The Evolved Eater
Page 8
We have to determine what processed really means when we’re talking about processed food. There is a significant difference between a food being riskily altered and a food being processed. Keep in mind that as a cook, you’re doing processing yourself—think about using a food processor. Is that dangerous and bad for your health and waistline? We get caught up and confused by the word processed without realizing what it truly means.
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The Spectrum of CRAP (Consumable Riskily Altered Provisions): Processed food falls on a spectrum from minimally to heavily processed. Again, the operative words are “riskily altered.”
• Minimally processed and not riskily altered foods—such as bagged spinach, cut vegetables, and roasted nuts—are often simply preprepped for convenience.
• Foods processed at their peak to lock in nutritional quality and freshness include canned beans, tomatoes, frozen fruit and vegetables, and canned tuna.
• Light CRAP: Foods made with riskily altered ingredients added for flavor and texture (sweeteners, spices, oils, colors, and preservatives) include jarred pasta sauce, salad dressing, yogurt, and cake mixes.
• CRAP: Ready-to-eat foods—such as potato chips, granola, and deli meat—are more heavily processed.
• Heavy CRAP: The most heavily processed foods often are shelf-stable or premade meals, including MREs, frozen pizza, and microwaveable dinners.
I define Consumable Riskily Altered Provisions as foods that have been chemically processed and made solely or mainly from refined ingredients and artificial substances. Obviously, most of the food we eat is processed in some way—oranges are picked from trees, butter is churned, fish is caught. But there’s a massive difference between mechanical and chemical processing. If it’s a single ingredient with no added chemicals, then it’s okay if it has been ground up and put in a jar—it’s real food. If the ingredients or the entire meal have been chemically enhanced or processed, then it has been riskily altered.
It’s worth noting here that I am not an ideologue or a purist. I love Kettle Brand jalapeño potato chips. I love Samoa Girl Scout cookies. And I love Snickers. I’m talking, like, really love here, man.
But I know what I’m getting into. And it is totally okay to indulge, as indulgence allows us to live fully—that’s why we sell desserts at Plated. But no one should be eating riskily altered foods multiple times per day, every day of the week—and that’s what Big Food wants us to do.
Cost and Craving
“The transition of food to being an industrial product really has been a fundamental problem,” says Walter Willett, the chair of Harvard’s Department of Nutrition. “First, the actual processing has stripped away the nutritional value of the food. Most of the grains have been converted to starches. We have sugar in concentrated form, and many of the fats have been concentrated and then, worst of all, hydrogenated, which creates trans-fatty acids with very adverse effects on health.”12
David Cutler from Harvard and Julia Wolfson from Johns Hopkins have done extensive research correlating rates of cooking and rates of obesity. They found that as the amount of time we spend cooking goes down, the rate of obesity goes up. Put differently, as the time-cost of food goes down, or as you can eat food without putting time into gathering and preparing it, you eat more of it.
As we saw in chapter 1, as humans, we have an innate, hardwired desire to cook. However, the CRAP Trap pushes us away from our better instincts.
What’s driving the increase in obesity, especially among children? Simple answer: The ubiquity of inexpensive, mouthwatering, supersized, energy-dense riskily altered foods.
We are eating unhealthy, high-labor, high–time consumption foods that are delivered cheaply and conveniently. Think about potato chips. If you were to make your own potato chips from scratch, you would have to wash, peel, fry, and air-dry potatoes before you could even get to the seasoning and noshing. But that’s not what happens today. Instead, you pop open the bag, and five hundred calories later, you’re sitting on the couch, crying salty chip tears while watching the most recent Ryan Gosling movie on Netflix.13
My philosophy is this: You can eat whatever you want, but it should be real and fresh whenever possible.
Probably the biggest problem with cooking is that if you have a limited amount of money and you go into the supermarket, you will find yourself gravitating to the middle aisles, where all the processed food is located, and away from the produce section, which tends to be on the perimeter of the store. And the reason for this is that over the last half century, produce has gotten a lot more expensive and processed food has not.
The average price of soda since 1985 is down 25 percent. The average price of fresh fruits and veggies over the same period is up 40 percent.14 And that coincides one for one with the obesity and diabetes epidemics. If you are looking to get as many calories as you can for one dollar, your best bet is processed food. However, that’s not saying you’re getting the most nutrition for your dollar. Quite the opposite.
Big Food’s business model optimizes for two things: cost and craving.
To make a new chip guaranteed to create a craving requires calculus and advanced mapping tools. The objective is to find what Big Food calls the “bliss point,” or the precise amount of processing that triggers an opiate-like response from consumers. The bliss point is then forced onto a cost curve, where different ingredient inputs are traded in order to obtain the highest possible bliss for the lowest possible cost. It bears repeating once again:
The people who run the Big Food companies are not evil. They are just boxed into a business model and production system that no longer works.
