The Evolved Eater

by Nick Taranto

  The Merollas’ grandma Margie died around this time, and in her will, she left me $5,000. I put that money into the KOMPIP microfinance portfolio. We ultimately raised hundreds of thousands of additional dollars from folks ranging from the regional government to the Ford Foundation to Coca-Cola. But no matter how much money we raised from donors, it felt like we were always behind the ball. I was spending all my time writing grant proposals and none of my time in the field interacting with clients, working to solve their problems.

  This ended up being a big lesson for me: It is incredibly hard and time-consuming to constantly rely on donors to fund your organization.

  We were disbursing hundreds of loans, but there were millions of people who needed our help. Even if I stayed in Java for my entire life, at this rate, we would only impact a small percentage of the population. I realized I needed to be more disciplined and rigorous in evaluating how I could be most helpful and where I wanted to spend my time.

  Who should I work with to accomplish as much as possible? What safeguards could I put in place to protect my valuable time and resources?

  That was when I first discovered the concept of the force multiplier: You as an individual can only do so much, but if you can inspire others to action, you can accomplish infinitely more.

  Even in the jungle, I was learning invaluable lessons that would serve me well later on as a marine, entrepreneur, and business owner.

  I tried to convince the KOMPIP guys to pivot our model from not-for-profit to profit-seeking, but they were adamantly opposed. These guys had seen how money had corrupted their country, leading to a cash- and military-fueled regime, and they wanted nothing to do with it. I could feel my time in Java coming to an end, and a few months later, I returned to the United States for graduate school. I understood nonprofits served a very important role in the world, but I also realized that I wanted to have the force multiplier impact of building my team around turning a profit.

  I wanted to build a mission-driven organization in a sustainable and scalable way that was not limited by donor funding.

  I knew I needed harder analysis skills and a better-informed toolbox for looking at the world. This led me to Harvard for graduate school.

  “Networking”

  At Harvard Business School (HBS), I watched my classmates job hunt and land huge bonuses and sign six-figure contracts at private equity firms and hedge funds. That life held no appeal for me. I knew that someday I wanted to start my own mission-driven business, combining the best of what I learned in Java and at HBS. But first I felt compelled to become a leader, to serve my country, and to live a life of high adventure. I wanted to be a marine.

  But I had also met Nimmi while in business school. I was in the gym with a buddy when I first saw her, and I immediately knew she was special. My friend and I spent the remainder of our workout trying to set up a nonawkward introduction, which went about as well as it sounds. Nimmi was also doing her MBA, but she was a year ahead.

  For some reason, she gave me a chance, and the more I got to know her, the more I got to like her. She was tall and beautiful and regularly had gaggles of friends in stitches with her irreverent sense of humor. She could also cook a mean omelet. Her parents were immigrants from South India, and she had grown up the town over from where my mom grew up in Minnesota. When she first met my grandma, they spent a solid half hour sharing their recipes for Marshmallow Fluff salad, some midwestern delicacy that I still to this day can’t wrap my head around. She was the kind of girl you’d ski to the North Pole for, and I felt compelled to pursue a traditional career path to make her happy and prove that I was serious about our relationship and that I could provide for her.

  A few weeks after graduating from Harvard Business School, I became an active-duty Marine Corps officer—the first person since World War II to join the Marines after going to HBS. In an effort to convince Nimmi that I was not just some adrenaline junkie, I also accepted and deferred an offer from Goldman Sachs. Before reporting for my year of active-duty training with the Marines, Nimmi and I traveled to Cambodia, where I asked her to marry me. It was almost one hundred degrees, humidity so thick you could cut it, and after carrying the ring around in rolled-up socks for a week, I totally surprised her. She said yes!

  We spent the rest of our trip chilling out, sampling various forms of Cambodian cuisine, which ranged from the unusual (grilled snake and fried crickets) to phenomenal (lok lak beef stir fry). We flew out of Phnom Penh, where the omnipresent sight of beggars missing limbs was a reminder of what the Khmer Rouge or any other totalitarian regime can do to humanity. Again, I found meaning in my decision to join the military. A few days later, I reported for active duty with the Marine Corps.

