For over a decade, planning scholars have promoted measures that cities can take to incorporate food systems into the urban planning agendas. Large cities such as Toronto, Rome, London, and others are hubs of these activities such as municipal Food Policy Councils, institutional procurement programmes, and formal municipal food documents. In contrast, there is significantly less policy activity in many smaller Canadian cities. In this chapter, I focus on the challenges and opportunities facing cities that are distinct only because they are small, ordinary – even mundane – and lacking the ‘buzz’ of large, fast-growing cities. I draw from my doctoral research and anecdotal experience based in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Kingston is a small city with 117,000 residents, located about two hours from larger cities like Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto. Between 2006 and 2010, I conducted my doctoral fieldwork by exploring the urban retail food landscape of Kingston’s lower-income neighbourhoods, including the closure of two full-service grocery stores. Specifically, I draw from forty-two interviews with local actors like elected officials, urban planners, real estate brokers and local food activists. I intend for this presentation to initiate a lively discussion about food systems planning in the context of the small, buzz-less city. Set within the theoretical context of Logan and Molotch’s (1987) growth machine theory, I suggest that food systems planning is hampered by factors such as preoccupation with land values, limited human resources, policy learning capacity, or inter-sectoral networks. Most importantly, an ideological resistance to ‘interfering’ in the free market is pervasive. Policy ideas may include but should not be limited to encouraging better inter-sectoral communication, low-cost ideas for municipal food networks and programming, capitalising on local knowledge and human capital, and incorporating food into other municipal agendas.