by Nick Taranto
The Stripping of Nutrition and Joy
There are two main reasons why chemically processed foods are bad for us. We eat food because it gives us joy and it gives us nutrition. But when food is hyperprocessed, both the joy and the nutrition are stripped out.
What’s left over is food in name only. From both a production and nutrient perspective, our ancestors wouldn’t recognize the ingredients or the processes required to make riskily altered provisions. It is clean, it is easy, it is stable—but CRAP is dead food, and as any good zombie aficionado can appreciate, hanging out with the dead can be very bad for you.
Extreme heating and cooling processes that often involve chemical baths are required in order to kill bacteria and other active microorganisms. This is undeniably helpful from a consistency, stability, and food-safety perspective, but from a nutrition and joy perspective, it’s like high school English censorship—all the fun and interesting parts of the story have been removed. The refining of grains for white breads removes the husk, which stores most of the valuable nutrients like protein, fiber, iron, and magnesium. These processes destroy both water-soluble micronutrients and vitamins like vitamin B and C and hosts of good bacteria.
As we are still in the predawn equivalent of gut microbiome research, we don’t yet fully understand the role and significance of microbes in our diet and on our health and psychology, but it may be possible to cultivate a healthier community of bacteria on and inside us by eating more “dirty foods”—foods that haven’t been processed literally to death.
It comes down to this: Riskily altered food is missing nutrient density. If you’re primarily eating riskily altered food, then you’re not getting the nutrients that your body needs to survive and thrive. So either you’re not getting these nutrients, which is bad for your general health, or you need to eat many more calories in order to get them, and you overconsume and get fat. On the other hand, if you’re consuming “nutrient dense” foods (fresh foods that aren’t processed), then you can get all the nutrients you need with many fewer calories.
Ultimately, as shelf stability is enhanced, nutrients are removed, and so are the flavors. In order to replace those missing flavors, various forms of low-nutrient fillers are added back.
Flavors and Fillers: The Sweet, the Fat, and the Ugly
The two most potent riskily altered provisions in the Big Food arsenal are sweeteners and fat. However, the Big Food players themselves are stuck in the CRAP Trap. As Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist Michael Moss reports, “It had taken me three and a half years of prying into the food industry’s operations to come to terms with the full range of institutional forces that compel even the best companies to churn out foods that undermine a healthy diet.” Despite their best efforts, Big Food’s unrelenting need to create the most taste for the lowest possible cost has pulled it back again and again to these two deeply addictive bullets.5
The Sweet
The World Health Organization has recommended that people limit their consumption of added sugars to 10 percent of calories, but experts say that typical consumption of empty calories in the United States is nearly twice that level. How did sweeteners become such an omnipresent part of the way America eats?6
There are special receptors for sweetness in every one of the mouth’s ten thousand taste buds, and they are all hooked up, one way or another, to the parts of the brain known as the pleasure zones, where we get rewarded for stoking our bodies with energy. Scientists are now finding taste receptors that light up for sugar all the way down our esophagus to our stomach and pancreas, and they appear to be intricately tied to our appetites.7
Big Food deploys armies of scientists who specialize in the senses, and the companies use their knowledge to put sweeteners to work for them in countless ways. Sugar not only makes the taste of otherwise bland food and drink irresistible; the industry has learned that it can also be used to pull off a string of manufacturing miracles, from fish sticks that fry up bigger and browner to yogurt with a six-month shelf life. All of this has made sweeteners a go-to ingredient in processed foods. On average, as Americans, we consume seventy-one pounds of caloric sweeteners each year. That’s twenty-two teaspoons of sweet per person per day.8
As a man much wiser than I once said, and I paraphrase, “It’s sort of like if you drink alcohol really fast, you get drunk really fast.” This is what happens when we rapidly overconsume refined sweeteners. We are programmed to like highly refined sweets because they bring us immediate pleasure. Again, think back to our hunter-gatherer ancestors stumbling across a tree bulging with fruit in the jungle. When you are starving and uncertain when and where your next meal will come, it makes sense to gorge on high-calorie sources of nutrition when they are available. When your body is adapted to operating in a low-sugar environment, these excess calories get converted into adipose tissue that can be called upon for energy when the next lion attacks.
But in the modern age of overabundance and overconsumption, obviously there are consequences to bingeing. When you break down sugar quickly, your body gets flooded with more glucose than it can handle, which triggers an insulin response to suck the sugar out of the bloodstream, which leads to an eventual glucose crash, which leads to the body craving more sugar. It is a vicious cycle.
As a consequence, the overconsumption of sugar has increasingly been tied to the obesity epidemic. Food processing worked miracles in the United States starting after World War II, enabling Big Food to supply hundreds of millions of people with unprecedented levels of calories—starvation was heading the way of the dodo.