  * * *

  Picture of an Evolved Eater

  Alyssa Wand, New York, New York

  Alyssa is a mother of two boys (three and six years old) and is a self-proclaimed foodie. She has been a Plated customer for almost four years. She lives with her husband in the Tribeca neighborhood of New York City.

  Alyssa says, “I am very particular about what I feed my family. And we’re very health conscious. I don’t do a lot of processed foods, no canned goods, only wild-caught fish, and always 100 percent grass-fed organic beef. I really don’t do any packaged food for my children. So I’m like the mean mom that doesn’t allow Goldfish.”

  Alyssa enjoys cooking, so before Plated, dinner was good—it just wasn’t great. Getting the recipe, then shopping, then making sure she had all the right portions of all the ingredients—doing all of this was too difficult to ensure that dinner was regularly living up to Alyssa’s expectations.

  She adds, “I got into this habit probably like a year ago where I was cooking two dinners every night. I would cook something for the kids that was a little simpler. I would feed them and then put them to bed. And only then would I start cooking for my husband and me. And I literally did that for a year. And eventually I was like, ‘I’m going to go crazy! I have to cook and clean up two meals a night! What is this, a restaurant?’ I just couldn’t do it anymore!”

  Alyssa then discovered the Plated three-portion offering. Now she only cooks one meal per night, and the whole family eats Plated.

  Alyssa concludes, “I feel like it’s expanding my kids’ palates, because I’m not cooking mac and cheese and chicken fingers. And my older son has become a really good eater. My kids are growing up eating mostly Plated meals for dinner! I mean, I’m a huge advocate. It’s been great. It’s made my life a lot easier, my family appreciates it, and it allows me to expand our repertoire and palate of foods we’re eating without slaving away in the kitchen.

  “I depend on you guys. You allow me to feed my family the way they deserve to be fed.”

  * * *

  First Course

  The Story of Humans and Food: How We Got to This Place Where Food Is a Problem Instead of a Solution

  1

  Our Food Is Killing Us

  It was the summer of 2011. The last part of my Marine Corps training consisted of a multiweek mission in the Mojave Desert. We were stationed aboard Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms, a 932-square-mile sprawling expanse of desert and mountains nearly the size of Rhode Island. The base is so big that several years ago, a marine got lost in training during a night exercise. He wandered off into the desert, following lights on the horizon. His skeleton was found four months later.

  The Mojave was fierce and unrelenting. Home to cacti, rugged snowcapped mountains, North America’s most venomous rattlesnake, and twenty-three thousand tons of dropped explosives per year, Twentynine Palms was about as far removed from the rest of America as you could get while being in the continental United States.

  Our company of Marines spent most of our time at Twentynine Palms awake, moving, and trying to convince our instructors that we were thriving. But surviving, let alone thriving, was not easy. We went days on end without sleeping. Temperatures in the midday sun reached over 120 degrees. W
e hiked over broken ridgelines, carrying hundreds of pounds of ammunition, weapons, communication gear, and water. No matter how much water I drank, I was constantly suffering from dehydration headaches. And the “food.” Let me tell you about the food.

  This won’t come as a surprise to you if you’ve spent any time in the military—or in a zombie apocalypse—but military-grade MREs are probably the worst food humanity has ever invented. Worse than Spam. Worse than a Hefty garbage bag filled with candy. Worse than the flaccid undercooked mystery meat you find in a Cincinnati airport lounge. And potentially even worse than a KitKat lasagna.

  We didn’t eat fresh food for weeks. Instead, we tore into MREs anytime we had five minutes to scarf down calories. Sometimes, when I was feeling masochistic, I’d look at the ingredient list on the back of the desert-drab package. The recipe title for menu 16 was “Rib Shaped Barbecue Flavor Pork Patty.” I could run a whole seminar breaking down those six words. What the hell is “rib shaped”? What word is “barbecue flavor” modifying, or is it its own food group? And pray tell, what the F is a “pork patty”?

