The Evolved Eater

by Nick Taranto

  As I returned to New York fresh out of the Marine Corps to start my new corporate job, I felt weighed down by reality. Tens of millions of Americans were struggling with obesity, shoveling in riskily altered provisions every day, and suffering significant consequences. But what if we took control over this and understood we had the power to change our circumstances? Or even if we were already eating okay, how could we make it easy to eat great?

  In America, stories of food failure are quickly becoming the “new normal.” More than one-third of U.S. adults are obese: a whopping 34.9 percent, or 78.6 million people.4 We pay a premium for obesity: The estimated annual medical cost of obesity in our country is over $190 billion—nearly 21 percent of annual medical spending in the United States.5

  But the real cost is not financial; it’s about losing the people we love. Reams of research linking obesity to poor health has been done over the last few decades, and the verdict is in: Obesity leads to heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes—three leading causes of preventable death.

  Emphasis here on preventable. But in order to prevent something from happening, you have to know how it happens in the first place. As an incoming high school freshman, I was six foot two and two hundred pounds. You know that awkward big kid lumbering through the halls of your high school who didn’t know what to do with his hands and feet? That was me. I played basketball and lacrosse, but the football coaches were always trying to recruit me. My mom was scared I’d get a concussion and wouldn’t let me play—she has always been ahead of the curve.

  I was made fun of in elementary and middle school because of my weight. I weighed the same in seventh grade as I did in twelfth, but once my height shot up and I leaned out, the teasing stopped. But this seminal time of being chubby and the center of many fat jokes had a profound impact on me. Even today as a thirty-two-year-old who can deadlift five hundred pounds and run three miles in under eighteen minutes with single-digit body fat, I still harbor an internal echo of my adolescent overweight self.

  For the more than seventy-eight million obese Americans—and the inflammation, the arthritis, the high blood pressure, the diabetes that comes with obesity—feeling crummy is a given. When you’re heavy, it’s hard to exercise, which fosters a vicious cycle. The Lancet, one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals, recently reported that physical inactivity has now surpassed smoking as a leading cause of death. The study estimates that 6 percent of heart disease, 7 percent of type 2 diabetes, and 10 percent of colon and breast cancers are linked to a lack of activity.6

  Always interested in human psychology, I started thinking about food in terms of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Abraham Maslow was a psychologist who studied positive human qualities and the lives of world-class humans. In 1954, Maslow created the hierarchy of needs and expressed his theories in his book Motivation and Personality. As you can see in the rendering below, ahead of even safety and security, food forms the base of the pyramid. Food is the most fundamental need we have as humans.

  If you don’t figure out food, hardly anything else matters—not family, friends, self-esteem, confidence, creativity, or self-actualization. That’s because without a strong food foundation, it is impossible to experience the emotions, ambitions, and relationships that make life worth living.

  You Get What You Pay For

  The fast-food phenomenon is a major culprit in perpetuating the FAD. As modern-day Americans, we want everything in our lives to be fast, from our transportation to our Wi-Fi connections. Unfortunately, this preference has spilled over into our food.

  Fast food is all about supersized portions and low prices. Like so much else in life, with food, you truly get what you pay for. Fast food chains are able to sell hamburgers for under a dollar by stripping out quality. And low-quality food literally kills us. There’s ample evidence that frequent fast-food consumption contributes to overeating and weight gain. One study followed three thousand young adults for a period of thirteen years, ultimately finding that those who had higher fast-food-intake levels at the beginning weighed an average of thirteen pounds more than their non-fast-food-eating counterparts by the end.7

  There are so many problems and there is so much work to be done that it’s easy to get overwhelmed. But unlike many of my predecessors who wrote great books that condemned the industrial food complex, in this book, and in my life in general, I try to be both an optimist and a doer.

  Let’s be honest—we have come a long way already. Many elements of our twenty-first-century food world are much better than they were twenty, fifteen, or even five years ago.

  Food has taken center stage. The celebrity chef movement has brought cooking into millions of people’s lives through various avenues ranging from “gourmet airplane food” to network TV competitions. What appears on the menu in Williamsburg quickly makes its way to the gastropub in Dallas and eventually influences everyday food culture. And cooking, while still hard to fit into our hurried lives, is becoming viewed less as a chore and more as a joy. As chef Dan Barber writes, “After Wolfgang Puck reimagined pizza in the 1980s at his fine-dining restaurant Spago, in Los Angeles—smoked salmon instead of tomatoes; crème fraîche instead of cheese—gourmet pizza spread to every corner of America, eventually culminating in the supermarket frozen food aisle. We now have the power to quickly popularize certain products and ingredients—in some cases, as with certain fish, to the point of commercial extinction—and increasingly we do, with dizzying speed and effect. But we also possess the potential to get people to rethink their eating habits.”8

  Activist chefs like Dan Barber have helped highlight the perils of the Flawed American Diet. They have exposed the connections between how we eat and our heavy environmental, social, and health footprint. The poet, farmer, and environmental activist Wendell Berry wrote that we understand that eating “is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.”9

  Folks like Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman, Gary Taubes, Marion Nestle, and Dan Barber have helped to elevate the American food conversation. “Farm to table” has become so widely known and popular that it is satirized to the point of absurdity, where chickens have names and wear clothes.