Big Food’s Hot for Mom
Food innovations in the 1950s and ’60s were sold as the solution to once and for all ending kitchen drudgery. “Overworked housewives can relax until dinnertime,” read one TV dinner advertisement. “Equally long-suffering husbands can be saved from the horrors of much home cooking. Now even Mother can learn what’s going on in the outside world. She doesn’t even have to don an apron.”15
The food companies targeted busy housewives, building up the idea that life at home was some horrible existence between solitary indentured servitude and a constant state of panic. You can see the drumbeat across all the food advertising of the period. The mantra was save time, savor the convenience, and “This is better than what you can make yourself at home.”
In the 1960s and ’70s, as women were working in greater numbers, a new conversation started between men and women. It was clear that there needed to be a new division of labor in the household—women couldn’t work, and take care of the kids, and clean the house, and do the shopping and cooking. There were public and private fights about this, and some domestic modifications began to happen. But before American society could complete that renegotiation, Big Food stepped forward and said, “Stop the fussing and fighting! We’ve got your back! We’ll do the cooking for you.”
You see this vividly in an advertising campaign that Kentucky Fried Chicken launched in the 1970s. It was a brilliant move on the part of KFC to align corporate profit–driven interests with the homemaker aspirations of working women and the masculine hunter-type, eat-or-be-eaten pressure on men to solve the perennial dinner dilemma.
As Kentucky Fried Chicken sales began to skyrocket, more and more food companies moved toward food processing as a means to drive both top- and bottom-line numbers while delivering solutions for millions of confused and time-starved moms.
And that ushered in the situation that we find ourselves in now, where Big Food deliberately discredits cooking as an everyday practice and art. Food marketers bend over backward to convince us that cooking is really hard, really time-consuming, and really messy and that we’d all be much better off using convenient processed shortcuts.
Fast food and other convenient foods may have reduced household chores, but they also diminished the variety and nutritional content of the food Americans ate. This was the CRAP Trap baring
its ugly fangs. Most of my parents’ generation grew up never eating a fresh vegetable except the occasional broccoli or iceberg lettuce salad. Veggies could go play with the Commies—blue-blooded Americans wanted to eat meat out of a can.
Meat, Meat, Meat
America of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s was all about meat. We had won the Second World War, we were the most powerful country in the world, and we had enough wealth and stability to eat meat three meals a day for the first time in human history.
What could be easier, “healthier,” and more American for your family than bacon for breakfast, ham for lunch, and steak for dinner?
By the 1970s, this resulted in unnatural cattle-raising practices. Rather than spending their lives eating grass, for which their stomachs were designed, cows were forced to eat the artificially cheaper (due to subsidies) soy and corn. Ruminants have trouble digesting those grains, and as farms got larger and space more constrained, the cows became increasingly sicker and sicker. So new drugs were invented and deployed to keep the herd healthy. Well, they kept them alive, but healthy is another story. Today, 80 percent of antibiotics in the United States are not administered to people but to animals.16
And with the plethora of government subsidies and the resulting rise of industrial farming, a cycle of dietary and planetary destruction began. Meat consumption increased fivefold.17
More subsidies led to cheaper production costs, which led to less expensive food, which created what is today the fast-food industry.
Home cooking remained the norm for a while, but as more and more women entered the workforce, there were fewer meals made from scratch. Any and all premade meats, salads, soups, potatoes, and more could be bought at any grocery store or fast-food drive-through. In the process, an entire generation of women (and men) didn’t learn how to prepare or appreciate real, fresh food.
Just like any other manufacturing process, food was now being raised and assembled without deeper connection or emotional thought. As a consequence, we became disconnected from the emotion of a good home-cooked meal.
Sadly, it was at this time that the prototypical family dinner began its long slide. This was the peak of process-enriched and preservative-enhanced food, which contained as many soy and corn products as could be packed into it.
The Big Food business model depends on getting the cheapest possible raw ingredients and making them as attractive as cost effectively possible. When you let Big Food cook your food, it cooks differently from the way normal people do. You can tell just by reading the ingredient label. You don’t have monoglycerides and diglycerides in your pantry. You don’t have high-fructose corn syrup in your pantry.
The infamous chicken nugget is a great example. Tens of millions of chickens are raised and fattened in feedlots that stretch for dozens of miles, where they are force-fed corn. Their meat is ground up and mixed with more corn products and preservatives to help it all stick together and have good mouthfeel. The nuggets are then pre-fried in an industrial corn oil bath so that all you, the “chef,” have to do at home is stick those bad boys in the microwave. But yet again, the CRAP Trap has its costs.
By the 1980s, fresh food was in such a sad state that the high fat and salt contents of foods like chicken nuggets and Spam made these fake foods more appealing than the bland dishes that people had previously cooked at home, like broccoli. Millions of women were working and had less time available, and fresh food simply wasn’t viewed as important enough for men to change their habits and share the burden.
