Seems like you've got a mental block about what he was trying to say. Citizens eat food and don't harvest any, so they can be used to consume the excess food produced to stop growth to avoid growing into unhappiness, since the unhappy citizen will also eat food and produce nothing. Better to have a nearly worthless specialist producing something rather than a totally worthless unhappy citizen.
I understand fully. I think it's you and others who are having a mental block... or perhaps I'm not explaining clearly enough. I'll try again using a different approach... maybe this will help get it across:
The scenario you describe is impossible. We are not taking a "unhappy citizen" and changing him to a "nearly worthless specialist" (citizen) because that unhappy citizen does not exist yet. Before that unhappy citizen exists, we are taking a different guy off of a high food tile, such as fish or wheat, and changing THAT guy to something.
The suggestion to change him to a citizen (1
), frankly, seems quite sub-optimal to me (unless running representation).
Here are some other options:
1) change him to a forest, on a hill if possible (2
1
or 1
2
or 1
3
)
2) keep him working the fish and change 2 or 3
other guys; e.g., change 2 grass forests (2
1
) to plains forests or hills forests (1
2
or 1
3
). Or change grass cottages to plains cottages (which builds your future infrastructure for when you get more happy and can grow your city to work all your cottages at the same time)
3) change him to a mine or workshop (1
2
or 1
3
or 4
)
4) change him to a real specialist (e.g., 2
3
or 3
3
or 3
3
)
With all those other options, why in the world would we change him to a citizen (1
)?
(Yes, it does happen that, extremely rarely, we have literally no other choice. e.g., as UncleJJ says in an ice city with literally no other tiles, or as Tephros says with the SoL. The OP advocated intentially running a citizen to avoid growth, which is what I am responding to. Given another option, it's certainly better than running a citizen.)