  Americans have more “non-conventional” food options than ever before (farmers’ markets, organic food, farm-to-table restaurants) and more information about how to cook (TV and app-based cooking shows, an infinite number of online recipes). In 1994 there were only 1,755 farmers’ markets in the United States. Today there are over 8,000.10

  Today food is safer, cheaper, and more convenient than at any prior point in human history. Through their construction of a processed food–centric supply chain, Big Food has, for better or worse, largely solved issues of food scarcity and food safety in the United States and, increasingly, around the world. Let’s acknowledge the monumental achievement of being able to grow, process, manufacture, package, store, and distribute enough shelf-stable calories to feed billions of people. This is a massive win for humanity and the twentieth-century efforts to industrialize food and should be recognized as such.

  But you won’t find executives and directors popping celebratory bottles of champagne in Big Food boardrooms. On the contrary, they have an enormous problem on their hands: Consumers are increasingly looking for and buying alternatives to the riskily altered provisions that Big Food exclusively promoted for so long. Packaged-food sales in the United States are falling at a rate of 1 percent a year, which doesn’t seem like very much, until you compare it to the fact that Plated has been achieving a triple-digit growth rate since we started. And we are not alone.

  My buddy Irving Fain is a former social media entrepreneur whose next business is Bowery Farming, a network of hydroponic, indoor, vertical farms. His first “farm” is located in a refurbished warehouse fifteen minutes from where I live. His prototype start-up farm is capable of growing more crops on less land with 5 percent of the water consumption of a typical traditional f
arm. His head of operations spent a decade building automation technology for the car industry in Detroit, and the first person he hired was a computer vision expert in order to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to optimize everything from water consumption to nutrient distribution to crop yield and packaging. Bowery Farming has already received millions of dollars in venture capital from some of the best early-stage investors in the world.

  In chapter 4, we will pay a visit to my family’s commodity corn farm in South Dakota. We will see the contrast between traditional farming and where the future of farming needs to go if we are going to feed the planet. As Irving says, “One of the things you realize when you dig into traditional agriculture is that there is a tremendous amount of eyeballing and knowledge transfer from generation to generation in families. And that system exists because prior to just a few years ago, there was no way to collect, analyze, or aggregate large amounts of information with regards to farming. Technology is changing that.” Fortunately, folks like Irving are already working hard for a brighter, healthier, more sustainable future.

  Healthier, fresher, and more delicious food is slowly making its way to more and more retailers and consumers. Annual sales of organic food are increasing by double digits every year. And for the first time, in 2014, sales topped $100 billion for the “specialty food industry”—what many folks might refer to as “hipster kibble.” Eighty-two percent of those sales were made in mainstream stores—places like Safeway and Albertsons. The Jerry Garcia–reminiscent products like quinoa and kale chips that used to reside only in the Phish T-shirt–operated co-op or the Birkenstock-bedecked local health food store are increasingly being bought and sold in places where Big Food once had no competition.11

  This is all fantastic news for humankind, but let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that our work as Evolved Eaters is done. We are living through a curious paradox: Though 79 percent of Americans say they enjoy cooking, two-thirds of calories are consumed away from home. And calories consumed away from home tend to be of the riskily altered variety.

  Why is this the case? The answer to this inconsistency involves a history lesson that starts three million years ago.

  2

  Eating Evolution, Part 1: Cooking Made Us Human

  EVOLUTION

  DEFINITION:

  noun

  1. the process by which different kinds of living organisms are thought to have developed and diversified from earlier forms during the history of the earth.

  2. the gradual development of something, especially from a simple to a more complex form.

  All right, bear with me for a minute. I’m about to jump up on the soapbox:

  I believe that evolution is the greatest single force in the universe and that it is awesome. To oversimplify things, as humans, we are all just vehicles for transporting evolution further down the road. Evolution affects the changes of everything from all species to the entire solar system. It is awesome because evolution is the process that leads to improvement and to building a better future. The things, creatures, and rituals that fail to make it to the future are those that don’t work because they are at odds with the laws of the universe and they impede evolution. The desire to evolve is humanity’s most pervasive driving force, and it’s why we’re all here today.

  Okay, let me get off my soapbox now.

  Why start this chapter off with a tirade on something that almost everyone takes for granted? Because wrapping your head around how quickly and dramatically we humans evolved into our current eating and living habits is essential to understanding how food and dinner came to fail us.

  Redefining History

  Most of us walk around and have a very tightly defined construct of what “history” means. We have work history, which focuses on the task list today, the deliverables due at the end of the quarter, annual reports, the holiday party—at the extreme, perhaps a decade or two of memory and future aspirations. We have national history. Here in the United States, this goes back to 1776. And we have family history, which spans generations and centuries—some folks can chart back their genealogy over a millennium.