  Once I’d torn into the main package, the smaller cardboard boxes inside were covered with the names of dire-sounding chemicals and preservatives that you would never find in a standard American kitchen. Dextrose, sodium tripolyphosphate, sodium diacetate, corn syrup solids, cellulose gum, malic acid, smoke flavor, maltodextrin, partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil, modified corn starch, tricalcium phosphate, and my favorite, flavorings. Some of that stuff was harmless, as I learned from a quick Google search, ingredients you’d find in the baking powder sitting innocuously in your pantry. But I couldn’t even figure out what half those words were, let alone pronounce them. And there I was, eating nothing but these strange-sounding concoctions every day, because like my mom always said, “Hunger is the world’s greatest chef.”

  Food was at the forefront of my mind, more than it had ever been before. We were out in the middle of the desert, sweating and bleeding and learning how to hump gear and shoot guns to serve our country. And what were they feeding us? Consumable Riskily Altered Provisions—CRAP. I understood why, too. Most MREs have to be highly processed so that the food survives the extended shelf life of active duty. You can’t exactly eat a warm spinach salad with herbed goat cheese and heirloom pears when you’re out fighting guys in Afghanistan.

  But what happens when the troops come home? The real problem is that it isn’t just marines and soldiers on active duty eating riskily altered foods. It’s millions of Americans—civilians living out their daily lives, many not even aware that the food they eat is killing them. I started rooting around for some hard statistics, and what I found shocked me. During the whole war on terror, 6,717 American servicemen and servicewomen died in combat or due to terrorist attacks. Meanwhile, in 2013 alone: 611,105 Americans died from heart disease; 584,881 died from cancer; 75,578 died from diabetes.1 According to a study in the American Journal of Public Health, obesity is associated with nearly one in five U.S. deaths.2 That’s one in five of your friends, family, and colleagues, dying every year from preventable causes—most of which are related to our riskily altered American diet.

  As pediatrician Dr. Harvey Karp said in the documentary Fed Up, “If a foreign nation was causing our children to become obese—that’s going to affect their health and hurt their happiness, cause them to be depressed, have poor self-esteem—if a foreign nation were doing that to our children, we’d probably go to war.”3

  During my time in the desert, I thought a lot about what it meant to eat riskily altered provisions versus real food. After a long mission, let alone a yearlong deployment, marines talked of “the golden loaf”—this referred to both the trans fat–infused corn bread snacks in MREs and the appearance of a bowel movement after exclusively eating the snacks for weeks on end. Neither was pleasant or natural.

  How had my eating choices affected my health and happiness in ways I had never admitted to myself or anyone else? I knew well enough the kind of riskily altered stuff my friends and I ate back in New York even when we weren’t in the middle of the desert with limited options for keeping food fresh and edible.

  After finishing my active duty and returning to New York to work on Wall Street, I was still a long way off from being an Evolved Eater. One night, I tried to cook for my wife, Nimmi, and nearly burned the house down. I had pawed through a truly terrifying number of processed foods in our own pantry. Why wasn’t I eating good food? Why wasn’t I cooking good food?

  If America had a disease when it came to eating, I had it, too. I was hooked on a FAD—the Flawed American Diet. I needed a palate cleanser. The question was, where to begin?

  Why Our Food Is Killing Us

  The United States is called a melting pot for a reason. As a relatively young country stewed together from the raw ingredients of many different immigrant traditions, each with its own depth of food culture, America has never had a unifying culinary tradition to guide us. My dad is a Turkish Jew who grew up eating hummus, baba ghanoush, and baklava in Istanbul. My mom’s family is of German stock—they’ve farmed their own homestead in South Dakota since the 1880s, and my grandma kept warm potatoes in her pockets when she walked to school across the frozen prairie (we’ll hear a lot more about this in chapter 4 when I pay a visit to the ol’ family farm). I married an Indian gal whose parents emigrated from Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, where they grew up eating dosa, idli sambar, and veda.