One Giant Leap Forward, One Evolutionary Step Back
Women entering the workforce was a massive leap forward for humanity, but the way Big Food enabled our adaptation to this change from a caloric consumption perspective was a step backward in human evolution. For many time-strapped families, instead of a home-cooked nutritious meal, dinner became pizza delivery, microwave nuggets, or fast food at the drive-through. During the years when both of my parents were working full-time with seven kids to feed, we were definitely not eating home-cooked meals from scratch many weeknights.
If you are a student of American history or food, none of this should be revelatory or revolutionary. But why should it matter?
THE ENVIRONMENT
As food-activist chef Dan Barber wrote, “The warnings are clear: because we eat in a way that undermines … and abuses natural resources (to say nothing of the economic and social implications), the conventional food system cannot be sustained.”18
But leading with an environmental argument is tough. We rarely see and feel the environmental consequences of our actions soon enough to change our behaviors.
OUR HEALTH AND HAPPINESS
Our waistlines, blood biomarkers, and emotional well-being, on the other hand, we can measure and feel every day, minute by minute. Our health and happiness are perhaps the most direct and unfortunate casualties of the CRAP Trap.
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Why is it impossible for the incumbent food companies to lead the way on change? I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was taken aback to speak with current and former employees from Big Food, who described how incredibly averse the CPG giants are to taking risks. Geoff Bible, the former CEO at Philip Morris, described what it would take for a Kraft brand manager about come up with a “better for you” peanut butter.
Essentially, the employee would have to put his or her career on the line to bring a healthier product to market because the risk of failure is so high. Despite platitudes about innovation, Big Food first and foremost needs to preserve profits.
So instead they resort to uninspiring tweaks (think omega-3-infused peanut butter) and line extensions (peanut butter and jelly in the same jar!), which are a far cry from invention and imagining new ways for people to eat better, even at Nestlé with their 350 Ph.D. food scientists.
The Big Food business model that unconsciously evolved over the course of the twenty-first century focuses on convenience and cost to the exclusion of connection, experience, health, and sustainability. We started Plated because we knew there had to be a better way.
Our Fourth Core Belief is: Food, and the experiences of choosing it, cooking it, and sharing it, are to be celebrated, and thoughtful design in all things is an essential part of that celebration. While our business model is technology-driven, we deploy innovation in support of the fundamentally human experience of cooking and sharing food. Over the following chapters, we will see what happens when food production is cleaved away from the experience of preparing and sharing.
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Picture of an Evolved Eater
Leslie Fiet, Salt Lake City, Utah
I’m a typical product of someone born in 1970. I’m an entrepreneur, and as a single mother, I found myself living on welfare in dead-end jobs at the age of twenty-two after a very bad marriage. I looked at myself in my blue polyester uniform working at the grocery store, and I said, “This is not me.” I kicked myself in the butt.
In 2007, I opened Utah’s first cupcake shop. I wanted to bake from scratch since so much of what we eat is processed crap. The way we eat forces people to go on diets, to make bad food choices. I called my business Mini’s Cupcakes because the cupcakes are smaller, more of a European model. I was so appalled by the McDonald’s “supersize me” phase that I wanted to do something to fight it.
And that’s part of why we love Plated. Before Plated, dinner was easy and fast, but without thought, we’d whip something up on the stove or in the microwave like spaghetti, then my kids were off to the basement to watch TV. We never had dinner together. The only time we sat down together was Sunday.
We have two kids at home, and I work from 6:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. I wanted dinner not to be painful. I wanted great dinner, and I didn’t want to have to think about it. I hated the waste, and I hate, hate, hate going to the grocery store. I could never find that one stupid ingredient I needed, like fish sauce, then I’d end up buying a whole bottle when all I needed was a teaspoon. Then I’d find that bottle four m
onths later, and I’d end up throwing the whole thing away—I hate that!
Plated has opened up a whole new dinner experience for us. For a meal of Plated quality, we’re not going to waste that experience sitting in front of the television. We eat more slowly now, because we’re talking together over dinner. We turn off the TV, the kids set the dinner table, they ask what’s for dinner, they help out, even my husband, who has no idea how to cook. I mean, he thinks cooking is ordering pizza, but even he has made a dozen meals by this point. So we all cook together, then we just sit and eat and talk. I’m learning things about my family that I never knew before, that I never had time to learn before. Unless you truly sit and ask the humdrum questions about what happened during the day, you don’t get close to your kids. We never would have gotten this close to our kids without Plated.
I ask myself, “Why is everybody on some kind of diet? Why is everyone overweight? Why is everyone fat?” We are not historically an obese society, but we are today, and I believe that is because we are not sitting down to share dinner together. I believe that if more people sat down to eat together over dinner, we’d all be healthier and happier.
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Second Course
The Plated Mission: Why a New Form of Food Production and Distribution Is Necessary If We Are Going to Reconnect with Our Food
4
“City Boy Goes Country”—Farming and Food Production
One-liner: The way food is grown, produced, and manufactured in the United States is making us sick. It doesn’t need to be this way.