  But very few of us walk around thinking about history in terms of tens or hundreds of thousands or millions of years. When I was living in Indonesia, I had a buddy who was a Ph.D. in geology. He walked around with a rock hammer. As we scaled volcanoes on Java or explored jungles in Sumatra, he would crack open small boulders and tell me the history of the area—on the scale of millions and billions of years. He completely changed how I thought about myself relative to the world and the universe.

  One hundred thousand years ago, Homo sapiens (a.k.a. “humans”) were just another type of animal slugging it out for survival on the African savannah. Over the following one hundred millennia, we transformed ourselves into the planetary rulers.

  This incredible evolutionary tale is the direct consequence of cooking.

  Despite their big brains and sharp stone tools, early humans lived for millions of years in constant fear of predators. They rarely hunted large animals and instead subsisted mainly by gathering plants, scooping up insects, stalking small animals, and eating the rotten flesh left behind by other more powerful carnivores.1

  This is a key to understanding our history, psychology, and evolution to the modern Flawed American Diet. For millions of years, early humans hunted smaller creatures and gathered what they could, all the while being hunted by larger predators. It was only half a million years ago that several species of man began to hunt large game on a regular basis. Humans only rose to the top of the food chain one hundred thousand years ago.

  In the grand scheme of evolutionary history, one hundred thousand years is the equivalent of the blink of a mastodon’s eye. My rock hammer–wielding buddy in Sumatra scoffs at one hundred millennia as if it were preschool graduation. However, that stunningly quick leap to the top of the food chain has had enormous consequences. Other alpha animals like lions and sharks evolved slowly over millions of years. This slower development meant that as sharks became deadlier, fish evolved to swim faster. This balanced system never emerged for humans. We evolved to dominate so quickly that both the world and we ourselves didn’t have time to adjust.

  The ability to control and use fire was the original break point that allowed humans to evolve at hyperspeed. Fire was the first significant differentiator between man and the other animals. By a quarter-million years ago, the forefathers of humans were using fire on a daily basis.2 Fire was a dependable source of light and warmth, and a deadly weapon against prowling predators. Humans eventually started deliberately burning large swathes of land—a farming practice that is still used around the world today. A controlled burn can turn dense, inhospitable forests into more easily managed terrain full of edible life. The earliest “start-up founders” sifted through the smoking remains of forests, harvested “barbecued” animals, plants, and worms, and brought back the spoils for their tribes.3

  The most important thing fire did was allow us to control the process of cooking. Richard Wrangham is a Harvard University primatologist who studies wild chimpanzees in Africa. Wrangham knew that cooking is one of the relatively few uniquely human abilities. He also knew that our habit of predigesting our food by heating it allows us to spend less energy on digestion. In the late 1990s, he realized that cooking is not merely the basis of culinary culture; it gave our ancestors a massive evolutionary advantage. “With cooking, we see major adaptive changes,” says Wrangham. He argues that cooking paved the way for the dramatic expansion of the human brain and eventually fueled cerebral accomplishments like cave painting, writing, and inventing the Internet.4

  Foods that humans cannot digest in their natural forms—such as wheat, rice, and potatoes—became staples of our diet, thanks to cooking. Cooking also killed germs and parasites and made it much easier for humans to chew and digest perennial classics like scavenged meat and insects. “What all these adaptations are about is increasing the bang for the buck nut
ritionally,” says William Leonard, a biological anthropologist at Northwestern University.5

  This all leads to what Wrangham calls “the Cooking Hypothesis.” Where chimpanzees spend more than five hours a day chewing raw food, a single hour or less is enough for people eating cooked food. If we ate only raw, unprocessed food, humans would need to eat for 9.3 hours per day in order to fuel our brains, which use about twice as much resting energy by percentage as other primates.6

  The advent of cooking enabled humans to eat more kinds of food, to devote less time to eating, and to make do with smaller teeth and shorter intestines. Wrangham believes that there is a direct link between the advent of cooking, the shortening of the human intestinal tract, and the growth of the human brain. Since long intestines and large brains are both massive energy consumers, it’s hard to have both. By shortening the intestines and decreasing their energy consumption, cooking opened the way to the oversized brains of modern humans.7 From that point forward, humanity and the world more broadly would never be the same.

  From Forager to Farmer

  Our modern lives are a direct consequence of how humans evolved and innovated upon the process of cooking and eating. In the grand scheme of history and human evolution, it is not that long ago that we were all hunter-gatherers, foraging wherever we could find the most food to keep us alive. And our genes passed on to the next generation. The last ten thousand years, during which almost all humans lived as farmers, are a small fraction of the millions of years during which our ancestors hunted and gathered.

  Evolutionary psychologists argue that many of our modern social and psychological characteristics were shaped during this long preagricultural era. Even today, our brains and minds are adapted to a life of hunting and gathering. How we cook and eat are the result of the way our hunter-gatherer minds interact with our current postindustrial world. Our modern society gives us more material resources and longer lives than those enjoyed by any previous generation, but it often makes us feel alienated, depressed, and pressured. To understand why, we need to explore the world of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.