Success bred success, and Big Food exported its low-cost, high-calorie taste paradigm around the world. Overeating is now a global issue. In China, for the first time in history, the overnourished now outnumber the malnourished. In France, where obesity has climbed from 8.5 percent to 14.5 percent since 1997, Nestlé has been enjoying great success in selling the Jenny Craig weight-loss program to the same French folk who once sneered at Americans’ proclivity to jump from one diet fad to another. Mexico’s obesity rate has tripled in the past three decades, leading to worries that it now has the fattest kids in the world.9
The United States, however, remains the most obese country in human history. And where the rates of obesity appear to be reaching a plateau among adults at 35 percent, they are still climbing among the group that is the most vulnerable to the food industry’s products: children. The most recent data shows that obesity among kids aged six to eleven jumped from 15 to 20 percent.
Sugar not only sweetens, it also helps to reduce costs. By replacing more expensive (and nutritious) ingredients like tomatoes in ketchup, sweeteners add bulk, texture, and allure while improving the bottom line. This is a win-win for Big Food, but a big fat doughnut for our health and, ultimately, our happiness as consumers.
The Fat
Fat is not part of our official roster of primary tastes, which currently consists of just five members: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and a more recent addition known as umami, which is a meaty, savory taste derived from an amino acid called glutamate. As a consequence, sometimes it is hard to determine if fat has been added to foods at all.
Because of fat’s remarkable powers, Big Food relies on it like no other component. Fat turns sad chips into crunchy marvels, parched breads into silky loaves, drab meat into savory lunch. Like sugar, some types of fat furnish processed foods with one of their most fundamental requirements: the capacity to sit on the grocery store shelf for months or years at a time. Fat also gives cookies more bulk and a firmer texture. It substitutes for water in lending tenderness and mouthfeel to crackers. It lessens the rubbery texture in hot dogs, deepens their color, keeps them from sticking to the grill, and, as an added bonus, saves Big Food money, since the fattier trimmings of meat they use in making hot dogs cost less to buy than the leaner cuts.10
Fat has a final trait, however, that makes it even more essential than sugar in processed foods. The fat bullet doesn’t blast a
way at our mouths like sweet does; it’s more CIA than Marine Corps infantry. As Michael Moss wrote, “If sugar is the methamphetamine of processed food ingredients, with its high-speed, blunt assault on our brains, then fat is the opiate, a smooth operator whose effects are less obvious but no less powerful.”11
The increased prevalence of soybean oil usage and consumption is a prime example of this. The most commonly consumed vegetable oil in the United States is soybean oil. Most people don’t realize they’re eating soybean oil at all, let alone hundreds of calories per day from the second–most heavily subsidized American crop (behind corn). Most of these surreptitious calories come from riskily altered foods, which often have soybean oil added to them because it is cheap and adds good texture and mouthfeel.
Soybean oil consumption increased over a thousandfold over the course of the twentieth century. We talk about olive oil all the time, but the chart above captures the full fat story. At the end of the twentieth century, soybean oil accounted for 7 percent of all calories consumed in the United States. It’s pretty insane for any food to account for that high of a percentage of caloric consumption.12
Reducing the amount of fat in its products is not easy for Big Food. They can’t allow this to diminish the taste or texture, or they will lose sales. Nor can they let a reduction in fat cause their production costs to rise too high, or they will lose profits.
The most important variable is how much more money customers are willing to spend for a better product. For example, fiddling with the fat used for frying has serious implications for the bottom line of food manufacturers. It’s relatively easy to cut down on the fat in fried foods. All you have to do is turn up the temperature of the oil being used for frying. But the higher the temperature, the less often the oil can be reused before going bad, which would send the food manufacturers running back to oil dealers more often for fresh oil.
Sometimes Big Food can reduce the fat content without causing a significant drop in the product’s allure.13 With other products, adding more sugar might be needed to maintain the allure. On the other hand, as reported, “these same manufacturers could crank up the fat content as high as they wanted, and unless people studied the nutrition label carefully, the fat would get eaten in bliss without setting off any alarms in the body’s system that help regulate our weight by telling us we are eating too much.”14
Why Can’t Big Food Kick Its Bad Habit?
The Big Food cardinal rule is that nutritional improvements can’t come at the cost of less mouthfeel, flavor, and general appeal. These are the factors that keep consumers coming back, and if these factors are diminished, profits take a beating. Again, the folks that run the biggest food companies are not evil—they are just caught in a trap of their own making, where they can’t maintain their profitability and change their products fast enough. Big Food’s riskily altered offerings are increasingly out of sync with what consumers want, but profits must be preserved ahead of meaningful product improvements. The fundamental problem is that Big Food built a business model and food system that no longer works. And that is why Plated is building a new and better system for delivering fresh food from the ground up.
More and more consumers have come to focus on fat and sweeteners, whether out of concern for obesity and heart disease or simply a desire to eat food that is less processed and more real. Elected officials, from President Obama to New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, have also elevated their criticism of riskily altered foods. The response from Big Food has been to give consumers more of a choice by turning out “healthier” versions of their traditional products. The further they go down this path, however, the harder they bump up against two stark realities of the industrial food model they created.
