That’s according to Howard Frumkin, head of the ‘Our Health, Our Planet’ project at the Wellcome Trust and a former professor in environmental and occupational health sciences at the University of Washington School of Public Health.
“The decisions we make are embedded in culture,” Frumkin said at the 2018 EAT forum in Stockholm. So “we need to be talking about culture change if we want to make healthy and sustainable the new normal.”
This means addressing people’s belief systems, tribalism and the issue of self-interest versus altruism, said Frumkin. He takes his cue from social marketing.
“One of my favorite maxims from social marketing is that if you want to achieve behavior change, make it fun, make it easy, make it popular,” he said.
“If we can convey that being healthy and sustainable is fun, if we can truly make those things easy, if it’s popular enough that it’s a party everybody wants to come to, then we’re moving down the road toward making healthy and sustainable the new normal.”