  My story is far from unique. Most Americans boast equally diverse legacies, hailing from a long line of rich cultural traditions. But while our culinary tradition affords us a tantalizing mélange of tastes, the lack of a consistent food culture has left us vulnerable to the modern-day food marketer.

  After being yelled at through TV ads, magazine spreads, and celebrity endorsements for the vast majority of our lives, how can we not be both schizophrenic and confused about how to even define what “good food” means? I sure didn’t know how to define it. Add to this every new diet fad—many of which are championed by a New York Times bestselling book, and several of which I’ve tried—and our bewilderment is justified.

  Why is it so hard to find the truth? Why is there so much confusion and conflicting advice? These were the questions I started to ask myself. I wanted cold facts and hard data on what to eat, how much of it, and why—and I couldn’t find anything conclusive. This baffled me. I needed to take a different approach.

  I went to my buddy Lance Martin, who had just received his Ph.D. in applied physics and bioengineering at Stanford. Lance lives and breathes this sort of stuff—big data, analytics—and I wanted to get his take on nutrition science. I knew he would have a well-formed opinion on the matter—and he did.

  Lance had taken Peter Thiel’s start-up class at Stanford. Peter Thiel is the billionaire cofounder of PayPal. He was the first outside investor in Facebook, and he has invested in and cofounded multiple other billion-dollar businesses. It is not outrageous to claim that he is one of the best venture capitalists in history.

  Lance told me about Peter’s talk about “secrets”—things that other people aren’t thinking about that might have big potential for a start-up. To paraphrase Peter: Most top scientists have gone into fields other than nutrition over the past couple of decades. There’s not really an incentive to study nutrition today, and nutrition science has been chronically underfunded. And now we have an obesity explosion. As Lance says, “Getting nutrition right isn’t quite low-hanging fruit, but there are reasons to think that the right people haven’t been incentivized to look at it hard enough.” Or more insidiously, that the wrong people have been incentivized to look the other way in the face of data that would otherwise help us solve our nutrition problems.

  “I think Peter’s right,” Lance said. “Having done a Ph.D. at Stanford, I’ve spent the last few years around a bunch of top scientists. There is plenty of interest in health data—molecular mechanisms, cancer, disease models, those sorts of issues. But very few pe
ople are really looking at wellness and nutrition. I have come across very few top research programs that offer a program in nutrition. The top scientific journals are rarely, if ever, publishing articles on it, and almost no one is funding these kinds of studies.”

  Why not? The answer to this question involves a much more nuanced answer that we’ll unpack in chapter 7. Lance has one of the best minds of anyone I know. He completed Peter Thiel’s class, where he was advised to pursue a “secret” no one was investigating—namely, nutrition. But did he jump into a research project or launch a start-up around the idea? Nope. Lance works on the data science team at Uber.

  Knowing that certainly didn’t help me, an average guy who just wanted to feel healthier, look better, and enjoy my food instead of constantly stressing about it. My own body was sending me confusing messages. I wanted to look good. I was a fitness junkie—I never wanted to go back to being the chubby kid who gets poked in the tummy at the pool, but I also wanted to stuff my face with greasy, sugary, delicious nomnoms, especially after a few drinks. I was finally becoming aware of the glaring disconnect between how we eat and who we aim to be—but I still didn’t have a clue what to do about it. And that is true for most Americans.

  We crave movie-star abs, but we choose processed carbs and sugary drinks over leafy greens. We want to feel and look great, so we hit the studio that offers the latest fitness craze after work—and then grab a greasy slice of pizza to sate our appetite after one drink at the bar. Guilty as charged; I’ve done all these things.

  Here in America, we have irrational expectations about eating. We have irrational expectations about a lot of things, actually, but eating is the one thing we all do every single day. Food is, in so many ways, at the heart of our lives—and when we fail at food, we fail miserably.