Profits Don’t Need to Come at the Expense of Sustainability and Transparency
Look, I get it. At Plated, we run a for-profit company, and we’re proud of it. A for-profit company is exactly that: for profit. As I learned in Indonesia running our microfinance institution, the only way to truly scale and have massive impact is to make a profit—otherwise, you will always be beholden to donors. But that doesn’t mean the profit motive should replace doing what’s best for people.
At Plated, our First Core Belief is: Transparency and control over personal and planetary health are essential. In many businesses, but especially in the food industry, there has traditionally been little to no transparency. Technology and data are essential to our new and better model.
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Picture of an Evolved Eater
Sally Robling is Plated’s chairman. She joined us in 2014 and has been instrumental in helping Josh and me structure our business and our board of directors for scale.
I began my career in 1982 working on Shake ’n Bake at the company that ultimately became Kraft. I spent the next eighteen years at Kraft and Campbell in marketing and sales, working on some of the most iconic American food brands, including Jell-O and Campbell’s, and with the largest food retailers. I returned to food in 2008, Pinnacle Foods, where I led the $1 billion Birds Eye Division through the company’s IPO.
I left Pinnacle, and Big Food, after Pinnacle’s successful 2013 IPO. My intent was to work with entrepreneurs who understood how much food had to change and who were applying new thinking and technologies to drive the change. I’d spent much of my career on dinner and trying to help consumers fit a home-cooked meal into their busy and fragmented lives at least a couple of times a week.
I sought Nick and Josh out because I knew they were trying to solve a big problem. If Plated worked, its customers could make a really good dinner at home on any night. The behavior was high value and frequent, so the addressable market was very large. Then I met Nick and Josh, and I was compelled by their passion, pragmatism, and grit. I believed that they could go the distance and that I could add valuable perspective and experience. As I dug deeper, I realized that this was not just about dinner but about building a new, radically more efficient food supply chain. At that point, while having no real idea of how hard this would be, I was in—with an investment in money and, more importantly, my time.
What makes Plated work, its core competency, is found in the middle of a Venn diagram that integrates proprietary big data, a highly flexible, distributed supply chain, with a consumer-centric brand built on the conviction that food is joy to be celebrated and that thoughtful design should permeate everything. Lots of companies do one, maybe two—but few do all three—and that is why Plated delivers an exceptional, tailored consumer experience with radical efficiency.
It’s superior to other food models because it starts from the consumers and how they live now, not an extant infrastructure, and because, while it’s got deep culinary and food fulfillment expertise, it’s not a food company—but this very new hybrid of food, tech, and an experiential, creative brand. Truly right brain / left brain.
Data binds together culinary artistry and consumer desires to yield an evolving, increasingly personalized and delightful consumer experience. I was deeply concerned that when the creative culinary process was married to the big data emerging from consumer behavior, it would be a drag on the chefs and their creative process and could drive them to dull and uniform menus. I was wrong. The marriage of data and culinary skill has had just the opposite effect. It’s been a dramatic and powerful accelerant to the chefs’ creativity in the service of providing our consumers tailored, and deeply satisfying, menus and experiences.
The data drives a personalized, continuously improving customer experience and radically more efficient supply chain. In conventional food systems (manufacturer to retailer to consumer), the data travels through multiple handoffs and the actual consumer eating experience is never captured, so the data signals are weak. In contrast, Plated data comes directly from the consumer and is both backward and forward looking, so the signals are powerful and immediate. That means that, even with and because of the consumer experience of flexibility and personalization, the food-waste levels in producti
on and at home are very low and multiples less than in a conventional food supply chain. The efficiency of food use has profound benefits to the consumer, Plated, and, over time, the planet.
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6
The Cacophony of Confusion
One-liner: The average American citizen still doesn’t know what or how he or she should be eating. We will walk through the cacophony of confusion that is created through modern food marketing and federal nutrition guidelines.
Every day, we are inundated with information, yet the average American citizen still doesn’t know what or how he or she should be eating.
So what should we be eating? And why? The deeper I dug into that question, the more complicated the answer became. And when things get complicated, we often fail.
If you’ve read any food books, blogs, or articles lately—especially ones that attempt to posit new ideas about what we should be eating—you may have smelled some controversy brewing. Food is a hot topic, and there is plenty of literature by medical doctors and investigative journalists, many of whom have penned more than one bestseller on the subject. The good news is there has never been so much information in the market dealing with food and nutrition.
The bad news is the authors rarely agree with one another, and it’s hard to know which guidance to follow.
One thing they all seem to agree on is that Big Food continues to support and uphold the model it created. You’d be hard-pressed to find one of these authors who doesn’t think the big multinational corporations and fast-food behemoths are fouling up our pantries and our arteries. Food authors and activists also all seem to agree that the American diet is significantly flawed. The proof is in the pudding, in the sense that “the pudding” includes more than seventy-eight million obese Americans and countless others struggling with health issues springing from a diet laden with riskily altered food.