles people. It's a lie. Poverty fucks people up. Bring "the poor" good food, and they might not  want it. Old habits die hard. But it's a libertarian lie that those habits spring from nowhere, that they have no history, that there mere "preferences" which emerged from a vacuum.

If we're interested in creating a just and environmentally sustainable food system, one place to start might be school gardens and school lunch programs. Is there money for it? First of all, is there really money to keep using these massive outlays to buy health- and environmentally ruinous crap?  Second of all, last time I checked, our president, who sometimes claims libertarian ideals, was busy burning through $2 trillion to set up a friendly and stable regime in Iraq, home of so much oil. So maybe there's not money, after all.

Will the health of poor Londoners improve as a result of his coercive policies or will they simply pay more for the few vegetables they do buy (possibly buying even fewer), and have to drive farther to obtain the foods they prefer?

Why should poor Londoners have to pay more for the "few vegetables they do buy" under the mayor's proposal?

Local food is generally substantially less expensive than non-local food.  All year long in Manhattan you can find red peppers from Holland - generally they cost between $4.99 - $6.99/lb.  In season, however, you can buy red peppers from Long Island for about $1.99/lb.

Perhaps the poor are choosing junk/fast food over fresh fruits and vegetables because fast food has become cheaper than fresh food.  Perhaps, given the choice of fresh, local fruits and vegetables at a reasonable price, many people would choose to include more of these foods in their diet.  Regardless I don't think the mayor is claiming that he will solve all of the poor's health problems with his proposal, however, it seems difficult to me to find issue with food that is fresher, less expensive and less damaging to the environment.

I think that Tom and BioD are both making valid points. I'm sure there will be people who will jump at the chance to buy relatively cheap, locally grown produce, given the opportunity. I'm also sure there are people who will want to have nothing to do with fresh veggies. Different people simply enjoy different foods. However, nowhere in the description of this proposed plan did I see anything about diminishing the availability of cheap, overprocessed, unhealthy food. Mayor Livingstone is simply providing an additional option to those people who are looking for fresh produce. Perhaps his scheme will drive up the cost of fast food, but I have to think that major fast food operations, and mainstream snack producers will not take all that large a hit.

At the end of the day I think food choice is all about personal preference. And people should have the option to obtain the food that they prefer.

Libertarianism is a philosophy that individual rights trump those of society and the environment.  When Biod or anyone else makes statements that evince that philosophy, which is very anti-environmental and which I abhor, I will call them it.  However, I do not call people libertarians merely because I disagree with them.  Biod's guiding philosophy seems to be an contradictory mix of libertarianism and wilderness/wildlife advocacy, the latter of which is my priority.  This is like a contrast between The Wilderness Society (Biod) and Earth First! (me).

Re the "difference between poor people, and young people who temporarily live in a poor neighborhood because of the cheap rent":

If young people are living there because the rent is cheap, they're also poor by definition.  There is a difference between young people who are temporarily poor and those who will never escape the slums, and between people who wish they weren't poor and people who don't care about acquiring material wealth (artists, musicians, radicals, etc.) but why differentiate?  If one lacks money to buy expensive food, it is irrelevant why or for how long that person is poor for the purpose of determining why there is no fresh produce available in the slums.  And BTW, when I lived in west Oakland, the people with whom I tried to organize to get fresh produce sold in our area were long time neighborhood residents.

Jeff Hoffman